What is the difference between ESXi Installable and ESXi Embedded?

[Dinges]

ESXi comes in two flavours, "ESXi Installable" and "ESXi Embedded". But what exactly is the difference? Is it only the media ESXi is installed on? Like installing ESXi on flash/sd or usb is called embedded and ESXi installed on hd is called installable?

I have downloaded the HP ESXi4.1 installable and it is called "ESXi HD-USB-SD Image Installer" so it can be installed on hd, usb and sd.

Thanks,

Dinges.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Functionality wise they're the same product.  Initially with ESXi 3.5, Installable could only be (officially) installed to hard disk and Embedded came pre-installed with the host on a flash device.  With 4.0 you can put Installable on a flash device and given the push towards scripted installs and running stateless (see the Autodeploy project) I would think that VMware would drop the suffixes and just have ESXi in the future.

[NXO201110141]

Even with vSphere 5.0 WMware didn't drop the suffixes.

So what's the difference ? In the WMware Compatibility Guide vSphere 5.0 with ESXi is supported, but not with ESXi installable...

[Walfordr]

NXO,

Dave covered the differences.

All features/functionality are the same.

Embeded usually comes pre-installed on flash from the vendor.  All you have to do is power on and setup.

Installable you can download and install on HD, USB, SD, SAN storage.

[NXO201110141]

Thank you very much