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moyle
Contributor
Contributor

ESX for Free - Entering the SMB Market

Hi All,

I read an article today in Network World Magazine that VMWare is looking into offering ESX Server for free without the DRS, HA, and other enterprise addins. This is to compete with MikeySoft and longhorn. Does anyone know when this will happen?

Mike

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rsa911
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Article says it will be announced at VmWorld 2007 and be available for D/L immediatly after !

so this would be in the september 11-13 timeframe

Hard to believe they will give away the starter edition !

curious to see how much they'll ask for the support...

Michael

edit: it's not an official article, but merely a comment on the MS Q&A article so...

Message was edited by:

rsa911

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moyle
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the reply. I am "VERY" happy to hear about this news. My company provides enterprise technology services for the SMB market and I have been waiting for this day to happen. Most of my clients didn't have the budget for virtualization, but wanted to take advantage of it. Now I will be able to provide them with ESX services that want and crave at minimal costs.

Thanks VMWare - You will really make the SMB market happy.

Mike

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MattG
Expert
Expert

Can you post the link to the article?

That is a big story!

Now Admins won't be reluctant to kick the tires of ESX because they can download, install, and test it without cost.

This would make sense, VMWare knows that their product is the best and that getting it out there and in use is key to their strategy of hooking admins on the product and making the leap from free to pay (for the production features like VMotion, VCB, HA, and DRS that no competitor can directly compete with).

-MattG

-MattG If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
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moyle
Contributor
Contributor

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petedr
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Should be interesting news if this is announced in 2 weeks at Vmworld. But as was already said this is coming from a comment posted on a article so we don't know how valid it really it is.

www.thevirtualheadline.com www.liquidwarelabs.com
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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Assuming that this actually happens, all I can say is, "It's about time!"

Now, we can reach more customers in the SMB space. VMware's finally caught on to Microsoft's tactics of becoming the most popular. I was hoping they would avoid being the next Netscape. This move should help.

Chris

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rsa911
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

>Now, we can reach more customers in the SMB space

I agree 200% with you homever their next hurdle will be their restricted HCLs...

altough for their actual customer base it's not really an issue, for SMB it could be totally different...

I've found many SMBs took the wrong habit of buying el cheapo servers stuffed with "fake raid" SATA drives and the like...

In the meantime, I'll keep dreaming all this is true Smiley Happy

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ReverendDeuce
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I saw another article that stated that VMware will be offering an SMB package for $2,995. It will include three ESX starter-edition licenses and a limited VirtualCenter license that will only allow management of three ESX hosts.

I think it's a great idea, but I do think that leaving out VMotion is a critical mistake. To me, VMotion is \*the* killer feature.

If I were VMware, I'd disable the cluster support in VMFS in this starter edition and make the only migration type available be DMotion. Then at least the customers can see VMotion-style hot migration, but it will take time as DMotion has to copy the LUN from host to host.

When I was evaluating this stuff in '05, VMotion was the number one feature to have. Hot migration of VMs is absolutely sick! Leaving this feature out of the SMB edition will just solidify, in customers' minds, that ESX is just some pricey version of the free Server product that "runs on Linux instead of Windows!"

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Vitaly91
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation Promotion

Please join us on August 29, 2007 for a VMLive interactive webinar session discussing the new VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation Promotion targeted at small and medium business customers.

VMware is making it easier for you to get customers started with enterprise-class virtualization with the new low-cost, low-risk VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation Promotion. The new promotion is available starting in September through the end of the 2007 calendar year, and includes:

Three VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter licenses and one license of VirtualCenter Management Server (restricted to use with 3 nodes of VMware Infrastructre 3 Starter) for only $3000. This represents a savings of over 50%.

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fontyyy
Contributor
Contributor

Leaving this feature out of the

SMB edition will just solidify, in customers' minds,

that ESX is just some pricey version of the free

Server product that "runs on Linux instead of

Windows!"

And they'd have a point, we have both ESX and MS VM's here and it would be very hard without vmotion and H/A to show anyone what they'd spent their money on.

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dpomeroy
Champion
Champion

well, they have to retain some features for the more advanced versions. Although as more features are added I would expect to see features trickle down from the Enterprise edition to Standard and ever this new Foundation version. As it stands I think the Foundation Edition is better than anything Microsoft can offer right now.

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sbarnhart
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for the reply. I am "VERY" happy to hear

about this news. My company provides enterprise

technology services for the SMB market and I have

been waiting for this day to happen. Most of my

clients didn't have the budget for virtualization,

but wanted to take advantage of it.

I do the same thing, but I think most SMB clients don't have the budget for a lot of things they want to do, such is the burden of being a SMB. I don't have the budget for a Porsche, but would like to take advantage of it, too...

Overall I think this is a good idea, although I think VMWare needs to back away from the "free or expensive" dichotomy and instead think in terms of inexpensive base features (say, a $129 per node ESX license) and then consider lowering the price of the value-adds to make complete systems overall more affordable, with the "whole deal" being about half of what it is now, as well as selling pre-packaged 2 node setups (ESX, Vmotion) at real discounts.

In other words, make money off volume and not margin, and you will also be able to bring in the 4-5 server SMB space where its just impossible to justify the costs associated with an ESX/VMotion setup even though the benefits are enormous.

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