To me it seems like it would have to be a specialized
hardware appliance in order to be truly effective.
Meaning, once it becomes "out dated" it has to be
tossed, you wouldn't be able to re-use as a test
windows box or linux box or something. While not a
bad thing, its life span to justify the upfront cost
would have to be pretty good.
The article says that it's going to be in the firmware of the MB. But I would hope that the firmware can be reflashed in order to upgrade the ESX part.
I see this like Cisco boxes. The firmware can be flashed but once they go EOL, what do you do with them? 
It does make for interest thinking, but what has changed to cause this?
A current install of ESX takes about 16GB, going on memory here, sure some of that is swap and drivers, low hanging fruit that can easily be removed.
But what else has been removed? Maybe they are just SAN booting, or PXE booting or is ESX Lite a very different product?
I think the bit of greatest impact is the removal of the hard drive, arguable the source of most failures in a server. It will be interesting to see the server hardware vendor response to this. A server with no spindles, or IDE/SCSI controller boards and therefore more space for memory.
On the Dell server my details date back to February time frame, the RAM spec was 128gb, if this is done with 4GB modules it means 32 memory slots, which is a lot of motherboard real estate. Of course they could go with memory daughter boards or similar, 8gb modules[/url], of course if they have tossed out the hard drives and controllers that they do have all that space 
Unfortunately VMware play their cards very close to their chest, so I doubt we'll get any official comment from them.
Message was edited by:
glynnd1
corrected link
/
beginning of IBM mode */
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=590165
We have been trying to talk about the node state-less concept for "ever" .......... it's good that now all pieces are coming together.....
/* end of IBM mode */
Consider that this post has nothing to do with "ESX lite" (never heard this name and I am not even sure it's going to be it ... ). But it is more of a common sense where instead of using 2 x standard legacy hard disk drives you would use another (better) I/O technology .....
Whether what you could load on these better devices is or is not a standard ESX instance as we know it today is another matter which I won't discuss ......
Massimo.
Jens,
well it really depends on what one means by "BIOS".
I see this as a big opportuniy for marketing .... On this pace they will tell you that ESX is going to be ported onto the silicon (which I am not ruling out as a concept for the long run ..... but Q108 seems to be a bit optimistic ..... )
Massimo.
It is interesting we keep on cross referencing ........
>"They are bringing out a conventional unit sized "VM" machine," wrote
>daniel_uk in a post. "Its got an embedded hypervisor (not sure if this is
>completely true) more than average RAM slots, and bolsters up on bus
>speeds and PCI speeds etc."
This article backs its statements because of a post on this forum and we back statements referring to this article (which backed its statements from some other forum posts)..... Isn't this funny.
However I didn't want to argue about the features of the Dell servers ..... I just wanted to say that any lite version of ESX CANNOT fit into the BIOS.
That's a matter of fact.
Having this said I wouldn't take for granted everything that is written on the web ...... not referring to this article specifically but sometimes it's reale garbage....
Massimo.
