Get ’em while they’re hot. Fresh from the bunnums of the internet!
Now I love my ESXi, and I recently converted my old gaming rig into a hypervisor with non other than my favorite beast ESXi! I first played with 6.5, and don’t get me wrong the fact it was a direct login to the host right from a fresh install is such a thing of beauty. With a plugin available for a smoother console experience from the web driven one. While the HTML5 based web interface is very slick, the console isn’t exactly 100% real time. With the plugins it’s a nice way around that, however the host management tasks are all locked down to the hosts HTML 5 web interface. So long goes any chance of using the old phat (.Net based) client. I have to say thats sad cause I LOVE the phat client, it is by far the smoothest of all management interfaces, in my experience.
Anyway, logging into my personal host… I see this
This of course doesn’t surprise me. However believe it or not you can continue to run ESXi completely free. It’s generally enough for most peoples needs, there however some limitations.
- No support
- Free ESXi cannot be added to a vCenter Server
- 2 physical CPUs
- Unlimited cores per CPU
- Unlimited physical Memory
- max. 8 vCPU per VM
I won’t go over the details too much but the basics steps are as follows:
- Sign up to VMware.com
- Goto the vSphere Download Center 6.5 or 5.5.
- Register, Download your ISO and grab your Key.