On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 12:33:06PM -0400, Giles Orr via talk wrote: > I'm having some trouble figuring out the licensing on VMware's ESXi. It's > proprietary - I've got that and I don't love it. But Packt's "DevOps > Automation Cookbook" (2015) is essentially saying it's free to use, and > implying - I don't think they ever stated it outright - that it's > permanently free. But on VMware's site ( > https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc/GUID-7AFCC64B-7D94-48A0-86CF-8E7EF55DF68F.html > ) it reads as if it's a 60 day evaluation, period. > > Which brings up a few questions: > - is ESXi technically good enough that I should be pursuing this at all? > (I'm currently using Proxmox. It works, I'm not entirely happy with it, > but I'll probably stick with it because of the licensing which is more open > source friendly) > - is ESXi permanently free? and can you get security updates if you're on > the free licensing? > - is there anything appalling in their license? eg. Facebook's recent > license clauses "using our products means you can't ever sue us for > anything" (point applies even though they fixed it)
ESXi when you install it gives you a 60 day evaluation with full features. If you don't enter a license within 60 days, or if you enter a license for the free version, then you get the limited set of features instead. Limited seems to mean: Can't manage it with vCentre, can't have more than two CPU sockets in your server, can't have more than 8 virtual CPUs per VM, no support from vmware, and probably some other things. In older versions there was a limit of 32GB ram, but there is no limit on that anymore. So for a lot of use cases, it works fine, and of course vmware hopes you will like it and want some more features and start paying for those. Personally I think kvm is much nicer than vmware to deal with and more flexible. -- Len Sorensen --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk