I have the free, as in no-cost, VMware ESxi 6.5  hypervisor installed on a bare metal server. I got it here: <https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi6>. You'll have to register to download it. There is a permanent, as in not time-limited, license key there. It's restricted to two CPU sockets. The server on which I have it installed has two Xeon L5630 CPUs and 72GB of RAM. ESXi is able to access all the hardware resources I have. I recently installed the latest updates also available from the same place as above.

Here are a few observations about VMware.

VMware seems to go out of their way to name thing as confusingly as possible. I still have no idea what the difference is between "VMware vSphere Hypervisor 6.5" and "VMware ESXi 6.5". I think it's two names for the same thing. The term "vSphere" seems to be a range of products.

VMware's web site does not make it easy to find what you want quickly.

VMware's "partner programs" are, again, confusing and they seem to go out of their way to make it difficult for someone to figure out which, if any, of the programs would be suitable. By contrast, we have a Microsoft Action Pack subscription, which gets us NFR (Not for Resale) licenses of various Microsoft products - Windows, desktop and server, SQL Server, Office, Office 365, and a $100 per month credit towards Azure, and other things I don't remember right now, and it was dead easy to figure out that this was appropriate for us and to purchase it for less than $500 per year. I have come to the conclusion that VMware has no such program. They want a big commitment in terms of time and money from "partners" to get them on the VMware train. I'm only interested in VMware because our customers use it and we deliver the software we build on a virtual machine image running Debian. Initially, we only distributed VirtualBox images. It was easy enough to convert those VirtualBox images to Hyper-V images. We never found an easy way to convert to a VMware image so we installed ESXi 6.5 to be able to build and test VM images for our software.

Someone mentioned that VMware and VirtualBox tend to do better on Windows systems. That is absolutely not true. First, VMware is not one uniform product. It's a company with a vast array of products, all of which have the word "VMware" in the name. Even if we narrowed it down to their virtualization products, VMware workstation and VMware ESXi are completely different virtualization technologies. The former is installed on a host OS, like Windows, macOS, or Linux. It's fine on all three of those operating systems, by the way. The latter is installed on bare metal and can host Windows, macOS (Apple's licensing issues notwithstanding), Linux, and even other instances of ESXi. I will be installing ESXi 5.5 and 6 shortly on 6.5 in a "nested virtualization" configuration to be able to test our virtual machine images on 5.5, 6, and 6.5 without needing three separate physical servers. Nested virtualization is not something recommended for production but it's fine for lab use.

ESXi 6.5 can be installed inside 15 minutes on bare metal. It's about as simple an installation process as it gets.

ESXi 6.5 runs on a Linux kernel. I have no idea if they've modified the kernel and if they have, if they contribute their changes to upstream as they are required to do under the terms of the GPL.

ESXi can be administered from a TUI (Text User Interface) or from a web interface. SSH and the ESXi shell are disabled by default. I find it odd that I get warnings that they're enabled and that I should disable them unless they are necessary for administrative purposes in the web interface. I can't imagine the web interface being more secure than key-based SSH authentication. There are many support resources provided by VMware and third parties that use a GUI admin client that was apparently deprecated in ESXi 6.5 so if you're watching a screencast of someone using the deprecated product, which only ran on Windows anyway, it will not be of any use. The web admin interface does not have the same look or feel or the same capabilities.

My experience so far with VMware ESXi 6.5 is that it is a lean, fast, and capable virtualization technology. Over the last week, I have been migrating our previous VM image creation scripts, which were mostly BASH, to Packer <https://www.packer.io/>. Our customers run ESXi 5.5, 6, and 6.5 I found that modifying our BASH scripts to generate images that are compatible with ESXi 5.5 through 6.5 to be more work than switching everything to Packer and even then, supporting three VMware targets is challenging.

By the way, the Facebook license controversy you mention has been resolved due to significant backlash. See: <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/26/facebook_license_surgery_on_react/>.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

647-778-8696