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... ) 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