On 2017-10-13 01:06 PM, Giles Orr wrote:
On 13 October 2017 at 12:36, Digimer <lists@alteeve.ca <mailto:lists@alteeve.ca>> wrote:
On 2017-10-13 12:33 PM, 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... <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) > > Thanks.
What are your design priorities?
That's a very broad question and I'm not entirely sure what you're asking for details on, but I'll explain what I'm using it for and hope that covers it.
Availability, performance or maximum resource utilization efficiency.
A lot of my work (the employment type, not the personal type) involves remote VMs. I have a i5 NUC at home with 16G of RAM that I've used Proxmox on to turn it into a miniature VM farm. This is useful both to learn about how VMs are handled, and for me to make better use of the NUC by splitting it into multiple experimental machines that aren't all on at the same time.
So - home use.
The Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) is a great front-end for KVM/qemu VMs, and it is a totally open source platform. The performance of KVM/qemu is great, and windows guests have signed drivers for the virtio network and storage drivers (making them very performant).
And part of the reason that ESXi sounded interesting is that it seems to be more scriptable from the command line for managing VMs - although I freely admit I haven't investigated that worth a damn on Proxmox. I'd probably be pissed to lose Proxmox's graphical interface: I know ESXi has vSphere, but I probably wouldn't install that.
The 'virsh' command line tool is extremely powerful for managing KVM/qemu guests. Our Anvil! platform is basically a customized front-end for virsh and there hasn't been an issue before we couldn't resolve. I think both proxmox and VMWare are overkill and not really aimed at what it sounds like you're after. -- Digimer Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.com/w/ "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould