But, when budget is a major constraint, we can consider using free ESXi in some areas of production and cut some expense. You can use just ESXi hypervisor without purchasing vCenter.
Before using a free version of ESXi hypervisor, we need to know its limitations. With those limitations in consideration, below are examples of how to leverage the use of free ESXi:. One of the great examples is using ESXi as an isolated environment for patch testing and application piloting before deploying it to a production environment.
Then we are free to do anything with the clones without causing any disruption to production. Note that free ESXi can still use snapshot function, so we can easily rollback any deployments if required. The main challenge of DR test is to synchronize changes between the primary site and DR site. Fire up the tools, select This local machine as the source and activate the option Synchronize changes , but untick the option the Perform final synchronization.
Free version of ESXi is not designed for large host production servers. In addition to that, you can also use the help of 3rd party software to minimize the risk when the situation becomes more critical. VMware Data Recovery uses this technology and so can developers of backup and recovery software. You still can look through VMware communities , and, if you are lucky enough, you may find the solution. Quick reminder: Two hosts below have Enterprise Plus and active Evaluation versions installed.
Evaluation is the only ESXi license with limited in time. Once you install it, you can benefit from the unlimited ESXi features for 60 days. Once time ticks down, you are to either extend the license or switch to Free.
The nice thing is, you can always switch to Evaluation from any other license including Free. Of course, once you have run out of time, no magic happens if you switch to Free and back. Other two versions that I review here do not have any time restrictions; until they are officially supported, you are good to go.
Well, that is the constraint that I can only mention, but, unfortunately, I could not check it here due to my hardware limitations. I also did not find any official information saying that this limitation persists in ESXi 6. If you know anything on this matter, please, share it in comments. So, I cannot say whether they are still limited. Being unable to use neither vCenter nor APIs, you have no other choice than to buy an advanced license. In this article, I took a closer look at limitations of ESXi 6.
Everything seems to look just as it was before. Based on this, ESXi Free still seems to be great for home labs regardless of its limitations. Evaluation, in its turn, allows getting familiar with all ESXi features. Follow the link in the e-mail and enter your password. In the next step, you will get the license key for a free hypervisor version and the link to download VMware vSphere Hypervisor.
Save the license key. Then you can install a hypervisor on a server a workstation or a virtual machine. The installation is very simple. Specify the drive to install the operation system on.
In this example, a 40 GB local drive is available. After the installation a warning appears that the hypervisor will work only for 60 days without a license key. VMware vSphere Hypervisor has been installed. If your server is connected to the network with the DHCP server by at least one network interface, it will automatically receive the IP address and you will see it in the hypervisor console called DCUI.
This IP address is used to manage the hypervisor from the web interface. In order to manage ESXi hypervisor settings, press F2 on the DCUI screen, enter your login root by default and password you have set during the installation. The initial VMware vSphere Hypervisor configuration is now complete. You can connect to it via the web interface. To connect to your vSphere Hypervisor via the web interface, enter the IP address of the server assigned during the initial ESXi configuration to the address bar in your browser.
Then enter your login root and password. You have activated a permanent Expires: Never hypervisor license with unrestricted amount of RAM size for your virtual machines. The vSphere Switch or vSwitch is a virtual device that transfers data between virtual machines on the server or out through a physical NIC.
There are two types of virtual switches:. After you install and run your hypervisor, there is a built-in virtual switch vSwitch0 , which includes a physical adapter vmnic0 , and two groups of ports: a service one Management Network to manage your hypervisor and a network for VMs VM Network to transfer data.
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