VMWare GSX Server For Free (as in beer)?

This article over at C-Net indicates that VMWare is going to start giving away their GSX Server product. That means that people could create and manage VMWare images for free! Currently, they provide a VMPlayer that lets anyone use a VM, but not create them.

Virtualization is all the rage in IT. Being able to run multiple OSs on a single piece of hardware dramatically decreases costs of administration and management. VMWare also has a snapshot feature that allows you to revert the entire system to a previously saved state. It’s pretty cool for testing and for disaster recovery.

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this move. I really like VMWare. I use it practically every day. It is, however, proprietary. I’d rather see an open standard for virtualization like xen. VMWare is already somewhat of a de-facto standard, and we all know how de-facto propietary standards can result in lesser software becoming entrenched in the enterprise and consumer markets.

3 thoughts on “VMWare GSX Server For Free (as in beer)?”

  1. Excellent timing on my employer’s part. We just received a quote yesterday for upgrading our GSX license to a full ESX license with VMotion (to move stuff LIVE between ESX server). They’re discounting the ESX license by the full retail price of the GSX product.

    I haven’t looked at Xen. How does it compare, both on a features basis and on maturity?

    As a counter to your Microsoft Office argument, there is OpenOffice, which for most (read, nearly everybody) user’s needs is as robust as Office, if not better.

  2. “As a counter to your Microsoft Office argument, there is OpenOffice, which for most (read, nearly everybody) user’s needs is as robust as Office, if not better.”

    That’s exactly my point. OO is more than sufficient as software, but because of the de-facto standard of MS Office, it doesn’t get the traction it deserves. Microsoft Word is *not* a document exchange format!

    As for Xen, I haven’t gotten around to playing with it. It relies on the guest OS explicitly supporting virutalization, so it’s not as flexible as VMWare. On the other hand, the performance hit is significantly reduced with Xen.

  3. Microsoft Word is *not* a document exchange format!

    Hey, but you can do spreadsheets,databases, presentations, layouts, designs – pretty much everything in Word that you would want to do with your computer. AND, since everybody has Word, you can share those files no problem.

    Okay, now I am being facetious.

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