ESX 3i for free with PowerEdge servers?
March 24th, 2008 | 
Author: First reported by theinquirer.net in the March 14 article Dell set to absorb price of ESX3i hypervisor, it appears Dell will be offering ESX 3i for free when purchasing PowerEdge servers. Virtualization.info posted Dell to give VMware ESX Server 3i for free? the following day which was then followed by a few other blogs reacting to the news with similar posts. Although the announcement of this possibility was, and still is, exciting, the comments posted by readers and bloggers have been very insightful and interesting.
Comments from theinquirer.net’s article:
“The fact that Dell might not charge for the ESX 3i hypervisor is interesting.
One has to consider that the ESX 3i is only a small subset of functions that you find in the ‘VI3 Enterprise’ (ESX 3i doesn’t have DRS, HA, VMotion etc..). Any large client that wants to add the ESX 3i machines to their enterprise class ESX farm, will need to upgrade the license anyway…
ESX 3i cost = 495$
ESX VI3 Enterprise = 5750$
ESX 3i to Enterprise upgrade = 5650$So client will not be interested in paying first 495$, then having to upgrade it for 5650$. Dell and other first tier hardware supplier might as well sell ESX 3i for 100$ or give it for free…”
Comments from virtualization.info article:
“Is maintenance included is this free 3i? How long and what level? Even then you will still have to purchase a Starter, Standard, or Enterprise license if you want any of the advanced features. All 3i gets you without additional licensing is VMFS and vSMP. Sure the hypervisor is free, but it is vMotion, svMotion, HA, and DRS that I really want and those features are not free. This is much like EMC giving you a free DMX or CX, and then you find out all the software costs associated with getting that DMX or CX to run.”
From virtualization.com:
“This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as VMware had added to the previous announcement that hardware vendors would be able to choose which premium they would charge to end customers, if any. Expect the other hardware vendors to follow suit and drop the prices for including the hypervisors significantly (or even zero) if Dell
comes through, especially with the sharp-priced Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V on its way.But don’t expect this to have a serious impact on the whole VMware reseller channel’s bottom line, as some blogs are proclaiming already. The real money is in the enterprise offering and upgrades anyway, and the smaller distributors and resellers have other advantages when it comes to SMB offerings besides pricing.”
With the almost certain scenario of all hardware manufacturers following Dell’s lead wouldn’t ESX 3i suddenly become the most deployed virtualization product in data centers? Companies would probably consider migrating existing VMware Server VMs to new ESX 3i servers as well. If you did not realize it already, the cost of Virtual Center to manage the ESX 3i servers becomes well worth the investment – even for stand alone servers without shared storage. On the other hand, designing VI on stand alone ESX 3i servers would shift us back to the ESX 2.x days when the goal was to see how many VMs could run on a single host.
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