VMware “Go” To Help Seed SMB Clouds With ESXi
August 31st, 2009 | 
Author: To entice SMB interest and acceleration in building cloud infrastructure, today VMware announced new offerings centered on the ESXi 4 hypervisor. In 2 separate press releases, VMware revealed that a new agreement was signed with Intel to effectively distribute ESXi to more SMB customers, and that these customers can now easily automate the installation and configuration of ESXi with VMware Go. This post summarizes the official announcements and then offers some opinion on other factors that continue to influence the ultimate adoption of ESXi.
VMware Signs Agreement with Intel to Expand Reach of VMware vSphere 4 to SMB Customers
“The Intel global reseller community of more than 50,000 Premier and Associate members will benefit from the new agreement by being able to resell the industry-leading virtualization platform to their SMB customers. The agreement supports Intel’s strategy to proliferate virtualization technology on the recently announced Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series into SMB markets and it provides resellers with low-cost high availability solutions, including the three new VMware vSphere 4 product editions for SMBs that enable Always On IT. The Intel ESAA program also provides resellers with pre-certified Intel server platforms for VMware vSphere 4 with the ability to have their products listed on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) at no additional charge. This reduces deployment costs and speeds time to market for resellers to address new opportunities.”
“VMware Go is a free web-based service that will enable SMB customers to fly through the ESXi setup process with just a few mouse clicks. The award-winning VMware ESXi is the industry’s most widely deployed hypervisor, with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. VMware ESXi, also available for free, allows companies to reduce overhead and simplify business operations by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single server, spending less money on hardware, power and cooling, and server administration. VMware ESXi together with VMware Go is an on-ramp for companies new to virtualization, especially small businesses who may not think they have the time or budget to get started.
VMware Go was developed in partnership with Shavlik Technologies, a member of VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner Program. VMware Go will be made available as a beta offering on August 31, 2009 to customers who go to http://www.vmware.com/go/vmware-go-beta. VMware Go is expected to become generally available as a free service in 2010″
As first pointed out to me by Eric Sloof on the NTPRO.NL blog, the VMware Go Beta is available today at
VMware Communities: VMware Go. The community page provides video showing the product’s web interface and details some high level features.
- Web Browser Interface
- Easy-to-use Wizard
- Quickly create ESXis
- Easily add VMs
- Manage ESXis and VMs
From my brief research so far, VMware Go appears to leverage common tools such as the VMware Power CLI, Powershell scripting, and the stand alone edition of VMware Converter to coordinate the automated migration of physical servers to ESXi 4 hosts
Thoughts on ESXi today
In preparation for today’s press releases Alex Barrett of TechTarget contacted me over the weekend to discuss my thoughts on the success of the adoption of ESXi to date. My comments can be read in her article titled VMware service to push SMBs to ESXi. Barrett speaks to other virtualization contacts as well, and all provided comments that emphasize the same point – ESXi makes sense for the SMB, but the ecosystem of third party products used in everyday administration of virtual machines can limit the mass adoption of the console-less hypervisor.
In my opinion, until the vendors who already develop VM backup, management, monitoring, and reporting for ESX classic can port the same features to ESXi based datacenters there will be a greater tendancy to deploy ESX with the Service Console operating system. Read Barrett’s full article for more details.
VMware continues to maintain they will phase out ESX classic and the console operating system. One would think the technology partners would be quickly developing ESXi replacements for their successful products.
Posted in 
Tags: 
Pingback: Twitter Trackbacks for VMware “Go” To Help Seed SMB Clouds With ESXi | VM /ETC [vmetc.com] on Topsy.com
Pingback: ESXi - ?????????????
Pingback: ESXi - ?????????????