What’s New in vSphere4.1 – ESXi Ready for the DataCenter?
Following on my series of blogposts about vSphere4.1 this article is all about the ch-ch-ch-changes to ESXi. For me, personally – these changes are the MOST important ones in vSphere4.1. Without them, I think VMware would have a real fight on its hands to prize the Service Console from the cold-dead hands of hard-core VMware COS men. Personally, I think VMware’s biggest challenge in the next 12-18 months is going to be convincing business to move from welterweight hypervisor to a skinny-latte version.
There will some folks who might hope, pray, delude themselves that VMware might have change of thought about the end of ESX “Classic”. If VMware did it would be the biggest uturn of recent years…
[Note: Article is currently missing screen shots, they are in the process of being prep'd, and should appear very shortly...]
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July 16th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
But.. The hypervisor is the same in ESX and ESXi. What’s the big deal? Use the vMA and go with it.
Anyone in IT resistant to change should get the boot anyway I guess. The last two years I have only deployed ESXi with NO issues so far relating to the differences.
/Henrik
July 16th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Henrik, the big deal is in vSphere 4.0 the functionality of ESX and ESXi was not equivalent (see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1015000). In addition, transitioning from ESX to ESXi may not be trivial especially for large companies due to changes required for deployment, management, and monitoring amongst other things.
With that said, I do support VMware’s push for ESXi and understand its importance in light of other companies struggling with the same problem (e.g., Microsoft and Windows XP). While I do not think the transition will come easily I feel it is something that must and will happen.
July 16th, 2010 at 11:55 pm
I definitely prefer ESXi because of the added security. Plus now that you can even add the servers to the domain, you can controls the users centrally or completely remove access except for vcenter.
Plus the install is a flash…
July 20th, 2010 at 11:54 am
We made the switch to ESXi 7 months ago and haven’t looked back. It has helped lock down these servers and is easier to manage once you get the hang of it. Just remember to have the diagnostic partition and syslogs. We use no local disks, so I offload both to a centralized SAN partition. No issues unless the lun goes away.