Vmware esxi freeware license

When you have downloaded the installer and received ESXi free license key, you can install the ESXi server according to the process described in this blog post.

Enter root as the user name and the password you specified during ESXi installation to log in. As you can see in the screenshot above, a host is running in the evaluation mode.

In the current example ESXi was installed on the 18 th of January and the expiration date is the 19 th of March. A full list of features available for the day evaluation period is displayed on this page in the features section. The license key is displayed as 25 zeros in this case. Click Assign License and enter your key 25 symbols. Click the Check License button, and if your license key is valid, click Assign license. The expiration date is changed to Never.

The first visual difference you may notice is displayed in the screenshots above. If you want to see more detailed licensing info, use a console. Enter the following command to view your license and available features:.

In the screenshot below you can see the output of this command for ESXi running in the free mode and for ESXi running in the evaluation mode. A list of available features is much longer for the ESXi server that is running in the evaluation mode. Depending on your environment, some restrictions may be unnoticeable for you while others can be critical:.

You can ask the VMware community for support, and with any luck, you can find a solution for resolving your issue. While commercial VMware technical support works 24x7 and usually provides answers in short order, help in resolving issues by the VMware community may take somewhat more time. VMware commercial support also provides software upgrades. The 8 vCPU restriction may not cause significant disadvantages, unlike the following two restrictions.

The free version of an ESXi server cannot be managed with vCenter — a centralized server for managing hosts and virtual machines. Hence, you cannot migrate machines from one free ESXi host to another as well as use clustering features, because vCenter Server is required to perform these operations. This is a significant disadvantage if you are planning to use multiple ESXi hosts. VMware provides a data protection framework that is called vStorage API Application Program Interface for enabling centralized backup of virtual machines on a host level.

Your backup application should display an error message in this case. You can only perform a legacy backup of VMs running on the free version of ESXi host that requires the agent installation on the guest operating system. This blog post explains why legacy backup is not recommended for backing up virtual machines. In old versions of ESXi a free license is restricted to using more than 2 physical processors.

The processor is virtualized but not emulated in case of hardware virtualization and is one of its primary components. First of all, there is no support. If you were to run ESXi free in production and had an issue, you would need to purchase per incident support from VMware, which could get expensive. This may be a show stopper for many, which means you will need to use VMware vSphere.

To get your free license, you can create a free MyVMware account here. You bet! ESXi is still free from VMware! Great question, so here are a couple of examples. For example, I can use a physical server with a couple of really big hard drives to store my virtual machines, and get away with a single 1 gig NIC card, neither of which would normally be advisable in a production ESXi environment! Earlier I mentioned that a vSphere evaluation licenses lasts 60 days, which is enough time to play around with the VMware vSphere features.

After 60 days you will either need to install a valid vSphere ESXi license, or start over. One strategy to limit the impact of this in a home lab would to have one host running ESXi free, and run a second vSphere environment with a couple of ESXi hosts and vCenter nested on the free ESXi host.

If everything I just said seems scary or intimidating, and you are just g etting started with VMware , ESXi free is a great place to start. This is great for those getting started with VMware to get a good understanding of what the conversation process is like, and to get used to working with virtual machines with a minimal uplift. With a few caveats, of course. The biggest limitations of free ESXi are the lack of vCenter management and the lack of support.