VMWare Makes ESXi Server Free

It’s been a standard strategy for many software vendors, to offer a free solution, and let the masses try it. Then when they want to purchase something, they will more than likely use your product, since they are already familiar with it.

In this Press Release, Vmware Announced that ESXi Server is free for production. Is this a response to the release of Microsoft’s Hyper-V?

Thanks to Halr9000 for pointing this out.

For a long time, neither vendor had a free server product, and then VMWare released VMWare Server for free.

This forced Microsoft to make Virtual Server and Virtual PC free. After all, you can’t have everyone interested in virtualization playing with your competitor’s free product.

The playing field was pretty even for a long time, with VMWare taking the big customers, since Microsoft didn’t have any HyperVisor based solutions.

Now, with the release of Microsoft Hyper-V, free for use if you already own Windows Server 2008, it looks like VMWare has to answer now by making one of their HyperVisor based solutions available for free.