VMware has long claimed that ESXi will one day be the Palo Alto-based company’s main hypervisor, and the time has come for ESX to begin to gracefully make its exit. The recent release of VMware vSphere 4.1 will be the last release to include the ESX version of VMware’s hypervisor, which may not make ESX fanboys happy. The improvements in ESX 4.1, however, demonstrate that the time to start switching is now.
In a recent Virtualization Viewpoints column, I wrote about drawbacks of VMware ESXi and why widespread adoption of ESXi is not a reality. Some of the problems with ESXi included:
- No official support for booting ESXi from a storage area network (SAN),
- no Web-based console to manage virtual machines (VMs),
- no support for scriptable installations, and
- no support for Active Directory (AD) integration.
The article also outlined several suggestions for making ESXi more attractive to administrators used to working with ESX. While I have always preferred ESX over ESXi, I am now recommending that you start using ESXi and plan on migrating all of your current ESX installations to the ESXi platform.
Read the full article at searchvmware.com…
