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I have a question regarding VMware licensing and running an ESXi host. I signed up for the free ESXi license to play around with bare metal virtualization on an old server I had in many pieces. I got it back together and set up with 4.1 since 5 wouldn't run on the old school single core opterons. It works and it's fun to tinker with, which is really my main purpose, this is just a learning project for me. To manage the host and interact with the VMs I have set up, I have been using vSphere client. vSphere client seem to be indicating that it's an evaluation copy and will expire in 60 days (less now, that was the initial limit). My question has two parts given this limitation. The first is: is the license of vSphere client (or any of their more complicated management tools) how they get you to spend money on their product given that the free ESXi license exists? If so, the second part of my question is: is there any free way to manage an ESXi host? Third party utilities maybe, or some hidden option that actually has datastore interaction and/or console accessibility in the ESXi host console, or something crazy like that? I am obviously very new to virtualization, but it seems that in order to do anything with an ESXi box you require management software. Having ESXi be free and the management software cost money is fine, but since I'm just messing around, I am wondering if my learning is going to abruptly end when the vSphere client's evaluation does.
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Mar 5, 2012 23:57
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Intraveinous posted:It sounds like you downloaded a trial of ESXi rather than ESXi free. The free version doesn't expire. You'd need a license for vCenter if you wanted to manage several boxes at once, and do things like vMotion between hosts. ESXi Hypervisor is what they call the free version now, I think, vs vSphere ESXi for the full, needs licensing, version. Well, I was able to put my license key into the ESXi server and it says it's registered now. If you're suggesting that the management tools take their licensing status from the host, then maybe I just need to re-launch vSphere client and see if it continues to have an evaluation warning.
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Mar 6, 2012 00:13
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doomisland posted:Yeah, if you go to the IP of your host in a web browser it will have a link to download the client. That doesn't cost you anything. The only things you will pay for are the vSphere Server and whatever licensing for the hosts + features. Alright, I was confused by the evaluation timer on the vSphere client, which was obviously not for the vSphere client, but for the ESXi host itself. Now that the registration key has been added, there's no more timer. Thanks for the replies!
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Mar 6, 2012 01:14
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zapateria posted:Is it just me or is it impossible to download anything from the VMware site? It's acting funny for me too, I was able to get to some downloads from here, however: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads
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Apr 17, 2012 08:14
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:When you open a console for a VM, is it normal to get a black screen that only reveals when you click into it? When that happens for me it's usually that the VM has turned the "monitor" off and activity wakes it back up. It's the windows power saving settings, usually.
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Jul 15, 2014 07:08
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Thermopyle posted:So, I have this weird thing happening every once in awhile (intervals from 10 minutes to a couple days). I do lots of work in a plain old VMWare vm hosted with Workstation on my Windows 10 machine. Only while that machine is running, I get system-wide "freezes". And by freeze, I mean things stop happening. The mouse works, and keyboard input is buffered and gets dumped when the machine unfreezes, and my CPU goes to 0. This is probably not the cause but I've seen random freezing like that when hard disks are having read errors or crc errors. The affected disks were usually seagate 2tb disks and would report no bad sectors but have large numbers of read errors (after a while data began corrupting so the controller was hiding the bad sectors or something). I'd give your disks' SMART data a look with Crystal Disk Info.
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Aug 20, 2016 01:05
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BeastOfExmoor posted:I'm using an old desktop (AMD FX-8350) as my "server". My plan was to install Windows Server and run some VM's in Hyper-V, but Hyper-V apparently doesn't have some of the features I wanted (USB passthrough, etc.) so I installed VMWare workstation, which apparently has an issue with Windows Server 2016's Credential Guard feature. Before I go through the rigmarole of turning that off I figured I'd pop in here and see if there's some other path I should be taking? Should I be running another VM product on the bare metal and then VM's on top of that? I'd like to run a couple Windows VM's, a Linux VM, and perhaps an OSX VM if I can managed to get that going on an AMD processor. I've got an AMD FX 8300 running ESXi. The onboard network card drivers for the MSI motherboard I have it in weren't recognized so I could've added them to the iso through some method but I just put an intel nic in there. I haven't tried to virtualize macos on it but I've run freebsd, linux, Windows XP, 7, 8, and 10 without issue.
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Dec 28, 2017 09:18
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cr0y posted:If I want to build a new homelab server running esxi and also have a ton of disks am I setting myself up for suffering by passing the sata disks to a VM running freenas? The disks I would be passing to freenas would be slower spinning disks and the VMs would be running on a separate SSD. I also considered doing hardware raid but in 2020 that seems kind of old school and not as flexible but I am just kicking around ideas. I really don't know what other options I have to gain disk redundancy while also running esxi. I like to keep the data storage and vms on separate machines but I've seen plenty of people do exactly what you're suggesting without problem.
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Feb 18, 2020 18:48
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Bob Morales posted:Buy a Pentium II Dell Dimension on eBay for like $799 I guess my shelf of old PCs is now my retirement fund.
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Oct 28, 2021 16:39
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