VMWare ESX 3i devient gratuit!

http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lire-vmware-propose-gratuitement-une-nouvelle-version-de-son-hyperviseur-esxi-26616.html

VMWare ESX 3i sera gratuit d'ici 2 semaines, dixit VMWare. Le but avoué, concurrencer Hyper-V de Microsoft, qui est inclus de base dans Windows 2008.

ESX 3i est une version "light" de VMWare Infrastructure.

Pour plus de détails sur les possibilités d'évolution :

http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=175

To be clear, the free ESXi offering includes the hypervisor, VMware’s virtual machine file system (VMFS), and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support. ESXi had been priced at $495 for a server with up to two processors. Most production virtualization deployments include high availability, and if you want to add high availability to the free ESXi hypervisor, you’ll need to upgrade to a VMware Infrastructure (VI) Standard license, priced at $3,624 (with the required 1 year Gold support package) for two processors. Upgrading to the Enterprise license ($6,958 for two processors [includes 1 year Gold support]) would get you features such as VMotion (live migration) and the distributed resource scheduler (DRS). The reason I’m bringing up upgrade prices is twofold. First, I don’t think VMware is doing enough with regards to price drops. Second, since practically all VMware sales include the standard or enterprise VI tiers, the impact on revenues will be practically non-existent.

La bataille des hyperviseurs est maintenant bien lancé, car ESX3i gratuit permettra aux entreprises de "goûter" à la virtualisation made in VMWare et donc d'être tenté par la suite complète...

Parallèlement à cela, les tarifs français de VMWare risquent eux d'augmenter d'ici la rentrée, la faute au dollar trop faible?