I do alot of creating, testing, and building of servers all from my home computer because being an individual who does not have company funding or make alot of money, I cannot afford to have a couple servers running in my office to test and build with. So I use my home computer to run these virtual servers to practice working on networking setups. One night I had a nerdspasm and I needed to build a windows and linux server to refresh my memory on initial setup and working with active directory. Working for HP answering phone calls about how to plug in laptops doesn’t exactly make use of my expensive knowledge I earned from college. I needed to build a couple virtual servers on the same network and subnet so they could interact with each other. IE Domain controllers in and Active Directory. I try and make all software as legal as possible and with VMware making such quality software I didnt want to just pirate it because I felt like their software deserved my money. I began my quest to search for free server virtualization software. The internetz kept pointing to VMware ESXi software because it was free. I didn’t quite believe it. There had to be some kind of cost, membership fee, requirement to fill out a million surveys to obtain a copy of such powerful software in Windows for free. I pulled up this website which informed me that its completely free with activation. There is no trial ending date from what I see. So its PERFECT server virtualization freeware.
Download Link:
Now it IS barebones software, but thats all I require for now. Ran through the install(which I actually used VMware workstation and virtualized it) then started it up. After that I started up the vSphere client and installed a Ubuntu server and a Windows server 2008. By the time I was finished setting up everything, I only had enough ram to run 2 virtual servers, the ESXi server and my host machines OS Windows 7. Only have 4Gb of ram limited my testing, but does not completely hinder it. Once the ESX server is running you really dont touch it. You manage it completely(or remotely) through the vSphere client…
If you want to get more information like this for free legitimate software visit my website:
July 22nd, 2010 at 11:55 pm
Sweet man!