Virtual machine management

Question

I'm looking for a VM management solution that will allow me to easily maintain VMs in a single repository accessible on the corporate intranet.

I'm currently looking into VMware's vCenter, HP's Manager, Microsoft's VM Manager. vCenter seems to require an ESX server, which I'm not very happy about. I haven't looked into others yet.

But can anyone suggest a good/simple solution to this? I'm looking for a bit more than just SAN space for the VMs, but at the same time I don't want to run a whole ESX server for this. Any ideas, suggestions?

Answer 1

Is there a reason you're not wanting an ESX Server?

vCenter does require an ESX server, but you can always run ESXi, which would run locally and can be managed by vCenter... and best of all, ESXi is free!

http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

Otherwise, you can also go with VMware Server http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

I would definitely recommend ESXi

Answer 2

Whether you were to go with VMware ESXi (the free edition of ESX) or the full-blown ESX is a business and maintainability decision.

Personally, the cost of the license for ESX to ensure I had the administrative tools, support, and maintenance is worth it in a corporate environment.

If it were my personal computer collection, then I'd go with ESXi because I don't have a reason to need the support and admin tools provided with a full ESX license.

The $2640 cost for a license to also get support for 3 years is pretty small in my book.

(http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=83581600)