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It seems that in response to competition from all sides VMWare is making a pretty big step to stay top of mind for IT folk. Several news sources say that they have learned that VMWare will announce on Monday that they are going to start giving away their GSX product. VMWare GSX sits somewhere between Workstation and ESX. It is managable by Virtual Center but it still runs on-top of a host operating system.

I've used it a time or two and it isn't bad. Give me the money and I'll take ESX over it any day. Even though you can manage a GSX install with VC, you cannot VMotion... Which makes since if you understand all the underlying technologies required for Vmotion... but that along with the lack of low level resource management removes it from most IT department's aim. ESX or bust... that's how it is in our shop. Not so for smaller installs.

While I was at VMWorld 2005 in Las Vegas, Microsoft was there giving away licensed copies of their MS Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition... So I picked up a few. At the time, the price on the street was about a grand. I planned on selling them on eBay. That weekend they announced that prices for this product would go down to the $100 range and that Vista Server would include this technology for free. What the heck, it became hardly worth my time to list them for online auction, so I decided to keep them and try to put them to use. I have, now, one copy running in production... MSVS2005EE is like GSX in so many ways... but in the end, it isn't as robust. I have frequent crashes while running only on virtual machine. Needless to say, if what is said about VMWare giving away GSX on Monday, I'm excited. I'll replace my MSVS install in a heartbeat. Way to go VMWare :)

Here's some links to news sites about this announcement:

VMware to make server product free
VMware moves to free with Server product
VMware to make server product free