ESXi 6.7 Free Features and Use CasesĪre you wondering if you should use ESXi 6.7 free edition for production? In my opinion for most, don’t. If you have the need for a so-called “wide VM”, ESXi 6.7 free edition will most likely be a limiting factor that may also be a deal-breaker for those needing to assign more than 8 vCPUs to a VM. However, the limitation here that may factor in will be the limit of 8 vCPUs assigned to a VM running in ESXi 6.7 free. In my opinion the ESXi 6.7 free limitation of 2 physical CPUs and 12 TB of memory are not going to be limiting factors in most environments. Maximum of 8 vCPUs for VMs running on ESXi 6.7 free
However, all of the cool features that we have come to know and expect with an enterprise backup solution will not be available to you with ESXi 6.7 free. You could get fancy and create a snapshot on your VM to redirect I/O and then copy over your base disk to a different host. Well, in short, this ESXi 6.7 free limitation means you don’t have a way to backup your VMs running on the free ESXi hypervisor short of powering down the VMs and copying your files over to a different host. With ESX 6.7 free, VMware has locked down the vSphere Storage APIs (formerly VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection or VADP) that allow third-party vendors to interact with the hypervisor for the purposes of backing up virtual machines. This will also be a deal-breaker for most production environments. No Backups from Third-Party Backup SolutionsĮSXi 6.7 free limitations also include no backups from third-party backup solutions. The lack of vCenter Server capabilities for ESXi 6.7 free means that you are looking at a totally standalone ESXi server that is subject to all the disadvantages that come with running multiple workloads on a single set of hardware. This allows you to lose an entire host or multiple hosts if you have the resources, and still have the ability to provide availability to your business-critical applications. This means you have multiple hosts connected to some type of shared storage that allows any of the hosts to run any of the workloads you have running on any of the hosts. This includes:įor any type of high-availability in your vSphere environment, you will need to run a cluster of ESXi hosts. VMware vCenter Server is the VMware piece of the vSphere architecture that unlocks all of the “cool” features that you will most likely want to make use of in production environments. This may arguably top the list of ESXi 6.7 free limitations since this rules out most if not all of the features that are considered for enterprise production use.
0 kommentar(er)
