Installing ESXi is a breeze. You’ll want to make sure your hardware is supported. Just go to http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx3i.html and click FAQ.

Summary of ESXi

Formally ESX which cost $1,200 to $5,000 depending on the features you get. ESXi became free in early August 2008. Mainly in response to Microsoft’s $28 release of Hypervisor. You can still purchase ESX and get access to some of the more advanced features like V-Motion and Virtual Center. In a large environment with hundreds of VMs these tools would save a lot of time and money. I only manage about 20 nodes so I am not going to pay $5,000 for Virtual Center… Instead we are managing each host with VMware Infrastructure Client, which is free. Also with ESXi you’ll manage everything from your desktop. For example, when installing the O.S. on a Virtual Machine you will load the O.S. CD in your Desktop’s CD-Rom Drive. Ever since I have installed ESXi, I haven’t touched the actual server. Everything from loading software and rebooting the host machine has been done from my desktop using VMware Infrastructure Client. Currently there is limited support for USB devices. I will detail below on how to clone out virtual machines for free using VMware Convertor.

One positive use of ESXi is how it utilizes memory. Recently I’ve setup two users with virtual XP desktops and assigned them each 300MB of RAM. On average they are only using 75MB of RAM (See screenshot below). These are not power users, they mainly e-mail with Outlook 2007 and sometimes use Access 2007. The users are accessing the VMs using Neroware Thin Clients ($200)(Yes you technically have to pay for the Windows XP license.) Normally you would give a Windows XP machine at least 512MB of physical RAM, if not a GB… With ESXi I can assign each virtual machine 256MB of RAM. Also you can share RAM between users. If one user isn’t using all of their memory it would be shared with another user. In theory an ESXi host with 64GB of RAM is able to host around 250 Virtual Desktops running Windows XP. As long as each user isn’t hounding the CPU… Each of the Virtual Desktop uses about 64 MHz on average. This setup can be very cost effective since each desktop pc would normally cost at least $500. Also the cost of ownership (maintenance, more layers to troubleshoot, time to setup, etc…) would be higher. I can clone out XP machine left and right. Each machine using VMware Convertor takes about 10 minutes to setup.

Tweaking Windows XP Master Virtual Machine – The Windows XP install can be tricky. You will have to download LSI Logic or BUS Logic drivers and attach them to the virtual floppy disk. Just make a folder on your desktop w/ the proper drivers and point the floppy to it. I assigned 15 GB (kinda over kill) of storage to the Master XP VM. After the install I assigned Virtual Memory settings to system managed. Also I turned off the following useless services – TCP/I NetBIOS helper, Error Reporting , & Wireless Configuration services. Lastly I adjusted the performance settings to “best performance.”

More to come…