VMware ESX Server and ESXi both provide the same basic virtualization functionality. Both can also be managed with VMware Virtual Center and joined with additional servers to create a cutting-edge virtualization server farm solution that can do all kinds of cool things. ESX includes a Linux-based service console that allows for some "local" agents to be run on the host. ESXi is a very slim hypervisor that can only be managed and accessed remotely. This chat helps answer questions and provides a discussion around the similarities and differences between ESX and ESXi.

Special Note: This chat resulted in the creation of a new unoffical theme song for Hyper-V created by Ye110wbeard.

Technical Community - Background Reading

• VMWare ESXi on DellTechCenter

Chat Transcript

	DELL-ScottH	Hello John
	John	Hello Scott
	John	I joined 10 minutes ago and thought we wouldn't have one today.
	DELL-ToddM	I usually hang out in the chat room for about an hour before; but was in a meeting about Twitter at VMworld
	DELL-ScottH	I would never miss the chance to geek it out
	DELL-ScottH	Again, I miss all the cool meetings
	John	What's Twitter?
	DELL-ScottH	www.twitter.com/delltechcenter
	DELL-ScottH	Sort of like text messaging to a group
	DELL-ToddM	I would say that it is a cross between IM and Blog
		slbrown joined.
	DELL-ToddM	Hello slbrown! How's goes it?
	John	Oh okie, messagblog :)
		kurtmeyers joined.
	slbrown	It goes well and you?
	DELL-ToddM	Hey Kurt
	DELL-ToddM	Things are good, but busy, here
	kurtmeyers	Hello
	DELL-ScottH	Hey Kurt and slbrown
	slbrown	Hello Scott
		Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger joined.
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	DELL-ToddM	Dan the Man!
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Hola
	DELL-ScottH	Hey Dan
	DELL-ScottH	Hello Jbarton
	jbarton	Hey everyone
	DELL-ScottH	I set the line at 20; who wants the over?
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	What are we virtualizing today?
	kurtmeyers	Everything of course
	DELL-ToddM	We are going to get officially started in about five minutes or so; give everybody a chance to join in
	DELL-ToddM	I'll take the over
	DELL-ScottH	Cool, lunch is the bet?
	DELL-ToddM	Deal
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Did you guys see that VMware and Cisco joined the SVVP program from Microsoft?
	DELL-ToddM	Today's topic is going to be ESXi and ESX—a discussion of the differences between the two
	DELL-ScottH	I'm in the VMworld session scheduler right now...pretty cool, easy to build a schedule
		Steve_W joined.
	DELL-ScottH	Define swp
	DELL-ToddM	I did get an e-mail about VMware becoming a supported virtualization Platform for Ms Os and Apps
	DELL-ToddM	Which nets out to Exchange is now supported on VMware!
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	The link is http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp/
	DELL-ToddM	I'm going to do a blog post on it tomorrow; stop stealing my thunder :)
	DELL-ScottH	Oh, s-v-v-p...I need better glasses
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Ok, ok I'll stop
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Might as well mention the license change that MS took today that allows VMotion of workloads outside of that 90-day limit
	DELL-ToddM	Seriously, I would like to hear from everybody if this makes a difference to them
	DELL-ToddM	Dan, Is that included in the link above? Or is that somewhere else?
	DELL-ToddM	I would like to welcome everybody to today's delltechcenter Web chat on ESX and ESXi
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	That's another link
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	I like the TechCenter but I read Allesandro's site for news too: www.virtualization.info
	DELL-ToddM	Last week we discussed ESXi licensing and features; the transcript is here www.delltechcenter.com/page/08-12-2008+VMware+ESXi+licensing+and+features
	DELL-ToddM	This week we can continue that discussion as well as talk about how ESXi and ESX are the same and different
	DELL-ToddM	Does anybody have any questions that we can get started with?
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	DELL-ToddM	Welcome tpape - we are just getting started
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	DELL-ToddM	There is a great page on VMware's site that goes through the differences between ESX and ESXi: http://kb.VMware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_us&cmd=displaykc&externalid=1006543
	DELL-ToddM	Welcome Jeff_g. You can use Action, Recent room history to catch up on the conversation so far
	DELL-ToddM	The biggest difference between the two is that ESX has the service console and ESXi does not
	DELL-ToddM	Oh, and the ESXi is available for free
	kurtmeyers	But when deploying say more then four or five VMs on a server, isn't it wise to have a service console?
	DELL-ScottH	Coolest thing I read from last week’s transcript was the hack to get SSH working
	DELL-ToddM	The service console allows you to run some agents locally on the ESX server; the most common and useful is probably backup agents
	John	I am looking at the kb from VMware
	DELL-ToddM	However, you can use the Remote CLI to do all of the same commands that you could do in service console against the ESXi server
	DELL-ToddM	On the ESXi page here on TechCenter I have a link to the Remote CLI: www.delltechcenter.com/page/VMware+ESXi+embedded+hypervisor
	John	If you can, please test that URL; I am not able to view it.
	kurtmeyers	So then there really isn't a reason for the console as long as you have the remove CLI
	John	I mean Kb on the difference between ESX and ESXi
	DELL-ScottH	http://kb.VMware.com/kb/1006543
	DELL-ToddM	Testing: It was working a few minutes ago when I pasted it in
	jbarton	I would assume that the Remote CLI only helps running ESX commands from another location, but doesn’t help much with other stuff that would run in the service console, like backup agents, monitoring agents, etc.
	DELL-ToddM	Backup agents will probably not work; you need to use VCB-enabled backup
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Don't forget your APC agents for graceful shutdown, etc.
	DELL-ToddM	In respect to the licensing cost difference, free versus cost, this has definitely increased the interest in ESXi over the past month
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	DELL-ScottH	Todd, how did your test go with the ESXi failover, without using Virtual Center?
	DELL-ToddM	Welcome Gkeller and Mikemoffet; Action, Recent Room History will catch you up on the discussion
	DELL-ScottH	Welcome Gkeller and Mike. Use Action, Recent Room History to catch up
	DELL-ScottH	Pick poke you owe me a coke
	DELL-ToddM	Scott, Thanks for mentioning
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Long story short, the move to a VMware hypervisor without a service console is pretty cool because it shrinks the form factor to a point where it can be run on USB/SD cards. It's a win for end users because a majority of the ESX security patches went to the service console
	DELL-ToddM	Last week a question came up about doing failover with only the free ESXi
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	You just need to double-check your internal processes and understand if you need to drop agents into the SC
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	If you do, then you may need to stay with the version with the service console
	DELL-ToddM	No Virtual Center, but a manual failover of VMs
	DELL-ToddM	So I set up two PowerEdge R805s with and MD3000i iSCSI storage to test it out
	DELL-ToddM	I created a VM on the first server residing on the shared storage between the two servers
	DELL-ToddM	In the VM I installed Windows 2008 and tested to make sure it was working
	DELL-ToddM	Then shut down the VM on server A
	DELL-ToddM	Went to server B and manually created the same VM again, pointing to the same virtual hard disk on the shared disk
	DELL-ToddM	Then started the VM on server B, and it came up just fine
	DELL-ToddM	Then tried to start the VM on server A, without shutting it down on server B
	DELL-ToddM	And the cluster file system was working; it prevented me from starting the already running VM on the other server
	jbarton	Did you have to create the VM on server B, or could you just open up and use the existing vmx configuration file stored on the shared storage?
	DELL-ToddM	Full blog post is here with more details: www.delltechcenter.com/page/08-19-08+poor+man's+failover+for+ESXi+-+comments
	DELL-ToddM	I couldn't find a way to get ESXi to just use the existing vmx configuration file
	DELL-ToddM	I think that you might be able to use Remote CLI to register the VM, but I haven't had a chance to try this out yet
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Is there a use case for that type of failover?
	jbarton	Is ESXi just managed through a Web interface, or is there a VI client type console as well?
	DELL-ToddM	You use the same Virtual Infrastructure client as for Virtual Center; you just point it directly at the the ESXi server
	DELL-ScottH	Blog topic includes words "poor man," so that might be best use case
	DELL-ToddM	If you point a Web browser at ESXi server, it has a link to download the VI client from the ESXi server itself
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Reading is fundamental...minus five hit points to me
	DELL-ScottH	Level down
	DELL-ToddM	The use case is that you don't want to purchase Virtual Infrastructure, but you want to have some failover capability in the event of server failure
	DELL-ScottH	Pretty cool to get ESX performance for free and quasi HA feature for free
	DELL-ToddM	Or you could do some very manual load balancing between a set of ESXi servers with this type of failover
	DELL-ScottH	You could take it a step further and script a monitor program to watch Server A, then CLI to start server B when A fails
	DELL-ToddM	I will award a TechCenter shirt to the first person to write such a script!
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	DELL-ToddM	I think that this type of failover is probably workable for a small environment, but would become unmanageable pretty quickly as things grow
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	DELL-ToddM	Has anybody considered using ESXi? Free or otherwise?
	DELL-ToddM	One of the best things about using the ESXi free version is that it can be "upgraded" into a full Virtual Infrastructure environment with just a licensing change
	jbarton	We are using it in our lab environment, and have the full-blown ESX cluster in production
	DELL-ToddM	No changes necessary to any VMs that are created while in Free mode
	jbarton	I have considered using it instead of VMware server, but I'm not sure I can meet hardware requirements for ESXi
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Jbarton, I've heard of a number of end users who moved from VMware server to ESXi
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	I guess it makes sense to move away from that hosted model pending you can meet the hardware requirements
	DELL-ToddM	What hardware would you be putting it on?
	gkeller	I had a quad socket 6950 I wanted to test it on, but it blocked me due to too many sockets
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	DELL-ScottH	Really? That was the message?
	gkeller	/me has slept since then.
	DELL-ScottH	Hey, ye110wbeard...good to see a fellow twitter
	ye110wbeard	Oh no! I've been spotted!
	DELL-ScottH	Use Action, Recent Room History to catch up
	ye110wbeard	Ruuuuuuun!
	DELL-ToddM	I didn't think that there was a number of sockets limitation to ESXi
	jbarton	Outside of work I would only have generic machines with SATA drives, which I believe will not be visible to ESX
	DELL-ScottH	Kind of hard to miss with that NIC :-)
	ye110wbeard	As long as there are no sharks with lasers today... >:)
	DELL-ToddM	At what point did it block you? During install or later when trying to create or start a VM?
	gkeller	During the install as I recall.
	gkeller	I'm going to need to test it again, since I actually have a business use for prototyping it now
	DELL-ToddM	Dan, we support ESXi on four-socket servers: R900 and R905?
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Yes we do
	ye110wbeard	Quick question, free ESX, same specs as Hyper-V? 64-bit hypervisor on chip?
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	I wonder if the freely downloadable version from VMware.com comes only in a two-socket version
	DELL-ToddM	ESXi is a bit different from Hyper-V, but its basic description is the same: 64-bit hypervisor
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	DELL-ToddM	ESXi is a truly bare metal hypervisor; whereas, Hyper-V is part of Windows Server 2008
	DELL-ToddM	So although both ESXi and Hyper-V are "free," Hyper-V requires Windows Server 2008, which is not free
	ye110wbeard	So ESX is a stand-alone O/S application to run the virtuals? Or requires some base O/S?
	DELL-ToddM	When I registered my license for free ESXi from the Web site, it asked me how many processors I would be installing it on, and I put in 64
	DELL-ScottH	ESX is the OS
	DELL-ToddM	I used the same license on two R805s each with two, quad-core AMD Opteron processors
	ye110wbeard	Ok, now that is neat :)
	ye110wbeard	What about the licensing of the O/Ss under? No freebies there I am guessing
	DELL-ToddM	I will look into the four-socket and free ESXi question and post to the home page for this chat when I find the answer
	Steve_W	XenServer is also a very good bare metal hypervisor
	DELL-ScottH	If you use Linux it is free :-)
	ye110wbeard	I'll steer clear from that debate... ;)
	DELL-ToddM	No free lunch on the guest OS; traditional rules still apply
	ye110wbeard	As I presumed
	gkeller	Thanks, Todd
	DELL-ToddM	Gkeller, What is the business use for ESXi?
	gkeller	We need to test virtualizing our login nodes for our clusters
	gkeller	So each customer has their own "private Idaho"
	DELL-ToddM	Then move to production ESX if successful?
	gkeller	Depends on feature differences
	gkeller	We don't need HA
	DELL-ScottH	Yes, XenServer is nice too; got a link to some of the demos: www.delltechcenter.com/page/xenserver+demos
	gkeller	I'll have to do some homework
	ye110wbeard	What do you use to Manage ESXi?
	DELL-ScottH	Keyboard
	Steve_W	Ugh
	DELL-ToddM	ESXi has the same performance as ESX. The differences are in the advanced features including HA, VMotion, and DRS
	ye110wbeard	I like having both options myself. Is there a non-keyboard option once up?
	DELL-ToddM	If you just need basic virtualization with great performance, it may be all that you need
	DELL-ScottH	We've got a systems management guide: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/eslvmwre/en/ves_3i/systems%20management%20document/pdf/msmpa01.pdf
	DELL-ToddM	Sometimes I find that chants will help prevent problems, but I'm not sure that qualifies as a non-keyboard option
	ye110wbeard	I use magic words myself >:)
	DELL-ScottH	Yes, ancient druid chants
	DELL-ToddM	With four letters; I do that too
	DELL-ToddM	Makes me feel better
	ye110wbeard	No, more like, "Stupid, no good !@#$!>?>!>$>!@$"—Those magic words
	ye110wbeard	Usually works
	gkeller	Rubber chickens and five-pound hammers tend to be persuasive.
	DELL-ScottH	I threaten to move the server out of the data center into a broom closet, that works
	DELL-ScottH	Can't usually stand the heat
	gkeller	(Oh, I thought we were talking about users )
	DELL-ScottH	Oh, lets not go there
	ye110wbeard	I threatened to downgrade one to a Commodore Vic 20. It was beautiful Ran away screaming!
	DELL-ScottH	Common, at least give em OS/2!
	gkeller	The original stateless computers...ah, the day
	DELL-ToddM	We are getting low on time—just about five minutes or so—any more questions around ESXi?
	DELL-ToddM	Or anything else somewhat virtualization related?
	ye110wbeard	Not from me...I'm downloading it now to try 'er out
	DELL-ToddM	Next week we are going to discuss Hyper-V
	DELL-ToddM	I've been working on some Hyper-V performance testing and will be ready to discuss some of what I have found as well as Hyper-V function and features as well
	DELL-ScottH	Todd’s built a beast of a machine in the lab
	DELL-ToddM	Let me know if you have any Hyper-V questions
	ye110wbeard	Don't forget, Hyper-V has a theme song too. :) Sung to "hyperactive"
	DELL-ToddM	I have two 128GB RAM systems that I am using for the testing; had to scrounge RAM to build out the second one
	DELL-ScottH	Send us the MP3 recording of your rendition, and we'll send you a shirt!
	ye110wbeard	****drooooool******
	gkeller	Oh, every super hero needs theme music
	DELL-ToddM	A video would be even better!
	ye110wbeard	You can throw one my way, I won't mind
	DELL-ScottH	yes, Youtube it and it's yours
	ye110wbeard	Workin' on the video and music for it. I did "highway to Powershell"
	DELL-ScottH	Lol
	gkeller	I have plenty of hardware for interesting tests. just no time!
	ye110wbeard	The bad gerbil version
	DELL-ToddM	When you have an idea for an interesting test—let me know. I might have the time
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	DELL-ToddM	That's why I did the ESXi failover test yesterday; based on a question from a previous chat
	ye110wbeard	Ok, I'm out...going to have to finally finish that MP3. I need some clothes. I'll work on the video. I could use an extra system >:)
	DELL-ToddM	I forgot to introduce Dan Bettinger at the beginning of the chat—sorry, Dan
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Thanks
	ye110wbeard	Cheers all. Chat later on next round
	DELL-ScottH	Later
		ye110wbeard left.
	DELL-ToddM	Dan is the virtualization guy here at Dell; he works with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft!
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Todd, can you compare Hyper-V versus virtual server from a performance perspective?
	DELL-ToddM	Hyper-V wins!
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Ok
	DELL-ToddM	I don't have data to quantify, but the performance of Hyper-V is very similar to ESX.
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	I guess it doesn't take 128 gigs of RAM to figure that one out
	DELL-ToddM	Virtual Server and VMware Server are comparable
	DELL-ToddM	Dan, is that a question that you get?
	DELL-ToddM	Thanks to everybody for coming today. See you next week
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Not often yet
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	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	I can pin that one on the guys at Microsoft
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	I just want a proofpoint
	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Hyper-V is X% "faster" than Microsoft Server for a comparable workload on a similar machine
	gkeller	Todd, we're building a four-node "scalemp" SMP that would be an interesting place to test ESXi, if it's not limited by sockets/RAM. Not a high availability configuration but potentially very fluid
	gkeller	Sixty-four processor cores, 16 GbE connections, QDR InfiniBand and 128 GB RAM (more or less)
	gkeller	Based on Dell Shoffner's
	DELL-ToddM	I don't completely follow; you want to combine physical servers to make one big VM?
	DELL-ToddM	VMware ESX just provides the ability to subdivide a single server into VMs; resources across servers can't be combined into a single VM
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	Dell_-_Dan_Bettinger	Hey guys, I've got to run. I'm late for a call about virtualizing OS/2 on an iPhone using KVM
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	DELL-ScottH	Who is that customer? :-)
	DELL-ToddM	Hey, I'm supposed to be in the same meeting—gotta run :)