There are a couple of other major limitations when it comes to ESXi free, however.įirst of all, there is no support. This is not such a big deal, and will suit many purposes. You are also limited to a maximum of 8 vCPUs per virtual machine. While there are no limit to the underlaying infrastructure your are licensing for ESXi free (your host can have as many CPUs and cores as you can find), there are some ESXi free limitations you should be aware of.ĮSXi free is limited to a logical number of CPUs on your ESXi host, which is 480. Once you apply your free ESXi licence, you will notice there are some differences between ESXi free and the evaluation version of ESXi, which is equal to vSphere Enterprise Plus. You can see how to apply a vSphere license here. To get a license, you will need to visit the VMware vSphere Hypervisor download center, create an account and request your free ESXi license.

This means after 60 days you will start seeing all sorts of problems in your environment had you not applied a licence. The evaluation licence gives you access to all ESXi features, but after 60 days will stop working. Remember, when you install ESXi, by default the evaluation license is active.

ESXi is Free, But You Still Need a License!Īfter you have ESXi installed, you will still need a licence, even though it is free! This would be a pretty bare bones installation, but it would get ESXi up and running for you. If you want to install the free version of VMware ESXi, you will need a server that meets the same requirements of any paid version of ESXi.Īs of ESXi 6.7, your physical server will need at least a single socket processor with at least two cores, at least 4 GB of RAM, storage, and network connectivity. Often people ask me “Is ESXi free?” The answer may surprise you, because it is “Yes!” Let’s take a closer look at the requirements and features of the free version of ESXi, and some use cases for it. When it comes to VMware vSphere as a whole, VMware ESXi, or the VMware vSphere Hypervisor is a critical component.

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