Nemertes Impact Analysis

The Impact Analysis is a weekly quick-take on breaking IT news.
Nemertes provides expert insight on how recent IT news affects you.

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VMware
ESXi: Free or Virtually Free?

VMware (NYSE:VMW) announced that ESXi hypervisor is now free! This is a competitive move by VMWare that underscores Nemertes' upcoming Virtualization benchmark, where participants are expressing concern over VMWare's pricing - before this announcement - and rising interest in Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Hyper-V, primarily due to these pricing concerns. However, ESXi offers a bare bones management interface, driving more dependence on VMware or third-party tools and services at additional expense.

Impacts:

Enterprises: If you are already a VMWare customer then consider adding ESXi servers to
your resource pools. If you are on the fence, ESXi gives you more incentive to jump off the fence and into the VMware pool.

Vendors: It's hard to compete with free and this will certainly put competitive pressure
on Microsoft and Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS).

Investors: This is a necessary move by VMware to protect marketshare. Virtualization
management vendors, such as privately held Hyperic and Nimsoft, will benefit from this move.

http://www.nemertes.com/ongoing_research [3]

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/VMwares-ESXi-Hypervisor-for-Free/?kc=rss [4]

Ted Ritter, Research Analyst