Vmware Esxi 6.5 Free License

Introduction

• Vmware Esxi 6.5 Free Licensee
• Vmware Esxi 6.5 Free License Test
• Vmware Esxi 6.5 Free License Renewal

ESXi is often told to be a free hypervisor. I've mentioned in my previous post that there are actually two free ESXi versions: Evaluation and Free. The thing is, both have several limitations that make them unfit for production use. The former has a 60-day time limit, but it provides all the ESXi features. The latter, in its turn, has no time limits, but it lacks many cool hypervisor features. With all that being said, it becomes clear why you just buy from VMware at some point even though you are potentially good to go with any of those free licenses.

After you have vSphere 6.5 licenses, you must assign them to all upgraded ESXi 6.5 hosts by using the license management functionality in the vSphere Web Client. See the vCenter Server and Host Management documentation for details. If you use the scripted method to upgrade to ESXi 6.5, you can provide the license key in the kickstart (ks) file. VMware vSphere 6.5 – Setup Your Own Enterprise Environment VMware vSphere 6.5 – How To Create Professional Lab VMware vSphere 6.5 – Software Defined Datacentre Case Study VMware VSAN 6.6 – Your Scalable Software Defined Storage VMware NSX 6.4 – More Then Traditional Network. Looking to upgrade from vSphere 6.7? Visit the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center. Get Your vSphere License Key. Once you have purchased VMware vSphere 7.0, you will receive a licensing confirmation email with your license keys or you can retrieve your license keys from the vSphere License portal.

The good thing is, VMware are very loyal in ESXi licensing. Well, you won't get a rich set of hypervisor features in a free version, of course; but you, at least, don't need to pay for its deployment in your home lab! In this article, I compare both free VMware ESXi 6.7 Update 1 (I refer it as ESXi below) licenses and Enterprise Plus. I think this post may be interesting for guys who have just started running their home labs or are getting familiar with VMware vSphere.

What's on the table?

VMware Free

VMware Free is 100% free just as it comes from the version name. Register at VMware website, download the hypervisor, request the key, and you are good to go! What's the catch? You get ESXi for free for the unlimited time… however, it has a pretty poor set of features.

VMware Evaluation

VMware Evaluation features all ESXi functions, but it goes off in 60 days. Once the timer stops, you won't do anything in vCenter Server. VMs will keep on working like clockwork, but once you shut down any of them, you'll never start it again until you either buy a commercial version or switch to Free.

Enterprise Plus

Enterprise Plus is the top-notch ESXi version. It is a commercial edition, so it has no time restrictions and provides you all the robust hypervisor features.

Setup configuration

I carried out today's study on 3 absolutely identical from the hardware point of view Dell R730 servers. Find their configuration below:

• 2 х 14 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 @ 2.00GHz;
• 128GB (8 x 16 GB) RAM;
• 1 x 1 TB HDD;
• 4 x 1 Gb/s LAN.

All three servers were under ESXi 6.7.0, 10302608 orchestration. The name of each server corresponded ESXi version on top of it.

Learn more about the current license

Apply the license key first. Here's the article discussing how you do it:

Afterward, go to the Licensing tab to find out about limitations. Here's what you see at that tab in ESXi Free.

Lagu barat lama romantis gratis. It does not have many cool features, though it is free and never expires.

Below find what you typically see at the Licensing tab of ESXi Evaluation and Enterprise versions.

As you can see, the only difference is that Evaluation license expires one day, while Enterprise Plus lasts forever (to be exact, until your ESXi version is supported).

Regarding all known limitations of Free, Evaluation and Enterprise versions that are typical for older ESXi versions, I decided to figure out whether they are still there. Here is the table with limitations that I tried to reveal in ESXi 6.7.

Now, let's get some more details.

Memory limitations

Just as any previous ESXi version, ESXi 6.7 has memory restriction. Interstingly, if you have over 32 GB of RAM in your host, there will be no memory limitations after all! The screenshot below had been taken on the host with 128 GB of RAM. As you can see, I can use all of it.

Support

Even though many claim ESXi to be simple, it still can be quirky. With the Free version, you won't be able to talk to VMware support. You still can look through VMware communities, and, if you are lucky enough, you may find the solution. Besides, you should agree that it's always better when the solution is backed up by the guys from support.

vCenter Server

You won't be able to add hosts to vCenter and manage them via vCenter if you go with the Free version or after Elevation expires. If you a stubborn one and try to add hosts in vCenter anyway, you'll encounter an error or will be asked to purchase a proper license.

Here's the error message that I was talking about. Quick reminder: Two hosts below have Enterprise Plus and active Evaluation versions installed.

Time limitations

Evaluation is the only ESXi license with limited in time. Once you install it, you can benefit from the unlimited ESXi features for 60 days. Once time ticks down, you are to either extend the license or switch to Free. The nice thing is, you can always switch to Evaluation from any other license including Free. Of course, once you have run out of time, no magic happens if you switch to Free and back. You won't have 60-day trial again unless you re-install ESXi.

Other two versions that I review here do not have any time restrictions; until they are officially supported, you are good to go.

A limited number of sockets

Well, that is the constraint that I can only mention, but, unfortunately, I could not check it here due to my hardware limitations. I also did not find any official information saying that this limitation persists in ESXi 6.7. If you know anything on this matter, please, share it in comments.

ESXi Free allows using just 2 CPU sockets per-host. Well, my servers even don't have more. So, I cannot say whether they are still limited.

A limited number of vCPUs per VM

With Evaluation or Enterprise plus, you can assign up to 128 vCPUs per-VM. For the Free version, you need to go with not more than 8 vCPUs in one VM.

Interestingly, in the Free version, you still can create a VM with just as many vCPUs as your host has logical cores.

However, you won't be able to start it just like any other VM that has over 8 vCPUs. Here's the message you'll see if you try to start such VM.

Well, you cannot do much about this situation, so either run VMs with 8 vCPUs or update your ESXi license.

API features

In ESXi Free, users need to go with the limited set of API features. In other words, the hypervisor won't be able to interact with other third-party applications like Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5. Being unable to use neither vCenter nor APIs, you have no other choice than to buy an advanced license.

Here's the message you get once prompted to back up with Veeam Backup & Replication.

Conclusion

In this article, I took a closer look at limitations of ESXi 6.7 U1 licenses. Everything seems to look just as it was before.

Based on this, ESXi Free still seems to be great for home labs regardless of its limitations. Evaluation, in its turn, allows getting familiar with all ESXi features. I think 60 days is enough to let you love the hypervisor. I hope that this small review makes you love the hypervisor too.

In this post I will be setting up a VMware home lab server using a very cheap Dell Optiplex 7010 PC with 8GB of ram and a 280Gb hard drive.

What you will need:

• Bare Metal Device to install VMware esxi 6.5 onto
• VMware esxi 6.5 image
• VMware esxi 6.5 license key

Vmware Esxi 6.5 Free Licensee

Vmware Home Lab Hardware

You can install VMware esxi onto so many different bare metal devices from a very cheap PC up to a high end server.

A lot of devices will work despite them not officially being supported by VMWare. i.e the Intel NUC is a widely used device but is not on the approved hardware list.

To see if your chosen device is on the list check the link below.

This tutorial is going to show you how to setup a cheap esxi server for home. The purpose of this server is to run a few virtual machines and so you can learn the process of installation and how to use vmware sphere 6.5.

If you are looking for the best desktop for vmware lab, this one is pretty good.

You also need to do some research on how loud this server is going to be, you can buy ultra quiet home servers or servers with really loud fans, it all depends where you going to put it.

My Dell Optilplex PC lives in a cupboard in the spare room and you can hardly hear it.

The term 'Bare Metal' just means a PC or server with no operating system installed on it, VMware esxi will be the operating system for this device

This is the PC I will be using, and as you can see you can pick these up on ebay for under £100-£150. The main benefit to this PC is that it has 8GB of RAM, ideally you would want 16 or more but 8 is more than enough to get you started. There are many debates about the best home server, but you just need to decide what it is you are going to be doing with it. If you are just wanting to learn VMware then get the cheapest thing you can and when you outgrown it then spend a bit of money on something with more RAM and Storage.

VMware esxi 6.5 image

You need to register for a free account at https://www.vmware.com/

Vmware Esxi 6.5 Free License Test

Once you have your account you need to click on products and then in the bottom right there is a section called Free Products – click on vSphere Hypervisor

Then click on the big green download now button

You will be asked to login with your account and then you need to download the VMware vSphere Hypervisor 6.50a – Binaries

Watery desktop 3d registration code keygen free download. (or later update depending on when you are reading this)

Vmware Esxi 6.5 Free License Renewal

Just above this screen you will see your license key, copy the entire string of text and save it to a notepad as you will need this later.
VMware esxi 6.5 will run for 60 days with an evaluation license, after that it will stop working unless you have entered your license key.

You are then free to use VMware esix 6.5 for as long as you want. There are obviously limitations to this which will be covered in more detail in a later post.

The VMware license cost is free, you do however get no support from VMware and are not able to run VCentre or setup datacentres, but for the purpose of learning, that's fine.

Installing VMware Home Lab Server using USB bootable drive

The easiest way to install VMware is to put the downloaded ISO image onto a bootable USB drive.

I use rufus to create the bootable drive – simply download the rufus software and start it up, you will see this screen

Once you have inserted a USB drive into your computer you will see it register at the top, then you need to point Rufus to your downloaded ISO image as highlighted above. Change the bootable disk to ISO image and clicking the Disk icon browse to where you downloaded the image. Then click start, the process should take less than a minute.

Now take your USB drive and put it into your bare metal PC/Server

Boot the PC / Server using the USB drive

The easiest way to install VMware is to put the downloaded ISO image onto a bootable USB drive.

I use rufus to create the bootable drive – simply download the rufus software and start it up, you will see this screen

Once you have inserted a USB drive into your computer you will see it register at the top, then you need to point Rufus to your downloaded ISO image as highlighted above. Change the bootable disk to ISO image and clicking the Disk icon browse to where you downloaded the image. Then click start, the process should take less than a minute.

Now take your USB drive and put it into your bare metal PC/Server

Boot the PC / Server using the USB drive

Power on your PC / Server, you want the device to boot from the USB drive so if it doesn't and it just starts up you will need to go into your BIOS settings and change the boot order.

On my Dell PC I had to press F12 at boot up to access the BIOS, I then just selected the USB drive as the boot device and hit enter.

If this works then VMware Esxi 6.5 will start to install on your device.

This video will setup you through the process.

VIDEO to go HERE

Once the installation has completed you will need to connect your server to your home network and then browse to the IP address you set.

In my case I have set the IP to 192.168.1.2 so will open my browser and go to https://192.168.1.2

You should get to this screen

Log in with User name: Root and the password you created during install, and the final step you should now be looking at this.

Congratulations, you have now completed your VMware lab setup for home.

I am not sure if this is the best home esxi server, but it serves a purpose for me, the only downside is that it lives in the spare room and does make a bit of noise, I am considering an Intel NUC my next project which can supposedly take 64Gb of RAM according to virtuallyghetto.com

In the following posts we will be covering how to install virtual machines and the limitations of the free version.

Remember, this is the exact software that is running all of the virtual machines running VMware in enterprise networks around the world. The main difference is the storage, in your home lab you are using the local hard drive. In an enterprise environment, they would typically be using external storage with much greater capacity.

But learning VMware 6.5 is a great way to improve your IT career with skills in virtualisation.