VMWare ESX vs ESXi and purchasing Foundation – the way I see it

If you have played with VMWare ESXi for a while and tried to monitor the underlying hardware with any degree of success (SNMP), give it up.  Although the future looks a little brighter with HP providing some functionality with ‘their’ version of ESXi, the reality for us, as a business, when recommending VMWare virtualization to customers (in a small business) is … Buy ESX (Foundation).  Two key reasons:

1. ESX is the only version of the two, that will provide full SNMP support – and lets face it, you want to know if a disk in your RAID set failed BEFORE the second disk fails (and planning on visiting your server daily to view red lights is not a sensible workaround)

2. Foundation gives you the VCB agent license – so you can then employ scripts, Backup Exec VMWare agents, etc. for ‘real time’ backups of your VMDK’s (Disaster Recovery – on a budget, compared to historical hardware based solutions)

So, buy the VMWare foundation pack and forget what VMWare tries to tell you (that it is $995) as that is a total crock (and frankly, VERY misleading).  Sure, they put their little asterisk there, but if you can’t get it without (support), PERIOD, don’t list anything but the truth VMWare!

Reference Link :: http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx_buy.html

Much as the other stuff is nice, the two things we care about are pointed out below (ESX, instead of ESXi) and the VCB license

And here’s the balogne factor…