VMware New Year Sale! Save 20.14% in 2014 on Fusion 6 ($49.73) and Workstation 10 ($207.60)

Related Stores

VMware

• 

  mikeywa on 16/01/2014 - 22:50

  Awesome, thanks !! I just upgraded my Workstation 8 to Workstation 10 for $98.71.

• 

  Zum on 17/01/2014 - 08:55

  +1

  Would someone be able to offer a brief overview of these products from a junior SysAdmin point of view.

  I'm in the first steps of teaching myself about Virtualisation. I've been running Ubuntu KVM for a couple of weeks and as soon as my Vmware compatible network interface card arrives I'll install ESXi Hypervisor.

  Would any of these products make my life easier while I am learning.

  Thanks

  • 

    Potatohead on 17/01/2014 - 09:34

    +3

    These products are all made for running VMs on the desktop and are usually marketed as ways to run apps from other OS's as if they were native. Where ESXi hypervisor replaces your OS and runs on bare metal, providing infrastructure on which to deploy vms, these run as applications on an OS (windows, linux, or mac depending on the flavour you purchase) and then run the VMs within the application, no hardware compatibility necessary.

    For learning, they probably won't make your life easier. Virtualbox is a free virtualisation program by oracle that achieves almost everything these programs do though at lower performance point, but it would be a good solution if you want to play with some VMs on a desktop. If you're looking into kvm and ESXi then you're probably more interested in virtualisation at scale rather than solving a desktop users application requirements, and the way kvm and ESXi are managed is significantly different from the way these programs are so there isn't much reason to investigate these.

    On a side note, look into lxc, Docker, and CoreOS for some cool virtualisation stuff.

    • 

      Zum on 17/01/2014 - 10:48

      Thank you for this excellent brief summary and some new keywords to Google.

• 

  bezanel on 17/01/2014 - 14:49

  If this works for Students. VM Fusion 6 Pro - Academic $72.95

  http://store.vmware.com/DRHM/store?Action=DisplayProductDeta…

  • 

    OSienna on 17/01/2014 - 23:37

    Doesn't seem to apply to Academic versions, I'm afraid (already heavily discounted).