VMware ESXi 4 - backup VMs & licensing

[rzammit82]

Hi all

We just got a new dell R710 server. I got a free licence from vmware, downloaded it, burned it on a CD and installed vmware ESXi 4 on its 1GB card to act as hypervisor.

Then I allocated all hard disk space (~600GB) as a single datastorage repository. So far so good.

I also got vSphere as evaluation and installed it on a seperate machine, specifically my computer.

Finally created a new virtual machine running Windows 2008 R2 on it and works OK too.

What I need to know are two things:

1-Are these licences free? or we shall buy some?
2-Downloading from the datastore to a PC via network takes ages? what is the best method?

Thanks all for your help

 

[mrdenny]

The vCenter license is not free. If you just want standalone ESXi servers without clustering, vMotion, DRM, etc then those licenses are free.

Yes moving a VM from the datastore to a PC will take a long time, there's a lot of data to move. It would be very rare that you would need to move VMs from the server to a PC.

Denny
MVP
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / SQL 2005 BI / SQL 2008 DBA / SQL 2008 DBD / SQL 2008 BI / MWSS 3.0: Configuration / MOSS 2007: Configuration)
MCITP (SQL 2005 DBA / SQL 2008 DBA / SQL 2005 DBD / SQL 2008 DBD / SQL 2005 BI / SQL 2008 BI)

My Blog