Virtualisation software maker VMware has announced that its ESX hypervisor will be available as a free download, starting from next Monday.

The move underlines the company’s increasing reliance on virtualisation infrastructure and management tools. “VMware is not a hypervisor company, but a virtual infrastructure company,” the marketing literature that accompanies the announcement proclaims.

The hypervisor, which decouples software resources from hardware or ‘bare metal’ – allowing for the creation of virtual machines – has become something of a commodity in recent months.

Firstly, software houses including Oracle and Sun have all released their own versions of the open-source hypervisor Xen. More significantly, Microsoft has released its own hypervisor, Hyper-V, which is available free with its server operating system.

However, VMware denies that the move was triggered by the release of Hyper-V last month.

“Making a product free is not something you can do overnight,” Reza Malekzadeh, VMware’s senior director of products and marketing, told Information Age this morning. “We have a channel structure and partners that we need to prepare. This has been in the works for several weeks.”

Furthermore, customers are not selecting Microsoft’s product over ESX, he said; Xen-based hypervisors even less so.

Instead, Malekzadeh said, the move was simply a natural progression for the product. He pointed to VMware’s previous hypervisor product, GSX, which the company made free in 2006.

“That triggered thousands of downloads, and customer adoption evolved,” he said. “They came back to us for infrastructure and management products, because they found out there was more value to be had from virtualisation than just installing a hypervisor.”

Malekzadeh added that he expects the free availability of ESX to trigger increased adoption, as it removes the need to raise a purchase order for the product.

Ringing the changes?

Also strongly denied was the suggestion that the announcement has anything to do with the sudden departure of VMware co-founder and CEO Dianne Greene two weeks ago.

News of the free availability of ESX was announced by new CEO Paul Maritz in his inaugural analyst call for the company yesterday, strongly suggesting that it lay at the heart of the strategic differences that caused VMware’s board of directors to give Green the push.

“We started this process when Diane Greene was with us,” Malekzadeh nevertheless insisted.

Further reading

VMware CEO Greene ousted
EMC tightens grip over virtualisation hot shot by replacing founder with company man

Early release for Microsoft hypervisor

VMWare's unstoppable rise
VMware is riding high with its virtualisation technology but it can expect tougher times ahead

The new virtual platform
The virtualisation revolution has just begun. Expect the most radical benefits to appear at the processor level

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