Considering all the known limitations of Free, Evaluation, and Enterprise versions that are typical for older ESXi versions, I decided to investigate whether they are still present. Below, you’ll find what you typically see on the Licensing tab of ESXi Evaluation version:Īs you can see, the only difference is that the Evaluation license expires after 60 days, while Enterprise Plus lasts forever (to be exact, until your ESXi version is supported). It doesn’t have many cool features, although it is free and never expires. Here’s what you’ll see on that tab in ESXi Free:

Here’s the article that explains how to do it: Afterward, go to the Licensing tab to find out about the limitations. Learn more about the current licenseįirst, apply the license key. I conducted today’s study on three SuperMicro SSG-620P-ACR12H servers that were absolutely identical from a hardware standpoint. It is a commercial edition, so it has no time restrictions and provides you with all the robust hypervisor features. Enterprise PlusĮnterprise Plus is the top-notch ESXi version. VMs will continue working smoothly, but once you shut down any of them, you won’t be able to start them again until you either purchase a commercial version or switch to Free. Once the timer stops, you won’t be able to perform any actions in vCenter Server. VMware Evaluation includes all ESXi functions, but it expires after 60 days. Register at VMware website, download the hypervisor, request the key, and you are good to go! What’s the catch? You can get ESXi for free forever…but its features are pretty limited. VMware Free is 100% free just as it comes from the version name. I think this post may be interesting for guys who have just started running their home labs or are getting familiar with VMware vSphere. Well, you won’t get a rich set of hypervisor features in the free version, of course, but at least you don’t need to pay for its deployment in your home lab! In this article, I compare both the free VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 1 (referred to as ESXi below) licenses and Enterprise Plus. The good thing is that VMware is very loyal in ESXi licensing. So, after all that, it’s obvious why you might end up buying from VMware, even if the free licenses seem fine. The latter, in turn, has no time limits but lacks many cool hypervisor features. The former has a 60-day time limit but provides all the ESXi features. The thing is, both have several limitations that make them unfit for production use. You may not have heard about this, but there are actually two free versions of ESXi: Evaluation and Free. StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) OEMĮSXi is often said to be a free hypervisor.

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