VMware offers various paid versions of ESXi, but also provides a free version available for anyone to use. IT professionals regard ESXi as the go-to hypervisor for running virtual machines and its available for free. VMwares ESXi is the worlds leading virtualization hypervisor. Workstation is the best way to go for enterprise compatibility & knowledge. VMware ESXi Free vs Paid: A Look at License Limitations. VirtualBox is as good as it gets for a community supported product. I'm admittedly biased towards VMWare products since I prefer the interface & VMX editing syntax. Driver support for certain OSes can be spotty & 3D acceleration can be a pain to deal with. Has more features than VMWare Player but doesn't always compete completely with Workstation. VirtualBox - has good community support & is completely free. I'm currently running the newest version for all of my VMs. All features are available for use for 60 days during the evaluation period announce that some of the features will not be available for use and will require a. For a majority of our readers, this question is absolutely no brainer and for a majority of our readers the ESXi Free version is used for labs or testing, but not in production systems. Editing the VMX files is the only way around this (can be done with Player VMs as well). The free version of ESXi is identical to the paid version, which means we get most of the features and functionality available, except for some of the limitations mentioned below. Even the free version of ESXi 6.x can be upgraded very easily to ESXi 7.0 Free version, and in this post, well show you how. Unless you wish to be paying upwards multiple thousands of dollars, for production out of the two, Proxmox is your only option. VMWare Workstation - it's right in between Player & ESXi since there are a lot more features to configure & utilize but still lacks the ability to define certain hardware features. VMWare ESXi can only be used for personal use, the free version cannot be used in production per there licensing policies. I definitely does lack power features though. 3D acceleration & virtual device support keeps this free version relevant. VMWare Player - works really well with almost every OS I've emulated.

Vmware free version versus paid