VIDEO: Jumpstart ESXi and P2V with VMware GO

by David Davis on December 3, 2009

I just released a new video to add to my vSphere video training course. This video covers VMware’s GO – a free product that provides SMBs the ability to download ESXi, install it, configure it, create new VMs, perform P2V, download VMs, and manage ESXi servers and VMs once up and running. GO is completely web-based, once you have watched my video, you can try out VMware GO for yourself!

{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }

Aaron 12.08.09 at 2:50 pm

Excellent video David. Well put together, good pace, and quite informative.

Muhammad Aamir Zahoor 01.10.10 at 3:36 am

I saw this video and get the concept in just 20 minutes. Great work done by you.
Good luck.
MAZ

Kevin Houston 01.14.10 at 12:52 pm

VMware Go finally released on 1/13/2010. The VMware website has a link to this site. Good job on the video – very imformative.

Mateus 01.17.10 at 10:26 am

Great Video. Congratulations.

JvPSquared 01.19.10 at 2:40 am

Found your video after I installed it the ‘hard way’. Very good video, could have saved me some time if I’d found it earlier.

Vincent RABAH 01.19.10 at 2:57 pm

Very impressive, I’m using VMware Server 1 for some years and want to test Go NOW !!!
It’s seems to be a very exiting experience :)

tux@free-esxi 01.21.10 at 7:16 am

Hmm, so this is just working on a windows pc/server so nothing for me. I am wondering if there is a PowerCLI for the free version of esxi (4.0), as I haven’t found anything so far. Would you know where to find any cli for the free esxi server, as I haven’t got an windows pc to use the VI Client. Thanks

MarKos 02.20.10 at 8:43 am

The Download and Install fauils because the automitic burn of the download misses a license. Error:
——————————————————
Bad magic number: This license ID is not supported anymore. Please contact Rocket Division Software at info@rocketdivision.com.
—————————OK —————————

David Davis 02.23.10 at 12:14 pm

Hi Tux,

I checked with @HALr9000 on this and he said this concerning PowerCLI and Free ESXi compatibility-
“No, it is not fully compatible, but you can do some stuff with it. To be precise, you can only do read-only operations. This still exposes a lot of useful reporting scenarios, but in order to something as simple as power on a vm on an ESXi host, you need a vcenter license.”

mal everett 03.26.10 at 6:20 pm

Excellent Video – definitely will have a look at VmwareGO

DPino 04.02.10 at 10:09 am

Would these free products work with VmWare Vue for desktop virtualization. I am looking at this from the aspect of … most 5-10 user businesses suffer from Malware and Viruses more than to many servers on the network. Most of the clients I do work for have a domain controller running exchange and File & Print services. They do constantly jack up their desktops and have to reload their PC’s often. This is very expensive to the small business. Any solutions for this?
Thanks,
Pino

Esther 04.03.10 at 11:36 pm

I noticed in the video that you said if you install ESXi in localhost, then Go would not work on that computer? So it’s not like a VirtualBox condition where you can have a host and a client on the same machine? You probably think who would want to have the host and the client on the same machine, but I really like the concept of VMs and want to use it at home, keeping my main computer as clean as possible, since I try out a lot of trial software and stuff. If ESXi and Go won’t do this, is there an alternate solution that you would recommend?

Mike 05.06.10 at 1:09 pm

Good stuff!! David.

john 05.20.10 at 12:11 pm

Can you use VMware GO to move VMs on different esxi servers?

David Davis 05.20.10 at 1:20 pm

Hi John,
I’m not clear on what you mean about “move VM’s on different ESXi servers”.
GO isn’t going to give you VMotion but GO will allow you to P2V VMs to any of the ESXi servers managed by GO.
If you wanted to move a VM from one ESXi host to another, you would simply shutdown the VM, SCP the files to the new host, Add the VM, and power it on. All this could be done with the free vSphere Client that comes with ESXi.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for the comments,
David

John 05.31.10 at 8:48 pm

where did the virtual machine saved? I mean the datastore of the vm? is it in the harddrive of the ESXi, NAS?

David Davis 06.17.10 at 1:57 pm

Yes, the VM was saved on the local datastore of the ESXi server but you could have also put it on a SAN or NAS connected to the ESXi host.

Thanks for watching!

Gary 07.21.10 at 1:34 pm

That Server does pretty good for only having 8MB of Ram. :-)
Thanks for the video, very helpful

Craig 07.23.10 at 1:52 pm

Being a user of ESX/ESXi for 4 years and I wanted to see what VMWARE GO was about and your video was very information, Great Job! To be honest for a new user, I think VMware GO is overwhemling, then just using the ESXi install cd and then using the vi client to get in and create a VM. Just me I guess. Keep up the great work.

Des Miller 07.23.10 at 4:53 pm

Very efficient use of time with the video. Good information and well presented. I am impressed. Thank you David.

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