ESXi @ Home

Does anyone use ESXi at home? I may be talking rubbish but let's say I want Linux and Windows on 1 computer at home, would ESXi be a good way of achieving this?

Does it support any OS?

Yes it supports a load of operating systems. But you can't access the guest VM's consoles or create VMs from the ESXi installation - you have to use the infrastructure client. Once configured, it will be a headless server.

I think what you are looking for is VMWare Server. Install your native operating system be it Windows or Linux, install VMWare Server, then run your alternative OSs from within there.

It would gain you some speed and more available memory but I think most people will have one installed natively and Just have the normal VMWare server running the other.
I used to Have XP and run a Linux VM. I now run Linux and have an XP VM :)

it's not really desinged for home use, you'd need a dedicated box.
better to use Vmware server, or virtualbox

I use VM at home. I just thought it would have been nice to have something that can manage how much memory each machine needs etc.

Just looking at a way to speed up my VM's at home - guess I need to invest in more RAM instead.

you don't need ESXi to add ram to a virtual computer. Just about any virtualisation software will do this.

I know I can give a machine as much or as little memory as I want - what I mean is having the software decide on the spot how much each machine needs.

So if I am running a memory hungry task on a *nix VM it automatically takes some memory from a machine that isn't doing anything and gives it to the *nix VM.

You mean you want a memory pool that hihger end products offer?

I don't know what I want - that's my problem. :D

Basically, I just saw the features of ESXi and wondered if they could be utilised at home.

I will probably build a new server and run esxi on it as I alreaady use windows and two linux vms on the existing one. One thing to look out for is a compatible storage controller, there aren't many. While you can install on a number of SATA on board ones, it wont let you store the VMs there.