We are new to the vm world, as we plan on moving 3 of our 5 servers (for now) to a VM solution. We have tested Hyper V and Esxi (free) and we like the Esxi.
However, we cannot afford the costs associated with running esxi and the tools. Can we just use esxi and all the free tools availabe to manage our infrastructure? What tools are needed in a VM environment and can we get these tools for free? It appears most of the tools are free, as we do not need to have High Available or clustering. We are only going to have 1 VM server with 3 hosts.
Any thoughts on using Esxi and free tools or going with Hyper V?
Sorry for the newbie questions, as we are just starting the entire learning process.
thanks