VMWare 182 days of free cloud based training
Get those IT skills! I recently used VMWare to virtualize part of my training lab hardware, and am using a “retired” laptop to act as 2 workstations. Slow, yes, but ‘free’ and allows us to conduct soem VCT (virtual classroom training) as opposed to having the students hook up their laptops to 2 different basebands (cell phone tower processors)
VMWare is really good if you pay for it ($200/yr) for VMUG or if you steal it (there’s supposedly a keygen for 6.X) or if you use the free version (you can’t clone VMs or migrate between hosts easily or do backups)
BUT
Proxmox (free, open source, has a pay option for support if you want to use it in the enterprise) has gotten really good lately, and I’d highly recommend it if the above doesn’t suite you. I was a VMUG member for a few years, and didn’t mind paying for VMWare but their new licensing scheme and them dropping hardware support, I don’t plan on renewing VMUG or upgrading from 6.5 before I finish migrating to Proxmox.
Also, Proxmox has integrated ZFS support!