VMware provides a loyal licensing policy. You can start diving into the wonderful world of hardware virtualization with free VMware ESXi, also called VMware vSphere Hypervisor, according to the VMware licensing terms. Free VMware ESXi can be considered a nice solution for small companies such as small shops and self-employed people, as well as for testing or learning purposes. The ability to use unlimited hardware resources (CPUs, CPU cores, RAM) allows you to run a high number of VMs on the free ESXi host with the limitation of 8 virtual processors per VM (one physical processor core can be used as a virtual CPU).