Next Monday, VMware's ESXi hardware-integrated hypervisor goes from a list price of $495 to nothing, in a move apparently calculated to strike a blow against Microsoft's recently released competing Hyper-V hypervisor.

This deal, announced in the company's Q2 earnings report webcast, comes on the heels of some turmoil at the industry-leader. It appears to be an offering from new CEO Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft executive, indicating that VMWare is willing to play hardball to hang on to its substantial lead in the virtualization market.

The deal may not be quite as good as it sounds; ESXi is essentially a lightweight version of the company's more widespread ESX hypervisor, but what makes it lightweight is the absence of the VirtualCenter Server agent, which simplifies management and only comes with the Infrastructure editions. ESXi is designed for single-server partitioning, which isn't of much interest in most enterprises. The idea, however, is both to counter Microsoft's $28 price point on Hyper-V (itself attempting to undercut VMware in pricing) and to give potential customers a "first taste is free" preview of the technology which will hopefully lead to revenue-generating upgrades to ESX-based VMware infrastructure solutions. The company has had success with such approaches before, offering its rudimentary vmware server and VMWare Player products for free.

More information from the webcast can be found in this Information Week article.