VMware CEO Paul Maritz goes on the offensive against Microsoft Hyper-V by announcing its embedded hypervisor product, ESXi, will be free. After announcing the company’s 2008 second quarter financials on today’s conference call, VMware’s new CEO Paul Maritz announced changes to VMware’s core business. VMware is going to launch a free version of its embedded hypervisor technology, ESXi. And Paul Maritz plans to bring VMware’s technology further into the cloud computing world while attempting to reach out to the SMB market.During today’s financial call, Maritz said that later this month, ESXi will be available at no cost. The 32MB footprint virtualization hypervisor technology is part of the company’s plan to make its virtualization technology as freely available as possible to everyone in the industry. Maritz believes this approach will help bring more customers into VMware’s camp. Maritz, a former Microsoft executive himself, said on the call that Microsoft is a formidable competitor, but not invincible. “I know that Microsoft can afford to play a long waiting game,” he said. Maritz then added that in a market where another company already has a sizable lead, much like VMware does with virtualization, it can be very difficult to catch up, even for Microsoft.This latest move of making ESXi free to the masses comes a few short weeks after Microsoft released its own “free” hypervisor technology, Hyper-V. And with it, it looked like Microsoft was going to attack the SMB market right under VMware’s nose.Maritz said that VMware needed to reach out to SMBs and bring more virtualization products into that part of the market, and a free ESXi hypervisor is definitely on the right track. Watch during VMworld 2008 as Maritz is sure to continue down this path by unfolding his cloud computing infrastructure plans.As a side note, VMware also said that it has plans to reimburse companies that paid for ESXi in July before today’s announcement. Software Development