Vyatta - Free alternative to Cisco, Juniper, etc.

Vyatta is a high-end, open source software that installs on your own hardware and provides standard WAN (wide area network) routing protocols such as RIP (Routing Information Protocol), OSPFv2 (Open Shortest Path First version 2), and BGPv4 (Border Gateway Protocol version 4). It also includes intranet networking protocols such as DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), VRRP and SNMP. Vyatta Community edition is free to use and can be downloaded from here. Vyatta is available as a standalone installation, as a VMWare Virtual appliance, and as a Citrix Xenserver Image. Get to know more about Vyatta.

Amahi Home Server - Best free alternative to Windows Home Server

Want to backup your home desktops, centrally share your music, videos and important files, and do much more? Amahi is your answer. Amahi is open source and free to use. Install it on an old pc or laptop with enough harddisk space and get going. Why spend $100 on Windows Home Server software when you can do all the same and more with Amahi Home Server?

Here are some of the important features that are available to you from Amahi:

• Easy backups of your PCs - protect your valuable data
  
• Audio Streaming
• Networking - DDNS, NAS, Web Server and more...
  
• VPN - Connect to your network and your home PCs from anywhere you have internet connectivity, securely
• File Sharing
• Calendars - see what every family member has planned for the week
• Disk Monitoring

and much more.

Get Amahi and get started!

Best free bare metal virtualization software

Bare metal virtualization software runs directly on the host's hardware as a hardware control and guest operating system monitor. You don't need an OS to run on the host hardware. This software is great for running multiple OS environments on a single physical host. You can consolidate your data center by cutting down on the number of physical machines and conserve energy. Get with the green program folks!

I looked at 3 of the free bare metal hypervisors in the market:

• VMWare ESXi
• Citrix Xenserver
• Oracle VM

VMWare ESXi does not give you centralized management abilities for free. You need to purchase additional tools from VMWare to get this ability. Citrix and Oracle provide centralized management and many other features that are not available with VMWare for free. Oracle is still not very popular in the baremetal hypervisor market and needs to gain a lot of ground.

I personally found Citrix Xenserver to be the best among the available baremetal hypervisors for the following reasons:

1. A wide array of features required to run your servers available free of cost.
2. Max support of 8 virtual CPUs vs. only 4 for ESXi
   
3. Better hardware support for SATA harddrives out of the box [ESXi only supports SAS/SCSI - you need to hack it to make it work with SATA].

It remains to be seen how long VMWare will sit back and let Citrix gain some ground before leveling the playing field by introducing free features in their product.

There are some hardware requirements for these hypervisors. You need to have 64 bit CPUs that support either the Intel-VT or AMD-V hardware virtualization technology. There is also a very limited subset of hardware that these hypervisors are certified with. Make sure to check these requirements before making the jump into bare metal virtualization. The alternative is to go with a hosted hypervisor [a.k.a Type 2 hypervisor] such as Sun's Virtualbox, VMWare Server, or Microsoft VirtualServer.