Since a few weeks I experienced a nasty bug in VMware 2.0. All my virtual machines starting up for 95% and than stay that way. They run, but thats all. No possibility of managing the VMs through the webinterface, no VM Console and no information in the management interface. The VM stays in a eternal starting up mode. I read another thread about this subject, and I think its urgency is downplayed by VMWare, altough many users are facing this problem, which exists for some time now. I always fully trusted the quality of released VMware software, up till now. After some investigation to the problem I believe this VMWare server version is in reality still beta. After some research with a tool like process monitor (Sysinternals), i discovered a lot of unsuccesfull calls to the registry and filesystem. Also the eventviewer shows some authentication problems.
At the company I work for, I always advertised the use of VMware up to the point that a major part of the servers is now hosted in a ESX environment. I could do this because of the quality of the GSX product and its low cost price. If VMware thinks that it can skip quality because VMware Server is a free product now, they are wrong. It will only make people explore other virtualization products quicker. I, for example, will start a Windows 2008 Hyper-V environment up from this weekend to get my test environment back up and runnning without the risk of loosing it again. I know, less functionality, but beter that then lots of functionality lost to bugs.
A disapointed VMware fan.