VMware Upgrade Policy Disappoints

I’m miffed. Darned close to full snit, actually.

A month and a half ago I bought VMware Workstation 6.5. The sale was just too good to pass up and I had a 30 day trial winding down. The timing was perfect and I was glad to make the purchase.

Shortly after that I ran into a bug. Seems that some combinations of 64-bit windows (Vista and Win7) and video cards break VMware’s Unity mode. I was fine with 32-bit Windows 7, but I reloaded 64-bit and lost it. VMware didn’t seem interested in acknowledging the issue… but it wasn’t a show stopper for me and I tabled it to be tackled later.

The new version of Workstation was announced this week. A lot of the new features look interesting and I’d love to think that the Unity issue is resolved. Unfortunately, it’ll cost me $99 to find out.

See, if I had bought VMware Workstation 6.5 in October, I could now just wait a couple weeks and get a free upgrade. But since I bought it during their big sale a few weeks earlier – when surely they new a new version was coming soon – I’m hosed.

That just feels a bit cheesy, doesn’t it? Clever marketing and all… I mean, if I buy the upgrade then I might’ve well skipped the sale and just bought version 7 for full price. But it was the sale that helped convince me to buy. Ugh. Not happy at all.

There are options, of course.

For instance, I see the free VMware Player was also updated with what appear to be many of the same bells & whistles. Couple that with the free VMware Server (release notes) and you’re well on the way to what VMware Workstation offers and it is still easy to work with ESX / ESXi (unlike a complete switch to VirtualBox or KVM for example).

Possibly Related posts:

1. VMware Desktop Sale
2. VMware Player is more than a Player
3. Quick Look at VMware Player 2.50
4. VMware Beta and Direct Launch
5. Lost My Unity