VMware Upgrade Policy Disappoints
Posted on October 28, 2009
3 Comments
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).
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I was a bit miffed by it too. I’m trying to decide if the new features are worth $99 or if I’ll pass on it.
I figure I’ll install the 30 day trial and see if anything seems compelling.
I tried to install just the new VMware Player but the installer wanted me to uninstall Workstation first..