VMWare Tools for FreeBSD

[Shawn Barnhart]

David Robillard wrote:
>> Basically the only reason I have for using VM Tools is for the ability
>> of Vmotion and such with our ESX Server farm. It's really the only
>> benefit that the VM tools will give me on FreeBSD as all my virtual
>> machines which are running FreeBSD are servers and don't use any GUI's
>> either.
>>
>> Currently there is nothing that doesn't run correctly under VMWare and I
>> have not seen any lack of performance or anything compared to a physical
>> machine. Maybe if enough of us push to have the VMWare Tools developed
>> and certified for use with VMWare that they might actually get started.
>>
>> I might develop some sort of E-Petition for it, what you think?
> 
> Why not? I'm in the exact same position as you are with ESX & FreeBSD.
> Hence I'd love to have VMWare Tools developed and certified for use
> with FreeBSD. Actually, I'd really like to see VMWare Server and
> Player certified for FreeBSD i386 and amd64.

VMWare is great stuff, I use and support all of it, but as a company they have 
a bit of Fortune 500 tunnel vision.  Their pricing is geared towards nickel 
and diming large enterprises and their software support is geared too much 
towards Windows.

Hyper-V will cut deeply into their market and they might regret being too 
MS-centered.  I already have potential customers asking "Gee, what about 
Hyper-V.  It's a lot cheaper than ESX and we don't really care about non-MS..."

Pricing ESX enterprise (with all the bells & whistles, including vmotion, 
virtual center, HA, etc) at around US$500 per node and providing better 
support for FreeBSD and other alternative OSes would go a LONG way towards 
long-term competitiveness.