I’m too low on the food chain to get wooed by vendors very often, so when I saw that VMWare was coming to campus and that lunch would be provided, I jumped all over that.  Not only did I get lunch, but I also got breakfast, a USB mouse (with retractable cord!), and a notepad complete with biodegradable pen!  Well that’s great and all, but what’s even better is the knowledge they gave me.

I’ve used VMWare’s desktopy products: Player, Workstation, and Server.  Useful products, especially Server because it’s free.  I only have a few servers in my department, so I don’t have need for enterprise products.  A few test VMs to play with are all I really need — or so I thought.  After seeing the power of ESX, I’m starting to reconsider.  With VMWare ESX, I could combine pretty much everything onto two beefy servers and never have to worry about hardware problems.  If I have a hardware problem, I’ll just let ESX’s High Availability services take care of it.

Of course, it would be hard to justify the hardware expenses — I can’t even convince my boss to pony up the 2k to pay for my Solaris training.  If I could start from scratch, though, that would be the way to go.  Also, I like getting free stuff.