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The first version of VMWare server was great

Then apparently version 2.0 was handed for the Java and XML fetichists to be developed and it was a huge bloated mess. It worked, but badly.

It looked like they knew what they were doing at first, but today we have virtualization services built into the processors and in the OS, making things easier

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The founders (who were married) left the company, the staff went to other startups: there's a few at ElasticBox and some went to Microsoft IIRC.

They 'won' virtualisation, but then virtualisation changed to 'cloud' and they never hung on.

If you mean VMware Server, the GSX replacement, and not the ESX products, then oh boy do I have stories to tell :) I was one of the, hmm, 5 or 6 people who threw that together in a span of months. It was more of a mess than it appeared, under the hood :) We called it the Frankenstein Project.

But it worked, and it worked well. More a testament to the infrastructure we had built for Workstation, and our team's ability to work hard and work well together.

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