I usually try not to write too much about what other people are blogging about -- especially when some of the "people" are actually vendors. Bloggers commenting on each other can create a good discussion, but writing about what other people are writing about what other people are writing about gets you through the looking glass into WhoCaresLand pretty quickly, and I have a pretty short attention span anyway and -- hey, look, a bird!

Anyway, last week I dinged VMware for waiting so long to announce it had joined Microsoft's Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) -- which is designed to help virtualization vendors tweak their products to support Windows Server as the OS in a virtual machine.

Then I quit paying close attention to the virtualization news cycle and went off to cover a military IT conference for a couple of days. (Military IT people are exactly like civilian IT people, by the way, except they dress neater, call everyone 'sir,' and are way less excited than they should be that some of the systems they work on eventually blow up. You probably already know this, of course, because a huge number of civilian IT people used to be military IT people. I'm just letting you know not much has changed. Except that joke about the two Navy lieutenants. That one's a lot funnier now.)

I only mentioned it in the context of a piece on a Microsoft licensing change that's likely to have a much bigger impact (though not as big an impact as it should have) on customers. I didn't realize how big a stir it would create, but there has been a ton of discussion about how great it is that VMware's finally on board and how smart it is to do it, and how it should have signed on a long time ago.

This guy, by the way, gets the Best Timing award for a blog specifically dated the same day as the announcement specifically criticizing VMware for not joining SVVP and explaining why it should. This isn't a criticism of his timing; it's an indication that VMware waited way too long to admit the obvious-that it was going to have to join SVVP and get certified no matter how many showers it had to take afterward.

Since Windows Server runs just fine on top of ESX I kind of doubt VMware engineers ignored the whole issue until the paper was signed. Given the number of Windows servers that have been or can be virtualized, I doubt anyone at VMware ever seriously considered not supporting it as seamlessly as possible in all VMware's products. They might not want to support virtual machines running on Hyper-V, but there's no way to avoid Windows Server.

Getting certified can only

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