I realize this is somewhat old news now but since I just got bit by it I'm particularly disturbed by Micrsosfts suppprt policy conecerning VM Ware based guests. I find their policy that they will support them if you are a premier support customer a little amusing. This means they do have some staff who is using VM Ware based technology, but they are choosing to save money but not fully documenting what that group is doing. It's also another obvios attempt to lock down the market and maintain a vitual monopoly by mafia like tactics as opposed to spend half the money they spend on Marketing and Lawyers on actually making a solid and supportable line of products. The other reason for the policy is simply to duck having to deal with admitting to or helping reolve bugs in their products due to unpredictable virtualization products. I challenge anyone from MS to look me in the face and tell me that having 5 servers all running on VM Ware or any other virtualization platform which present a consistent hardware configuration is somehow less stable or predictable than 5 servers or workstations from a whitebox vendor or even Dell or HP if they have chaged their product line between when those 5 servers were purchased.
I call shenangans on MS and I say we fight back on this one. But not tyring to get them to change their policy lets just invalidate it. How exactly can they tell that our servers are running vmware? Well either we tell them, or with their latest support tools they pull a dump of multiple pieces of system information and we have to email those dumps back. So I propose one of the two solutions, change the hardware descriptions in the guest OS from vmware or create a utlity that will poll the dump files and edit them before they get sent back to MS support.