Wil van Antwerpen recently collected and published a number of evidences that may prove VMware has no plans to continue the development of VMware Server, once called GSX Server.
One is that the security advice VMSA-2010-0007 includes the following warning:
End of General Support for VMware Server 2.0 is 2011-06-30, users should plan to upgrade to the newest release of either ESXi or VMware Player.
The last version of Server released has been 2.0.2, out more than one year ago, but the 2.0 major update came out in October 2008.
During this time frame, apparently, VMware didn’t fix a number of issues (like VMSA-2009-0016 and VMSA-2010-0005) despite the customers support agreements in place.
The history of Server has been rather complex since the early days. The company first released it as an expensive little brother of ESX. Then it released for free, progressively reducing the R&D investment on it. Finally, regardless of some significant features to win the SMB market, VMware completely cut the marketing budget for it to the point that it’ really surprising customers are still talking about the free platform.
Early signs of a lack of commitment can be tracked back to November 2007, when VMware released the first beta of Server 2.0 without introducing any significant new feature.
As van Antwerpen said, this will give the opportunity to Oracle to push even more its free alternative VirtualBox, which is adding remarkable new features at an impressive pace.
If confirmed, this will second product VMware discontinues since its launch. The other one is Stage Manager.