I was hoping over the past 12 months that this decision would be reversed.
My final rant, this is a ridiculous decision that is only justified with an internal VMware company view, namely the amount of effort required to address core code issues that have been allowed to grow more and more rotten over time.
For me, this marks the exit from using VMWare technology for virtualisation after using it from the very very early days and paying for VMware Workstation and Fusion licenses for multiple machines over the years.
Looking forward, it turns out for me a slight re-think of my approach and HyperV turns out to be a far better solution anyhow from a windows stand-point. This experience has left me questioning the future of the workstation virtualisation products from VMware, so for my Mac environments I will be moving to Parallels during the next upgrade cycle, they appear to move faster and have far more respect for their users.
My hope is that for those remaining with VMware, that the product management team and management of the newly separated company, might re-look at decisions like the removal of auto-start/shared VMs with new eyes and do the right thing by users who use such features extensively.
Finally, thanks to VMware for the last decade plus of stability on some key infrastructure in my personal and professional life.
