Ray,
Relying on the good nature of volunteers is not a good plan though.
Seems that is working well for them for 15+ years.
Why burn money when someone helps out for free 
Joking aside, they had some of their support staff helping out on the forums a year or so ago.
But to be honest I wasn't impressed by their answers. A lot of the volunteers gave better answers than they did.
What they are doing now for the forums is to encourage some of their technical staff -who work on the core product and have deep knowledge- to help out. I doubt that they get compensated for that, but hopefully they can do so in working time. There's some _really_ good advice and troubleshooting in there.
They regularly pick up some of the more difficult topics.
It certainly has been worse.
TS: If at all possible then post your question here. Quite a few of the issues get resolved via help from either volunteers or VMware employees helping out.
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Wil
