There's supposed to be a 90-day evaluation license
available during the contest; we want everyone to be
able to participate in the contest without having to
pay for Workstation even if they're not already a
customer, and I'm pretty convinced that Workstation
is the best tool for creating VMs for the contest
(Server is great and all, but it's in beta, and
Workstation is in stable release, plus the snapshot
support in Workstation is probably more useful for
the contest than the remote management support in
Server).
Agreed on all counts. Workstation is definitely the best tool for the job, and a 90-day eval would be great. I just didn't realize that we had modified our standard eval period for the contest; it looks to me like the contest page points people to the standard Workstation eval page, which still claims 30 days is the eval period.
We should look into this internally.