Over at Plan­etVM Wil van Antwer­pen posted The Future of VMware Server back in May 2010. Wil makes the argu­ment that it seems like VMware is indeed aban­don­ing VMware Server as a prod­uct, leav­ing us with VMware Work­sta­tion and VMware Player as the two Win­dows instal­lable vir­tu­al­iza­tion solu­tions from the company.

This has caused some reac­tions, includ­ing my own com­ment, where I ques­tion the smart­ness of aban­don­ing what might just be one of the best vir­tu­al­iza­tion “gate­way drugs” VMware has to offer.

In my opin­ion, aban­don­ing VMware Server would be a bad move, but re-reading the doc­u­men­ta­tion from VMware and think­ing more about the con­se­quences this might have made me real­ize something;

What if VMware is work­ing on a replace­ment prod­uct or man­age­ment solution?

I seri­ously doubt VMware would want to aban­don the use case that VMware Server has, even if they do indeed aban­don the VMware Server prod­uct itself. I don’t have any inside knowl­edge about this, but lets say that VMware is work­ing on a man­age­ment frame­work for VMware Player?

Some­thing that you can install, in addi­tion to VMware Player, that lets you set auto-start para­me­ters for VMs, let them run head­less and remotely man­age them? Wouldn’t that pretty much allow us to do the same with VMware Player, that we today use VMware Server for?

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EDB ErgoGroup specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.