One of the first things you notice in VMware releases are the experiemental features. They’re usually cool and cutting edge, but just what does experiemental mean? Well, a couple weeks back, I attended a customer focused seminar at HP in Colorado Springs. One of the folks responsible for cultivating the relationship with HP from VMware spoke and explained a little more about this experimental tag.
Experimental to VMware means basically that they have done all the research and development for the feature in the product and the features is fully functional. What has not been completed is complete quality and assurances testing on the feature and how it interacts with other functionality or hardware.
This is one of the cool things about VMware and I agree with another speaker who pointed out that it shows VMware is a tech centered company. By introducing these features into the golden master release, they get thousands of hands on the functionality, lots of feedback and it is just experimentally supported – so they don’t recommend it for production environments. But, its a good compromise from a commercial entity with an open-source (release early, release often) mentality.
