I just received an email from VMWare:
Hi Steve —
Thanks for pointing out the Auditing term in the ESXi license.
We usually sell our enterprise products with “Support and Subscription” (SnS). This entitles you to both support and product updates for a period of time.
As the license is written, if there is no fee involved for the product (which there isn’t in the free ESXi) or if you haven’t purchased support (i.e., there is no SnS), then the auditing provision doesn’t apply.
I realize it looks crazy and I’ve forwarded your thoughts internally here at VMware. I hope we can come up with something a bit more human-readable, especially for the free version.
Your readers might also be interested in our new PowerShell toolkit
http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/
and some of our resources on running Microsoft apps on VMware.
http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-infrastructure-apps/microsoft.html
Don’t hestitate to drop me a line if I can be of assistance!
Regards,
John Troyer
Vmware Communities
http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/
Very refreshing to hear this. After looking through the license again I see what he means. Hopefully the free license will be updated to be more clear about it.
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