I have always kicked myself for missing that meeting as although I have used VMware for a very long time I have not spent a lot of time looking at alternatives.
Yes, it was a shame you weren't there (see below).
I am interested though as to why there was no mention of the VMware p2v converters in the product comparison.
I guess you're looking for a more complicated reason than I didn't know of their existence? :) If you'd been there we could have discussed a use case I hadn't been thinking about!
I would say that this is one of the most significant advantages VMware has over the (free) competition and is something that even MS Virtual Server can't do without 3rd party help. Also it is worth mention if only because of it's cleverness.
Looking into it now, it looks like it has been replaced by the freeware VMware Converter Starter tool.
Did you feel that converting physical Windows machines to Virtual ones was beyond the scope of the demonstration or perhaps more suited to another evening ?
Not at all, it's just not a use case I've ever really had and, to be honest, I had no idea there was a specific tool to clone an active system!
That said, given that I assume the resulting virtual machine would take up as much disk space as the original system, I can't see I would be using it much - I don't have that much disk space to spare!
Certainly it would be fiddly to convert an active system to VirtualBox. In fact, probably the easiest solution might be to use the VMware Converter Starter tool to get to a .VMX and then convert that to VirtualBox's format - there is information on how to do that on the VirtualBox site, though the process doesn't look brilliantly user-friendly.
I did try to pull out that one of VMware's greatest strengths was the defacto standard of the .VMX virtual machines, as well as the ability to import MS Virtual Server formats.
Basically, I concluded that VirtualBox edges it overall, for personal use, (the seamless Windows feature - demo'd at October's meet - is fantastic) and is mostly GPL too but that if you need to collaborate with lots of other people or have to distribute your machines, then it's worth considering VMware Player. It's just so time consuming and bandwidth hungry to have to rely on sites like EasyVMX to get a blank machine, tho ...
Peter.