They do though. A few years back we had a patch room next to our office and in one corner was this really ancient tower case. We took the side off once and it was something like a pentium DX4. Then someone suggested turning it off to see what happened. Before anybody could object one brave soul pulled it's kettle lead out. Later that day, a bloke wandered up to ask what had happened to his database. Apparently it was something to do with reporting for a national tax system. It had been running 24x7 for the last 11 years. It all recovered fine and it's probably still going.

Edit: I mean a 486 DX4 of course. Actually can't remember, might have been something else, but it was very old and very dusty.

Yeah I don't have much call for VMs these days but if I do I use Qemu. (And virt-manager for ... managing them).

I installed Qt-based AQemu for management, then discovered the best man page you've ever seen... :/

:D

I mean... it's accurate!

I'm still on VMWare Workstation - it's definitely findable, I only got the latest version a few weeks ago.

This is something that's actually improved, because I had to buy it before. 

Yeah, me too. It seems they forgot that they are a major international company for a few weeks. If they have good intentions then it's sadly masked by poor execution. I went to a third party file download site, grabbed a copy and everything worked fine after that. 

Just got bit in the ass when I ran a backup and clean out of my virtualbox directories, scrupulously not deleting and/or altering in any way machines currently in use. After performing this virtuous act, I test booted my main machine. It didn't. Now approaching blind panic, I tried to figure out what I may have mistakenly deleted/moved. Nope, all present and accounted for. wtf? Finally I reimported the attached vdi's from the exact same location into virtualbox manager, and lo and behold, it booted.