Official vendor support for an operating system contributes highly to the visibility of a system. Therefore it is very encouraging to see that VMWare is planning to support CentOS as a guest and host(?) system in its upcoming VMWare Workstation 6.5 product. Kudos go out to VMWare for planning to support CentOS, as well as releasing guest OS tools under a free software license.

Of course, we would love to see more vendors supporting CentOS. And given the fact that we try to be fully binary compatible with our upstream vendor, it should not require retraining of support personnel or much additional effort. It's surprising to see that some vendors do not support CentOS even when their infrastructure or developers rely on CentOS. Of course, many vendors will create their offerings based on customer demand. So, don't hesitate to speak up, and ask your software vendor to support CentOS. Maybe even drop a few lines on why you prefer CentOS over the operating systems that they do support (such as stability, long term support, etc.). Finally, let the community know if a major products starts supporting CentOS, other people may have been waiting for support as well (and as a kind "thank you" to that particular company).