hdtvguy wrote:
My experience with vmware is while their virtualization product features are very stable and mature, many of their other features and and product are not. They also seem to think they are a small startup that can change on a dime like no enterprises are using their products yet. Every release of vsphere HBR has made fundamental changes to how it works, often having negative impact on how we use it and the impact it has to us. So much so that we will not use it going forward.
There are not a lot of companies that truly understand how to build and market real Enterprise grade products. That does not mean many companies can't do it, they just have lower standards for measuring impact. It also depends what the target customer demo is, smaller customers can often be more nimble, bigger companies often can not. This is part of my 3par issues, their heritage is niche/start-up like and HP is still working to get them in the real Enterprise way of thinking. The product managers I have dealt with get it, but many legacy 3par folks do not.
Back to vmware, I have very little confidence in vmware's software define storage apps due to the number of QA issues I have seen from them that have had direct impact to my environment. It could also be that I am old bastard, but I will stay old school where possible, dedicate storage even for my smaller locations. Additionally vmware loves to change license models that create more revenue for them, look at recent ROBO license changes (BTW third change in less than 2 years) that in some cases mean a 4X increase in cost. one day you are locked into them the next day they change the license and start charging you per TB or something and your costs go up.
I am sure there are valid use cases for SDS, but for me I will let the dust settle.
Agreed on the VMware stuff. They love to change things. Look at what they've done with SSO. three major changes in the last three versions. And the changes coming in vsphere 6 put me against best practices. Reason? I have two sites with SSO in each, but SSO resides on vcenter. When I upgrade to vsphere 6, vcenter will configure the new PBC or whatever they call it to match my SSO configuration (which is a quite normal configuration). But the best practice says that for multiple sites you should separate out the controller.
Thanks VMware. Make a change, and provide literally no migration path to stay within your recommended best practices.