VirtualCenter Quality
So Bob @ lonesysadmin.net and Scott Lowe are not so happy with the quality of VC2.5. They are unhappy with performance, reliability (unpredictable errors), and incomplete features.
I’m not sure when anyone decided that VMware’s management tools were all that great. In fact they have always been pretty crappy. Think how many times you have typed “service mgmt-vmware restart”. But I know that both these guys have worked with VMware stuff long enough to remember how far we have come, so I think this is more venting than anything.
If I have to vent anything personally, I’m not a big fan of shipping beta experimental code. Either you ship and support it, or don’t ship it at all. This isn’t a free web 2.0 service, this stuff costs a premium. I’m not here to test it for you.
Also, I think that VMware should get the point. While reliability for the virtual machines is first and foremost, expections are higher now. Mass adoption in the datacenter requires reliable easy to use management tools. Engineers need to hand off to operations. Your typical customer is the engineer who can deal with the problems. You also need to think of the operations departments.