VMware adopts cloud-first-for-new-features vSphere update plan

Future releases of vSphere will include features that have previously debuted in VMware's cloud, vCloud Air. So says Joe Baguley, a Virtzilla veep from the office of the Chief Technology Officer, who spoke to The Reg in Sydney today. VMware's thinking is that there's no bigger and uglier vSphere use case than its own cloud, …

[Nate Amsden]

ram failure not an issue

ram failure hasn't been an issue for a long time if you use the right hardware(no doesn't have to be mainframe or other "big iron")

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/c-products/servers/options/c00256943.pdf

"To improve memory protection beyond standard ECC, HP introduced Advanced ECC technology in

1996." [..]

Online spare memory, memory mirroring.. quite a few companies offer this kind of tech, though HP seems by far the most advanced and mature in my experience (tried it with Dell a few years ago and it required disabling something like half the DIMM slots just for Advanced ECC).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ram failure not an issue

Ram failure still exists in the DELL PowerEdge world, just had an ESXi host taken out with an unrecoverable memory error (12month old server)

[Trevor_Pott]

Re: ram failure not an issue

I have RAM mirroring and online spare in my Supermicro gear. Have for some time. I expect that since this is a feature o the Intel chipsets now it will be in Dell gear, Lenovo fear, Intel gear, etc.

There's nothing special about HP except the high prices and shitty support.

[MC]

Extraordinary reliability?

"VMware believes it has a reputation for extraordinary reliability that it simply can't afford to lose"

For the last couple of years, it would seem VMware have been trying really hard to loose this reputation. I've lost count of the serious bugs....are we on 6.0z yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

vCloud reliability? Not yet.

I signed up for vCloud as a side result of buying Fusion for the Mac - you get lots of free vCloud funny money, so why not sign up and see what it's about? Be sure to sign up for notifications if you do. It's a real eye-opener.

In the two months I've been signed up (with nothing running in vCloud) the number of incidents when the portal isn't available, sometimes for many, many hours at a time, is appalling. And I'm not talking about scheduled downtime - there's plenty of that - I'm talking about unscheduled outages. There was one recently where you couldn't assign public IPs to VMs for hours. Haven't seen one yet that's taken down running VMs, but if you can't manage your environment I'm not sure that's much better.

I run active VMs in AWS and the number of outages there, while spectacular when they do occur, is a tiny fraction of what I'm seeing with vCloud. I don't doubt VMware will get better at this, but right now vCloud feels like a beta that's been released into production, with a lot of serous bugs that still need to be fixed.