2015 was VMware's Year of Living Dangerously

Server virtualisation just works, so most IT shops do it. And in the decade since it rose to prominence VMware has ruled the roost. But 2015 was VMware's year of living dangerously. At first glance, things look fine for Virtzilla: vSphere 6.0 emerged to applause and swift adoption. Dollars rolled in through the door. A …

[TaabuTheCat]

Customers were the ones in danger

"vSphere 6.0 emerged to applause and swift adoption." Followed by a lot of regret.

vSphere 6 has arguably been the buggiest release of vSphere ever, and still had serious data corruption and stability issues nine months after release. VMware needs to get the "Q" back in QC in 2016.

[CheesyTheClown]

Where's the solution?

Let's be honest... all the competitors of VMware are fighting like banchies to provide data center solutions instead of bits and pieces.

So long as VSphere Client and Web Client are the primary tool for management of VMware and those tools are constantly lagging behind, there will be no success for VMware.

Hyper-V, OpenStack and Nutanix all offer end to end solutions. Hyper-V is longer the bastard buggy step-child. It's a solid and tested product that integrated with Azure Pack is amazing at the least. VMware is a massive pile of tools which are often incompatible with each other. Their virtual SAN solution is pretty old school.

I was a VCP and have the course requirement to cert up for version 6. I also was offered a spot to become a VCI and in short, I just didn't bother wasting my time. I just don't see a future in it. If you need my reason for it, the latest VCP requirements don't require any application design or even scripting or orchestration. VCP means you can click your way around VSphere client. Why would I waste my time with such ancient nonsense?

[itzman]

Re:fighting like banchies? was Where's the solution?

WTF are banchies?

[Hairy Airey]

Re: Re:fighting like banchies? was Where's the solution?

I suspect he means banshees - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banshee

Shame that speling is so atrocious in IT.

[Rusty 1]

Re: Re:fighting like banchies? was Where's the solution?

Damnation. There I was hoping it meant "branchies" and that there was a whole new line of configuration-management based terror and insurgence that I was previously unaware of. Damn again.

[jklincewicz]

Re: Re:fighting like banchies? was Where's the solution?

I believe Banshees scream and wail...but not fight...

[Hans 1]

Re: Where's the solution?

I keep hearing here that vmware has good management tools ... I have used vcenter fat client, the ui is atrocious! The web app is worse, it wants some "Adobe Flash" thingy, no idea what that is. Ok, it is 5.1, maybe time to upgrade to 6, but if the comment@rd above is to be believed, I guess I will have to wait for 6 to stabilize ...

Gimme puppet, ansible, or vagrant over vcenter .... anytime, in combination with your hypervisor of choice, even VirtualBox headless ...

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare still hasn't given up on licensing RAM by the GB.

We were going to use VMWare for some cloud-driven applications and were surprised to learn that VMWare is using the much maligned $/GB pricing model there (more or less anything you host on your own servers that delivers applications to third parties) and it was absolutely #$!@ing ludicrously expensive - we pretty much scrapped them from our plans at that point. I do like a lot of things about VMWare, but their product is becoming commoditized and while they do continue to add additional value in new releases they seem to be more focused on squeezing their customers hard where they can. Many of the extra features are nice, but we just don't need them that badly. We can make do with HyperV or open-sourced Xen for the difference in price. VMWare will probably do a Netscape-level implosion in the next few years - everything will have a hypervisor built-in (even OpenBSD is doing one for crying out loud), open-source management tools are getting better, and in a lot of cases the super-premium money just won't be there. Hopefully Dell will turn them around.

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware in 2015

Jump the Shark for VMware in 2015