VMware flushes Adobe Flash in new HTML 5 web client for vSphere vAdmins are having a great March: first VMware released vSphere 6.o update 2, with a new HTML 5 host management interface. And now it's released an HTML 5 interface for vCenter. The new client is a “Fling”, VMware's name for unsupported and don't-run-this-in-production-grade code it thinks vAdmins will appreciate. Flings are …
"The decision to go with Flash was made years ago, before HTML5 and developer tools were ready. "
Nonsense. We were all baffled a couple of years ago when they decided Flash was the future. At the time they made this move every other company and individual in the industry was dropping flash. VMware are so far from having their finger on the pulse it's sad. Almost as sad as the way they keep trying to push pointless products on their loyal customers. No, we don't need or want NSX/VSAN/VCAC, just the hypervisor will do fine. Version 3 was fine. Everything since then has been an effort to justify an unsustainable price and "growth" in the company. This is leading inevitably to VMware imploding and disappearing in the next few years since they lack a strategy for the public cloud era. Even the bookshop has a strategy for that!!
VMware is definitely feeling some heat. They did after all lay off their entire US dev team for Fusion and Workstation earlier in the year (to outsource?). Kinda sad considering how good of a product VMware Workstation is. It's one of the few applications that I've been consistently installing every single time I upgrade my PC both at home and at work.
workstation has been a pretty mature product for a decade or more. The only reason for upgrades for me is so it works on newer guest and host OSs, which doesn't seem to be that much work.
I keep an archive of most of my vmware workstation versions just to see how it's grown over time, my oldest one:
9.3M Nov 4 2001 VMwareWorkstation-3.0.0-1455.tar.gz
and before that I guess it wasn't called workstation yet
5.9M Jan 12 2001 VMware-2.0.3-799.tar.gz
The latest version of workstation 12 pro for linux is 355MB (build 3,272,444)
more than 3.2 million builds of workstation between 2.0.3 and 12 pro.
The only reason I upgraded to 12 pro from 10 was it was a good sale, black friday I think it was(saw the link to it on el reg).
(vmware customer since 1999, though I seem to have misplaced my vmware 1.0.2 for linux CD at this point, makes me want to go look for it again now...)
You're on crack if you think Vmware ESX 3.x and its feature set would suffice in the enterprise today.
There have been so many improvements in 4, and 5 to make the product scale'able, and handle larger and larger workloads, etc. Not to mention compatibility with newer apps and OS's. I guess for an SMB, a stripped down "entry-level," hypervisor would be an interesting sell... But then who wants to maintain two code bases?
Add to that, Flash (which was established back then) and HTML5 which was ONLY ratified in what the last two years?... Who can move that fast to build a new UI, change the entire ship's course with that? While also building in new features.
SDN, SDDC, and automation are rather large initiatives in many orgs, small, medium and uber large. NSX, VSAN, VCAC are available to follow roadmaps of the customers, as well as the market (for their own greedy valuations) Not sure if you ever worked for a manufacturer.... But large customers drive roadmaps. If a UPS, or AMEX wants X feature, and will commit to buying 10's of millions of dollars of VMware licenses over Y amount of years, Damn straight VMware will find a way to put it in. I'm pretty sure those companies are not looking to implement Windows 2000/2k3 with less than 8GB of RAM on smaller than 2TB workloads.
I don't disagree with their lack of cloud strategy. But they keep saying it's coming... With EMC still controlling some aspects, you really think that will change anytime soon?
What is a cloud strategy ? vmware is more of a technology company, providing technology that can and does power several private and some public clouds. Do people think they should change and become a public cloud provider / service provider ? I think they thought about it but in general it sounds like a bad idea (HP tried it, Dell thought about it, IBM is fussing about trying it, etc).
For me I suppose as a SMB (~$300M/year in SaaS revenue give or take) all I really care about is the hypervisor (5.5U2 is what I am on, maybe 1 or 2 years until I consider trying 6).
Don't care about SDN, VSAN, NSX, not sure what VCAC is, but probably something else I don't care about. You can google "techopsguys sdn" and see the first result for my in depth ripping apart of the SDN hype from a couple of years ago. I'm sure it's great for service providers, but not everyone needs it.
vSphere's last big release that I got excited about was 4.0 (mainly for 64 bit support). Every release since has been ok, but no rush to adopt. The only reason I jumped from 4.1 to 5.5 was 4.1 no longer had support. It was doing everything I needed at the time, and I had no bugs or problems with the product.
(Another reason is newer hardware support). I held out a long time on 4.1 because of the vRAM tax stuff that happened early on with 5.x.
From a hypervisor perspective at least compare "what's new" in 4.0 to any newer version and 4.0 seems to dwarf the newer versions every time (last I checked anyway)
https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_40_new_feat.html
5.5U2 works fine(I had some issues with VMs hanging on 5.5U1 I think it was but that went away on it's own), I read of issues on 5.5U3 so had held off on upgrading to that, but probably will at some point I am sure. If only my HP DL380Gen9 systems could reboot in less than 1-2 hours and reboot on the first try I would be more inclined perhaps to patch sooner (http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04822613&sp4ts.oid=7500984).
I love vSphere don't get me wrong, it is a very solid piece of code in my experience, vmware quality in general has been very high which keeps me a loyal customer.
I think part of that quality is because I don't leverage close to all of the abilities of the platform, things that seem to have a history of being more buggy (I don't use them because they are more buggy I don't use them because I don't need them).
It literally took about 7 years until I saw my first Purple Screen of Death on vSphere (hardware failure).
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