VMware's flagship vSphere now in never-ending beta, if you're up for it

VMware has announced that its flagship vSphere virtualization suite now offers a continuous beta. Virtzilla's beta programmes have evolved over time from a conventional "we've got a new version coming, who wants to play?" model to a "sign up to test this and future versions" panel. Now the company has announced new …

[jake]

VMware, don't you know that "Beta" is a slur?

It is a vulgar term denoting men who are not particularly masculine. It is obvious that you are using it as a form of micro aggression against men in general. I demand that you drop it from your list of approved words immediately.

[Piro]

Re: VMware, don't you know that "Beta" is a slur?

Hah!

[katrinab]

Re: VMware, don't you know that "Beta" is a slur?

Yes of course, real men would use the Alpha release, I think?

[chivo243]

Re: VMware, don't you know that "Beta" is a slur?

Real men and computers? So many ways to go with this one...

[jake]

Re: VMware, don't you know that "Beta" is a slur?

Real men write their own and toggle it into the front panel.

[iron]

So have they managed to exorcise Adobe Flash from their management tools yet?

[DougMac]

Yes. Various dates for various tools, but vSphere 6.7U1 in 2018 was feature complete HTML5 interface.

Everything else that used flash has other various dates, but I assume that is the big one you want.

[reub]

I sure hope they have worked out a better mechanism now than they did in the past with regards to beta version upgrades going forward. In previous times gone by you had to completely destroy and rebuild your entire setup every time a new build came out, as they did not support upgrades from beta to beta, nor ugprades from beta to final. The installer enforced this so technically it wasn't (easily) possible to do nor can you upgrade by saving the config and re-importing it.

No sane person is going to want to recreate their entire lab and rebuild vCentre (with dvSwitches etc) every few weeks for each new build. People who are *that* into it have paid jobs to do and won't waste hours and hours of time rebuilding their environment to help VMware for free (it's also as boring as all get-out to do). And it's certainly questionable if people will want to ever put a real workload on such a temporary setup.

I have never figured out if VMware understand the practicalities of this but this is just a token gesture to indicate they are "community friendly", or if they genuinely believe people are prepared to spend their waking hours testing their software for free.

[Troy Tempest]

Agreed mate, VMWare upgrades were/are shithouse.

THE main driver to the cloud for me