Given my last post, it’s pretty ironic that I’m right now in the middle of a VMware ESX deployment at work. VMware seems to have this reality distortion field around it that makes tech management think that – despite its substantial overhead – it’s the only “real” virtualization product out there: The rest are just hacks, so we bought VMware. Now that I’m knee-deep in working with it, a few other thoughts:
- Wow, the VI client is really buggy and slow. It crashes for me at least once a day. We haven’t upgraded from 3.0.2 to 3.5 yet, hopefully some of this is fixed in the new version.
- There also seems to be an IP storage bug on reboot where ESX server doesn’t reconnect to iSCSI or NFS storage – possibly something to do with a transient name resolution or default route problem in ESX. I haven’t gotten any good suggestions out of VMware support about this, but the case is still open.
- VMware does a good job of pricing ESX so it’s expensive but affordable for non-profits.
All in all, I have to admit, I’m pretty pleased with ESX so far, but I also know that the honeymoon isn’t over – we only have one virtual machine in quasi-production so far.
