More Disaster Releases from VMWare
In my article about VMWare 3.5 here I already pointed out several problems, but also hoped for improvements. Well, on April 10 VMWare released the Update 1 package for 3.5 and it seems like VMWare is absolutely not learning it. I am kind of tempted to say that if Wall Street Analysts start reading about these problems, that the VMWare stock will definitely be downgraded to "hold" or "sell" as these ongoing problems will drive customers to look at competing products more often.
Take a look at this thread at the VMWare communities.
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/138793?tstart=0&start=0
The discussion is 16 pages long and has 157 replies! The discussion is about severe problems installing the upgrade and amateurish VMWare responds to the problems. Look at the dates of the different postings and how long this ordeal was going on before VMWare closed the discussion. Does this make a professional impression to you? Probably not. I am not very impressed with it either and it really makes me re-think if VMWare ESX is the right product for a web hosting environment or any production environment. Sure, as an admin I will have to do testing and research before I apply an upgrade to one of my systems – it’s just part of the job. But again it looks like VMWare is testing its alpha or beta code releases in production and lets its customers find all the problems. Can you risk your production environment this way? I can’t. We’re talking virtualization here. Anything that impacts your virtual environment has a much bigger impact. It’s not one physical server going, it’s 35 VMs sitting on that server that eventually go down with it. You are multiplying the problem by 35.
This is supposed to be a minor upgrade and not a big jump like it was from 3.0.2 to 3.5. This is an upgrade package 1 for 3.5, but apparently there was plenty of "opportunity" to mess up. Very disappointing. I for myself won’t upgrade my existing environment for a while and maybe even look at other companies like VirtualIron or XEN for my next virtualization step. I don’t have to drop what I have and paid for, but additional rollouts might just be on another product. I have also forwarded my concerns to my VMWare rep this morning. We will see what comes out of that.
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