I just viewed the presentation from VMware Europe. I'm very happy to see that this is progressing. It has been very frustrating to hear VMware talking about an appliance approach when I have to install a windows server and a SQL server for practically every VMware product. My ESX servers are practifcally bullet-proof and my guests all run uninterrupted regardless of ESX patching but I have to reboot my VC server on a regular basis for Windows patches.

I think you touched on it in the presentation, but it's critical that a cross-platform approach become ingrained in the way of doing business within VMware if this is to succeed. You simply can't succeed in an environment where one platform is chasing the other and the leading team is free to implement features in a way that may complicate cross-platform support.

Ellimination of Oracle and SQL is critical for an appliance approach. We're partial to mySQL.

Looking forward to trying this out.

Bringing vCenter to Linux

1. You need to have the database embedded with the install of vCenter. Just like Windows, I don't have to worry about the database unless I really want to.

2. For cases where you need more than a small DB running on the same machine as vCenter itself, you need more than just Oracle as an option. As we all know Oracle licences aren't cheap and the free version of Oracle is limiited. If Oracle is the only option for a Linux vCenter deployment, then VMWare needs to provide the licences.

3. There needs to be a version of VI Client native on Linux (and Mac OS X).

4. Looks like this preview was released in 2007 and it's now 2009. Where is the progress?

It'd be nice to see an updated appliance with Oracle XE included inside it and already configured -- that would really make everything more seemless and shouldn't be that hard (though I can understand the agreements with Oracle to redistribute could be challanging).

Hopefully the UI work will end up with something working across Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Thanks,

Chris