Host profiles are indeed very cool. But I see adoption hurdles. I know companies who invested a lot of man power and time and effort in creating very advanced kickstart PXE installation processes for ESX from scratch. They use scripts or workflows to set up configurations cluster-wide. By switching to host profiles you will have to throw a lot of that investment over board, right? In this case people get attached to their work, and we need to find the added value that really makes a difference. Here are a few items I see:
1. Custom PXE boot processes, scripts and workflows are not supported by VMware. I have seen a lot of effort going into the adjustment of these scripts when upgrading from VI3 to vSphere 4. OTOH Host Profiles are supported by VMware.
2. The fact that Host Profiles provide ongoing compliance checking could be a compelling argument.
Yet, bringing these features to a broad adoption appears to be a steep uphill battle.
