SANGuru20111014's Posts

For those of you looking for a decent thick client, give VMWare Workstation a try. You can use it to connect to your Virtual Center, see all your VMs, connect using remote console, edit settings etc. Its really sleek and fast, and for day to day management of your virtual machines, it's a damn lot better than the web clients. Obviously, it's limited to managing virtual machines, if you need to manage your ESXi infrastructure, clusters, datastores, networks etc, you will still need to use the web client, but VMWare Workstation has definitely made about 70% of my work a LOT more pleasurable. I'm not shilling it, this is just from one administrator to another. I think you also get a free Workstation license if you have a VCP, so no harm in trying it out.

I've been using VMWare since version 3, and it used to be the best thing ever. I started a new job about 5 years ago, vSphere 5 was around at that time but my manager insisted on using Citrix Xen. It took me 3 years to convince him that if we move from Citrix Xen to VMWare the money we spend will be well worth it. So eventually he agreed and we bought Enterprise Plus licenses for our production and DR datacentres (about 50 hosts, so it's a massive investment). I implemented it all and migrated all our workloads from Citrix Xen to VMWare over a 2-year long project. As we were going through the project I upgraded from 5.0 to 5.5, to 6.0 and then to 6.5, each time hoping and praying that the web client would get better. Then one day my manager wanted to create a VM, to see what was so cool about it and why I had been hounding him about VMWare for so long. The web client crashed when he tried to use it, so I told him to use the HTML5 client, he logged in and created a VM from a template using a customization spec. The VM came up, but it's hostname and IP didn't automatically get set as I told him it would (it had worked with other VMs, although inconsistently). Then he opened up the web console to try and login to set the hostname and IP, only to find out that his French keyboard is not supported. He spent a good 2 hours of cursing and battling trying to get that VM up, and then he asked me, "is this what we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on?". It was utterly embarrassing. I raved about VMWare for so long, that it's the best thing, only to have VMWare let me down at the end. I must say that VMWare no longer delivers value for the money that it costs. The C# client was awesome, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. Why discontinue it without a properly working replacement? To VMWare I say, "We are NOT your beta testers. We are your #@%$ customers and we pay a LOT of money for what has become an inferior product." This shyte client looks and works like it has been put together by amateurs, and I'm sorry, but 4 years has been quite long enough. I have done literally hundreds of VMWare implementations in my life, and it's a sad thing to say, but I'll be recommending Hyper-V in the future, because it's MY reputation you've damaged.