Microsfts support scam

[pcrowley]

I realize this is somewhat old news now but since I just got bit by it I'm particularly disturbed by Micrsosfts suppprt policy conecerning VM Ware based guests. I find their policy that they will support them if you are a premier support customer a little amusing. This means they do have some staff who is using VM Ware based technology, but they are choosing to save money but not fully documenting what that group is doing. It's also another obvios attempt to lock down the market and maintain a vitual monopoly by mafia like tactics as opposed to spend half the money they spend on Marketing and Lawyers on actually making a solid and supportable line of products. The other reason for the policy is simply to duck having to deal with admitting to or helping reolve bugs in their products due to unpredictable virtualization products. I challenge anyone from MS to look me in the face and tell me that having 5 servers all running on VM Ware or any other virtualization platform which present a consistent hardware configuration is somehow less stable or predictable than 5 servers or workstations from a whitebox vendor or even Dell or HP if they have chaged their product line between when those 5 servers were purchased.

I call shenangans on MS and I say we fight back on this one. But not tyring to get them to change their policy lets just invalidate it. How exactly can they tell that our servers are running vmware? Well either we tell them, or with their latest support tools they pull a dump of multiple pieces of system information and we have to email those dumps back. So I propose one of the two solutions, change the hardware descriptions in the guest OS from vmware or create a utlity that will poll the dump files and edit them before they get sent back to MS support.

[vmroyale]

MAYBE it will get better next year?

Microsoft has indicated that beginning in June 2008, Windows guests on Microsoft and non-Microsoft virtualization platforms will receive the same technical support.

In response to industry and customer demands for more comprehensive technical support of virtual machines, Kelly also announced the Server Virtualization Validation Program. Beginning in June 2008, vendors will be able to self-test and validate certain technical requirements of their server virtualization software running Windows Server 2008 and prior versions. The program will enable Microsoft to offer cooperative technical support to customers running Windows Server on validated, non-Windows server virtualization software.

Read the full article here:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-12HyperVPR.mspx

[esiebert7625]

It's probably only a matter of time before they will change their policy, they are making progress as evidenced in the below link. What some people do is get their MS support from other vendors like HP instead.

Microsoft embraces 3rd party virtualization platforms - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9048260

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[pcrowley]

Yea but tht doesn't help when you are a company who builds their own hardware because HP and Dell use the cheapest components they can find and ironically considering MS compatability claims are highly prone to failure and driver issues.

I also find it a bit amusing that on 11-12 Micrsoft also released an updated support policy stating they will only support other virtual for premier support customers.

[vmwareisascam]

VMware is a scam, why should I take scam advice from a company that actively scams people?