well to me it is a bug, especially as the documentation says that it will move the vms if needed IIRC.

If it needs to be a new feature necessary for some customers vmware should make it a configurable item.

The old way was perfect for most customers and didn’t require any manual interaction concerning VUM or VC.

VUM is already bad at handling errors, just addining another “error” to it which requires you do browse through log files to figure out the real reason doesn’t really help to make customers feel enthousiastic about it.

Marcus

That beign said, I grow increasingly frustrated by software companies and particularly one very big one who make seemingly wrong assumptions (ok sometimes based on market research) on how customers use their software. When they push even large or even small changes to the product which break fucntionality or current process then it becomes a problem, especially without warning.

Take MS Exchange 2007 + as an example. They now dont provide the ability to create mailboxes from AD which they always did. Their argument was they believed that most exchange helpdesk people didnt have access to AD tools. The stupid thing is you still need AD to set some properties on an exchange account, unless you are a posh guru. Now there is more than one way to skin a cat, but that small change caused allot of gnashing of teeth and a change in process for allot of small, medium and large businesses alike. I think the responsibility lies somewhere in between.

I’m not saying that everyone should have a management cluster but you are insanely exaggerating here.
What if I would just patch the first host, move vCenter & VUM to the first host and then do a Remediate on the Cluster? The first host would be skipped as it is already patched the others would be patched without any manual intervention. So what would we be talking about? 5 minutes extra? I don’t know about you but I can spent those 5 minutes and still have a walk in the park with my kids.

By the way, when I talk about enterprise customers I am not talking about customer who bought the enterprise license. I am talking about the size of the company! As you know I am not a sales guy, licensing is never part of my message.

With the utmost respect, I think you are making an assumption about Enterprise customers which I am not in agreement with. In your view, most Enterprise customers are large, with large infrastructures and management clusters dedicated to managing the infrastructure. This would seem to indicate that Enterprise licensing is mostly for these types of large customers. I disagree. I think there are customers of all sizes who can and do benefit from Enterprise features. The last shop I came from has 8 ESX hosts (4 DEV, 4 PROD). They are an Enterprise licensing customer and they reap the rewards of Enterprise features such as DRS and VMotion. This environment has no management cluster. They are not using PowerShell. They are not pinning VMs. Their VMs move around seamlessly in the private cloud as they should.

There exist a few work arounds that can be applied to the problem. One is a management cluster. Another is pinning VMs. A third is PowerShell scripting. All of these work arounds involve extra time and/or money which was not required in the past. VMware’s best practice now is to virtualize vCenter Server so the functionality and flexiblity surrounding that choice is more important than ever. In my opinion, these are all work arounds which do not directly address the problem which has occurred. Putting on my customer hat, if I didn’t have these solutions in my shop previously, why should I be forced to reactively adopt them now? The marketing message from VMware is Efficiency, Control, Choice which I have become accustomed to. People may not use all of the features VMware offers, but at least the flexibility is there in the feature sets to be leveraged as needed. I can think of another hypervisor vendor that boldly makes design choices for its customers in its lack of a memory overcommit feature; they don’t offer the flexibility that VMware does. If VMware removes or breaks features a customer depends on, that creates friction and is contra to VMware’s marketing message.

I do apologize for the refund comment. It was merely satire. I do not expect customers to ask for a refund. However, this is a real world problem and VMware does have the stigma of being the most expensive virtualization solution sticker price. I think it’s fair to say that customers who buy a Cadillac should expect Cadillac quality and a vehicle that will not let them down. It’s a competitive market and VMware needs to continue delivering their “A” game. They’ve had some issues with quality control in the past. These issues should be eliminated as much as possible.

Most Enterprise companies use a separate Cluster for Management services and thus do not need to do 32 manual actions to updates.