The idea behind VMWare’s vCenter Lab Manager is reasonable. Make one big virtual vm-host, that dynamically configures itself under the covers, so the same hardware can be used by lots of people, eliminating wasted resources, and the wasted time of people building the same configurations over and over again. Who knows, maybe in some places, the reality matches the dream.
Where I work, it’s been a big ole pain in my butt. They massively under-budgeted for usage, even though they knew exactly how much physical hardware they were replacing, and instead of adding more capacity to meet the needs of now, much less the needs of the future, they spent months begging people to use the system less. Frankly, I’m amazed enough people can even get to the server to put a load on it. Out of 3 machines and 6 browsers, only 1 works reliably with the remote console plug-in. There’s zero support info for it available from VMWare, making me wonder why we bothered with the supposedly supported ‘paid’ product. Seems like we would have been better off using the free server, in terms of worker productivity. Most annoyingly, the product, even when working, seems missing the most basic of features, like mounting a local drive or ISO. It must be nice to live in a world where IT is always instantaneously available for trivial tasks like adding CD’s to the media library….seriously, I have to make an internal support call if I want to load something brand new into the system. So much for saving time.
Mostly, I’m just pissed-in-the-moment, because I have an urgent task that has to be completed by friday at noon, and the ‘upgrade’ of our vCenter that was supposed to be done with by last monday morning, is still miles away from being in a usable state. It wouldn’t be half as frustrating if IT would at least give us some sort of feedback on what they are doing to fix the problems. Do they have a root cause? Any ETA? Are they waiting for support from VMware to get back to them?