Author: Brad Wagner, Director of Product Strategy, Vizioncore

I've been hearing more about customers embracing ESXi, and even more that some are beginning to deploy it at scale in production environments. I want to share a few brief notes of concern that I have validated with other large customers and with some hardware manufacturers.

The VMware kernel part of ESXi seems to be rock solid, same as their other core hypervisor stuff.  So the concerns outlined below are not meant to say that VMware’s ESXi is not ready for primetime production use, but rather as suggestions to make sure it's right for you.

Several customers, and two of the big three hardware vendors, are raising a flag and saying that customers should be aware of what hardware failure and performance alerts they can’t receive on ESXi hosts.  Customers can minimize the impact of these concerns with the following recommendations:

  •     Customers should perform extensive testing in their environment with ESX 3.5 beside ESXi and compare the alerts each generate from such failures as the removal of a power supply, drive, array controllers and memory errors.
  •     Customers should only run non-critical loads (dev/test/etc) in ESXi for a measured period of time to fully understand its performance and monitoring characteristics in their specific environment.
  •     Customers should establish a conversation with another customer that has been down the path of trying ESXi in their environment.  These peer-to-peer conversations really do add a lot of real world experiences to the conversation.
  •     Customers should take a close look at all of their infrastructure tools in the new environment: backups, replication, security, audit, monitoring, asset management, capacity planning, provisioning, etc.  Many might not function since their agents are longer able to exist in the console OS.  Others could be significantly impacted in performance due to alternate means of execution.


The bottom line is that I’m not suggesting that ESXi is not a great fit for customers in their environments, but rather that most customers experience some significant pain while they learn how to manage ESXi in their unique environment.  Vizioncore can be a trusted advisor by merely pointing out some of the pain points, such as those above that have been experienced by others; however we are not typically able to assist further than referring them to a partner to help with the VMware side of the execution with products other than our own.

I am very interested in your experiences around this topic and would welcome any corrections, or alternate views that you have.

Sincerely,

Brad Wagner
Director of Product Strategy
Vizioncore