That title may seem confusing. However I have to deal with a small collection of ESXi 5.5 hosts that are connected to SAN storage on a 10Gbit back bone and support is an essential piece of the puzzle for a small to medium size company. While I am sure that VMware makes efforts to care for their premium accounts with hundreds of ESXi/vSphere clusters the small to medium sized companies have to deal with whatever we get. When I suggest that we do vm testing and config setup with Workstation Pro as a small low cost alternative then I get the somewhat baffling to response to rip out the whole expensive ESXi production environment and just run a few big HP Proliants with Virtual Box on top of Oracle Linux. The cost savings would be enormous and would certainly offset a few big new shiney Proliant servers that are all running Oracle Linux and Virtual Box with internal fast cheap disks. To make matters worse my attempts to demonstrate Workstation Pro 14 have failed utterly as the install simply doesn't work ( on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 no less ) and there is absolutely no support option for Workstation at all. So the suggestion to simply give up on VMware, because it is intensely expensive, and switch to running the Windows PDC and BDC servers and everything else inside Virtual Box is, at first glance, laughable. However the accountants don't care. As far as they are concerned a very expensive problem goes away and twenty virtual machines can run just fine on some other solution from a tier 1 major supplier like Oracle and all for super cheap. No idea if other people run into this sort of problem but the tech director really has no clue how things work and the last thing I needed today was Workstation Pro doesn't work, doesn't install and yet Virtual Box just runs great as far as a few people are concerned. No support option available and so why pay another penny to VMware? This is, to say the least, a tough argument to non-technical managers.
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