VMware support - absolute shit?

[parkgoons]

Just curious what others have been experiencing when it comes to VMware support. Back in the day, they used to be decent (ESX 4.0 days). I'm no longer in an engineering/admin role but often have to discuss escalated tickets with clients. We've had a priority 1 ticket (vCenter down) ticket for well over a month and a half. Is this the norm?

What are my options? Should we be giving hyper-v a second chance?

 

[Epyon9283]

Haven't had good luck with VCenter support. Had a ticket open for an issue updating to one of the 6.0 updates. They never resolved it and I just gave up. Then we had issues migrating to a 6.5 appliance and it took over a month to resolve.

 

[parkgoons]

This is an interesting thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comment ... rt_issues/

I wonder how true this statement is:

"Ex-VMware employee here. I left because there was a shift in management attitudes towards support. Particularly towards production support.
I have good reason to believe VMware is deliberately sabotaging their production support in order to force all their customers to upgrade to a Premier Support contract for much more money."

Honestly if that's the case, to protect my business and my reputation, we'll gladly begin moving to another platform.

 

[stash]

The statement about trying to get companies to pay for higher levels of support is interesting. At my last company we had Mission Critical Support ($$$$$) for about 2 years. It was pretty good for about six months and then went rapidly downhill. The engineers assigned to our cases were useless, wasting our time by sending KB articles and blog posts. They started doing the stalling for time trick of asking for log bundles when we had already attached them to the case. They also became way less responsive.

We also had some really bad TAMs (before and after MCS), but the last one that we got about a year before I left was pretty good. But the main issue was with the support people, as well as getting any sort of input from engineering.

 

[parkgoons]

In a way its reassuring to hear me and my team aren't alone.

Maybe its time for a group boycott.

 

[DrWebster]

I've had several tickets that I've opened that turned out to be wastes of time. I've had better luck Googling for the answer than getting them to fix it.

That said, IME when you've got an otherwise stable environment, if it suddenly breaks it's usually a simple fix anyway. As much as their support sucks, I'd still rather run VMware than deal with Hyper-V (and TBH Microsoft's support ain't so hot either).

 

[Klockwerk]

It's hit and miss for me, but it's just like all vendors.

 

[hawkbox]

VMware support has been utter shit for about 5 years now.

 

[ferzerp]

I've been involved in support tickets with vmware twice in 9.5 years. Neither time were they any help. I ended up fixing both on my own. Only needing support twice in a decade though, it's still far better than the alternative. Back when I was heavily involved with the Microsoft stack, I feel like I was on the phone with their support at least once a quarter if not more (though it's not a fair comparison since there are multiple products I was calling in for).

Boxes rarely break, and when they do, your second response (after a quick review to see if it is something simple) should be to just redeploy the box anyway, so unless it is a systemic issue in your environment, or a problem with the surrounding software (vCenter, etc), there is little reason to ever engage them.

 

[hawkbox]

Most of my problems these days revolve around vCenter. As in pretty much all of them.

 

[Mortus]

The last 3 tickets I've opened with them I ended up solving despite their involvement.

 

[sryan2k1]

Yes. Sev 1 issues used to be dealt with by an engineer on the west coast or Cork, and would stay with you until issue resolution.

Now I can't get a S1 to give me an answer or apparently even read from a KB. I end up solving the issue myself, or resolve that it will never be fixed (like whole sites going away in the web client, including the one I'm connected to).

 

[breakingnews]

I used to love getting the cork DC just to chat with them while working on issues, love their accent! I hardly have any issues but the ones I do have to call in on, ya, these days it's horrid 90% of the time (logs and more logs, misdirection to blogs and irrelevant KB's, etc.). Asking for elevation and escalation usually helps (for VMware and other support), but not always. I find if I have a crappy support person and it drags on I'll just log a new case and hope someone half competent gets it

 

[MKG]

VMware's long term plans are to make the product no longer a viable or affordable product and to force their customers onto their VirtueStream cloud thingy. This is one of a billion reasons why the Dell purchase of EMC was one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry.

 

[hawkbox]

VMware's long term plans are to make the product no longer a viable or affordable product and to force their customers onto their VirtueStream cloud thingy. This is one of a billion reasons why the Dell purchase of EMC was one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry.

They're going to force people ont Hyper-V or AHV is what they're going to do.

 

[MKG]

VMware's long term plans are to make the product no longer a viable or affordable product and to force their customers onto their VirtueStream cloud thingy. This is one of a billion reasons why the Dell purchase of EMC was one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry.

They're going to force people ont Hyper-V or AHV is what they're going to do.

That is exactly what they are doing.

Oh and... we've already begun "exploring".

Containers will crush them from one side, and KVM/AHV/Nano from the other.

 

[w00key]

More and more services are meant to be deployed on unreliable hardware. Lose a few nodes? Meh who cares. For ease of patching, I currently always deploy 2+ workers even for simple sites, take one down, patch, test and rejoin the load balancer is far easier than take it down, patch as fast as you can type and everything works right the first try. (Works as long as no dev makes a database migration that breaks backwards compatibility... I hate deploying those changes.)

You still need 1 vmware cluster on proper SAN for the really important stuff like the main HAProxy and Postgres nodes, but for the nth container hosts, nope don't need that expensive vSphere license.


On the other hand, VMWare is kinda squeezed by the crazy amount of cores and RAM modern machines have, they tried charging for vCPU and RAM, but got yelled at so hard they won't try again. Except for charging even more for support, I don't see how they can prevent revenue from cratering from node count reductions and moves to the cloud.

 

[szlevi]

This is an interesting thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comment ... rt_issues/

I wonder how true this statement is:

"Ex-VMware employee here. I left because there was a shift in management attitudes towards support. Particularly towards production support.
I have good reason to believe VMware is deliberately sabotaging their production support in order to force all their customers to upgrade to a Premier Support contract for much more money."

Honestly if that's the case, to protect my business and my reputation, we'll gladly begin moving to another platform.

I can absolutely see that, it was already EMC's 101 tactics fifteen years ago.

 

[szlevi]

VMware's long term plans are to make the product no longer a viable or affordable product and to force their customers onto their VirtueStream cloud thingy. This is one of a billion reasons why the Dell purchase of EMC was one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry.

I'd say the worst thing was EMC buying VMware. Having Dell exert control over its EMC body parts might turn out to be a good thing, assuming Dell's business people can reign in on the hordes of aggressive, pushy EMC sales people.

 

[hawkbox]

VMware's long term plans are to make the product no longer a viable or affordable product and to force their customers onto their VirtueStream cloud thingy. This is one of a billion reasons why the Dell purchase of EMC was one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry.

I'd say the worst thing was EMC buying VMware. Having Dell exert control over its EMC body parts might turn out to be a good thing, assuming Dell's business people can reign in on the hordes of aggressive, pushy EMC sales people.

I'm rolling out more Nutanix units lately and with the way VMware is going I'm getting more interested in exploring AHV.

 

[MKG]

VMware's long term plans are to make the product no longer a viable or affordable product and to force their customers onto their VirtueStream cloud thingy. This is one of a billion reasons why the Dell purchase of EMC was one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry.

I'd say the worst thing was EMC buying VMware. Having Dell exert control over its EMC body parts might turn out to be a good thing, assuming Dell's business people can reign in on the hordes of aggressive, pushy EMC sales people.

I'm rolling out more Nutanix units lately and with the way VMware is going I'm getting more interested in exploring AHV.

As are we. KVM is mature enough and AHV is starting to become more and more viable and - more importantly - supported. The industry will be different next year as the civil war within Dell rages on and folks like Nutanix, Rubrik and others gain more market share (small but relevant).

Dell EMC is eating itself alive right now.

 

[hawkbox]

VMware's long term plans are to make the product no longer a viable or affordable product and to force their customers onto their VirtueStream cloud thingy. This is one of a billion reasons why the Dell purchase of EMC was one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry.

I'd say the worst thing was EMC buying VMware. Having Dell exert control over its EMC body parts might turn out to be a good thing, assuming Dell's business people can reign in on the hordes of aggressive, pushy EMC sales people.

I'm rolling out more Nutanix units lately and with the way VMware is going I'm getting more interested in exploring AHV.

As are we. KVM is mature enough and AHV is starting to become more and more viable and - more importantly - supported. The industry will be different next year as the civil war within Dell rages on and folks like Nutanix, Rubrik and others gain more market share (small but relevant).

Dell EMC is eating itself alive right now.

Considering our VMUG is basically defunct after the purchase I can't imagine this is going to end in anything but internal bloodshed.

 

[sryan2k1]

In the long run Dell will be a much better steward for them. Its going to take a few years though and for some that might be too late.

 

[hawkbox]

I ahve to hope they put at least minimal effort into the core functionality again to draw back us smaller customers, but for now I need to look after my own needs. I don't need 1000 hosts and 15000 VDI sessions.

 

[sryan2k1]

What's the struggle? Essentials is awesome for 3 hosts and it's not like features have gone away.

 

[hawkbox]

I've mentioned my issues more than once in the past. I have considerably larger needs than 3 hosts but considerably less than a full DC. I have neither the money nor the staff to support VMware full time, which is what the default assumption is these days.

vSphere 4 was fantastic, it's been getting harder to use and support since.

 

[sryan2k1]

The virtualization stack is most enterprises single most critical things. Not being able to dedicate the proper resources to it is a recipe for disaster. You think hyperv or xen don't have their own management nightmares?

Tell your org better switch everything back to bare metal!

 

[hawkbox]

The virtualization stack is most enterprises single most critical things. Not being able to dedicate the proper resources to it is a recipe for disaster. You think hyperv or xen don't have their own management nightmares?

Tell your org better switch everything back to bare metal!

Right...

 

[w00key]

Isn't vmware still the golden standard in ease of use? It's just next next next finish oh hey it works, KVM is tons more touchy when I last looked at it. I haven't noticed the newer versions being harder to manage (using the vCSA).

 

[sryan2k1]

Yes. For all it's issues, it pretty much "Just works". Also 95% of peoples issues are with vCenter and not the Hypervisor itself (ESXi) which is absolutely rock solid. HyperV is pretty much a management nightmare and I haven't used Xen in 6+ years so I can't really comment there.

 

[molo]

Yes. For all it's issues, it pretty much "Just works". Also 95% of peoples issues are with vCenter and not the Hypervisor itself (ESXi) which is absolutely rock solid. HyperV is pretty much a management nightmare and I haven't used Xen in 6+ years so I can't really comment there.

Yup. VMWare is still *easily* the best, in all categories except cost. The management tools, especially, are so much better than the other options that it's ridiculous.

If you are having trouble managing vSphere, you're in for a world of hurt with anything else. Unless your requirements are VERY simple.

 

[hawkbox]

If all you need is the basic functionality that's true. But VMware has no interest in you using just the basic functionality, they want to sell you a bunch of additional shit and if you're not in the market for it they're not interested in talking to you.

 

[sryan2k1]

That's just not true. If so your reseller sucks. If you are not doing fancy VDI or anything the licencing is crazy simple too. vCenter is it's own licence and each socket either gets Standard or E+ which is clearly broken out.

My IT group at work has a total of 12 sockets (but with like 120 cores and 2TB of RAM) and have never had issues with our account guys or CDW.

 

[hawkbox]

So you've never dealt with their support people. Thanks for making that obvious.

 

[sryan2k1]

I have. EMC has shown a gradual decline in overall support quality (Although the Cork and Western US centers are still absolutely wonderful). The techs on a Sev 1 ticket don't care if you have two hosts or two thousand.

Yes you can get bad techs, but you can always as it be escalated or the case owner changed.


Also, much like HyperV, Microsoft's support is just as awful.


VMWare has plenty of room to improve, but they are literally the best technically, usability, and support wise.

 

[A. Reed]

I've had to open a few support tickets these days for an Airwatch deployment, so far so good, they were quick to answer and scheduled calls were on time with competent people.

 

[molo]

If all you need is the basic functionality that's true. But VMware has no interest in you using just the basic functionality, they want to sell you a bunch of additional shit and if you're not in the market for it they're not interested in talking to you.

I don't know, man. I've never had the problems you claim to be having.

It sounds to me like you have some kind of fundamental issue that isn't really a VMware issue at all. Like maybe you are trying to make it do things that it wasn't designed for?

I've had almost nothing but good experiences with VMWare. Even their support is pretty good, though their base-level support people are absolutely useless. You HAVE to escalate if you are having any kind of problem that goes beyond "I don't understand how to use vSphere, can you help me?"

 

[anon-x]

They left out critical pieces of information in their upgrade documentation, which I'm assuming is designed to force people to use professional services. It's rather despicable and my opinion has changed towards the company as a result.

With that said, I hope they improve their support/documentation and streamline everything now that they are transitioning to the Photon OS.

 

[Klockwerk]

They left out critical pieces of information in their upgrade documentation, which I'm assuming is designed to force people to use professional services. It's rather despicable and my opinion has changed towards the company as a result.

With that said, I hope they improve their support/documentation and streamline everything now that they are transitioning to the Photon OS.

What did they miss out?

 

[ferzerp]

People use VMware services? That's even a thing?