For what it's worth, a little personal history. I have used VMWare products personally and professionally since 1999, starting with the original release of the workstation product. I took a company 100% virtual on the old GSX product in late 2002, and quickly adopted ESX shortly thereafter. I have used VMWare in large and small environments, ranging from single hosts to hundreds, for well over a decade. You might describe me as a loyal customer and early adopter. All that said, to keep things as simple as I can, 5.5u2 is the end of the line for me at this point. The web client is not acceptable, and while it pains me to consider alternatives...it is important for VMWare to understand something. You are not special anymore. Hypervisors have been commoditized. Unlike in the past, you CAN be replaced, and quite easily. You still have an edge when it comes to manageability and overall feature set, but the current direction with regards to management tools and interface are rendering that edge irrelevant, as it becomes more and more difficult and time consuming to take advantage of that feature set. Your customers are speaking to you. You can choose to ignore us if you wish, but we have alternatives, and many of them are free, or have already been purchased due to them being bundled in base operating systems. Many of us have run KVM, Xen, and HyperV environments alongside VMWare in production, and know full well that while there are some tradeoffs, all are perfectly workable solutions. If you surrender your competitive advantage in some bizarre effort to provide a solution to an imaginary problem, you might find out just how portable VMs really are across platforms. Sure, there will be large customers who will move slowly, masking this effect somewhat, but it would be foolish for you as a company to believe that you can stop that momentum once it starts. The very inertia that makes you the incumbent today, could turn against you and leave you wondering what happened. To put it more plainly, you exist because system administrators, engineers, and architects preferred you because you made their lives easier. You're pissing them off now, and making their lives more difficult. How do you really think this is going to end?
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