Seriously? I can't believe this would wash at all. Maybe it's because this is Canada, or maybe it's because other businesses seem to feel they can tell you what you can, can't or how to make use of what you buy, but telling me I have to pay more if I dance?! Not that I would dance... I don't dance unless I'm trying to make someone laugh derisively... but that's not the point. Simply charging more because someone thinks they are getting more enjoyment??? Okay, can it go the other way too? Someone didn't like the music so we can discount the original charges? Like maybe "no charge if someone didn't like it?"

This crap has simply got to end... that and charging extra for wifi tethering on my mobile phone. I already paid for the data. Now I just want to use it. It's not for them to ask me HOW I will use it.

VMWare has shown a single host doing one million IOPS at normal latency, if you've got storage related performance problems look at your SAN vendor not VMWare.

Kemp has some very inexpensive virtual load balancers that will probably cost a few percent of what the equivalent hardware LB would cost.

It depends on load, I run multiple copies of SQL Enterprise as VM's in my VMWare environment as we have applications that need specific version of SQL Server (some down to the patch level) but none which will max out more than one or two CPU's. Our Oracle boxes aren't virtualized, partly because of load but mostly because of Oracle's retarded licensing policies regarding VM's and mobility.

In my experience MS clustering causes WAY more problems than it solves. This is probably resolved with SQL 2012 since it uses the same kind of shared nothing clustering that Exchange 2010 uses, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (most of our applications don't even support SQL 2008R2 yet).

While this is correct, it is also true that a vcenter 5.0 appliance is fully supported managing a 5.0u1 cluster. We run this exact configuration for our DMZ cluster. The biggest limitation with the appliance is that it only supports a few hosts and VM's (5 and 50 come to mind) which means you can only run very small environments on the appliance. For our DMZ network it was a fine choice since we didn't want those hosts talking to our main vcenter instance and we only run about a dozen DMZ machines.

It depends, by default you'd have to login to one or more hosts directly and fire up VM's. I have my vcenter setup to only run on the first two hosts in my production cluster so for me I would login to those two and fire up vcenter (this is if it didn't come up on its own, which it should since I changed the properties of my vcenter server and a few other critical VM's (domain controllers, database servers, etc) to power on with host, but that is not the default out of the box. Bringing up vcenter would just make things faster, it's not a requirement.

Yep, FT is still limited to a single vCPU in 5.0, that should be changing in the next release since VMWare has released some papers around vSMP and machine state synchronization.

I already do this to gather teeth to get rich off of the tooth fairy. We tell the little bastards that the we're removing isn't a tooth, but bone cancer from the jaw we need to remove pronto.

I'm pretty sure most of my post wasn't passive aggressive, but hey. I assume you didn't read the my tagline either.

    Sending an anonymous email is real easy. I forget sometimes that there are people who read and write on here that actually don't know how to do simple IT things.