One thing that seems to have been overlooked in this debate is the updating of firmware (BIOS, BMC, FC HBA, etc) of the physical host. The advantage of installing the HMA (hardware management agent) such as Dell OpenManage or IBM Director et. al. is the ability to push down firmware ...
al. is the ability to push down firmware updates. This is currently not possible with either ESXi 3.5 or ESXi 4.0 (as of September 2009). I raised this issue at some of the sessions at VMworld 2009 last week and got mixed results. The one session on Kroger's deployment of ESX 3.5 ...