I work for VMware Support. I'm a senior engineer in one of our North American Centers. I've read through most of these comments and have a few take-aways that I think are worth mentioning.

-Remember, you called us and we know NOTHING about your environment; we have to ask "dumb" questions. -Logs do help, please provide them when asked. -RCA is best effort in production, RCA will be attempted in BCS/MCS if requested, but sometimes there is just not enough info. -Don't lie to us, its OK if you messed up or don't know the answer, we are here to get you fixed, your pride getting in the way slows that down. -Some of these questions might seem dumb to you, but we know things that you don't know. We do this all day every day, have some faith. -When we ask you to upgrade your drivers and firmware, please do it. This is not a stall tactic and fixes more than you can imagine. -When we tell you its your SAN, it usually is. -Its nearly impossible for us to determine what you did when you installed SSO/PSC in 4 different data centers behind 8 load balancers in an unsupported topology; keep it simple.

I could go on for days...

The reality here is that we are here to help and we go ABOVE and BEYOND any other support org I know of and maybe that's our problem, maybe we should be more default deny like MS, Oracle, HP, Dell, and EVERY SAN MAKER EVER. The visualization layer gets picked on quite a lot as the issue for problems because its easy to point at. For example, when you have an exchange performance issue on a physical environment, do you call dell and escalate with them because the intel processor isn't fast enough, or your SAN disk is slow, no, but when its virtual, we have to defend and "fix" those issues, no matter how you built the environment.

Sometimes that fix is, "sorry, you engineered this poorly, ESXi doesn't create CPU cycles, your SAN is maxed out, or you are over committed on CPU". But we can't just say that and hang up because it would hurt your feelings.