Paging all Microsoft System Center users: Your treadmill is here

№ 5, № 9, Coco or Gabrielle?

"first Semi-Annual Chanel version of System Centre" - how very fragrant, and haute couture, of MicroSquash ;)

It's difficult to get excited about System Center updates because they seldom fix any of the infuriating and long-lived bugs.

Virtual Machine Manager still occasionally corrupts the cluster configuration of a VM and seemingly is unable to recover itself. It still doesn't configure logical switches gracefully on Hyper-V hosts when the management connection is on an affected NIC and is briefly interrupted. You still can't remove/delete a vCenter connection from SCVMM after the vCenter has gone offline! Live Migration might work if the planets are correctly aligned, but running software update remediation on a cluster will inevitably grind to a halt after a single virtual machine is unwilling to migrate for some reason. Speaking of which, if Live Migration decides to not use storage offloading (which also happens at random) then you could be waiting for a very long time for BITS to slowly trickle the virtual machine across even on a 10GbE link. Not to mention the fact that storage offloading also only works between the VMM library and the cluster shared volumes/datastores within a single cluster and not across multiple.

The amount of "unknown errors" or undocumented error codes that SCVMM throws up is outstanding. Come back, VMware. All is forgiven.

Configuration Manager still routinely breaks during upgrades, management points need reinstalling frequently when HTTPS is configured (seemingly it does strange things to IIS), Software Update Points are a complete and utter joke and I've still yet to see one even functioning. Machine and user policy retrieval can be incredibly slow on clients, and often without any feedback to the user or administrator whatsoever. Distribution points still won't always provide a boot image to a client for a specific architecture unless boot images for other unused architectures are present too. Computer accounts imported from heartbeat discovery also don't always seem to be recognised properly when a machine tries to PXE-boot (even when the MAC and SMBIOS GUID are correctly populated in the object).

Does anyone at Microsoft even use these products? I can't believe that these problems would still exist after all this time if they did.