I was working on a standalone ESX 3.5 system last night in order to upgrade to vSphere 4.1u1. I realized that the full ESX download had been deemphasized on the VMWare website. While I've known that the focus in the VMWare world was moving towards ESXi, I now realize that I have to actually assess the impact that this will have on my existing deployments.
I'm a consultant and have a range of VMWare installations, ranging from single hosts with internal storage to multi-host clusters backed by shared storage. I've mainly relied on HP ProLiant hardware as well. For me, the main attraction of ESX over ESXi was the presence of the HP Management Agents and a console capable of running HP-specific utilities (firmware updates, ILO configuration, SNMP traps, etc.)
I am interested in hearing how other IT engineers are handling the transition. For those of you who've installed full ESX 4, are you migrating hosts as needed? Are you making a concerted effort to move to ESXi now or waiting until the next upgrade cycle?
Either way, what are some of the challenges, missing features, etc. that you've encountered in making the move from ESX to ESXi?