How does this differ from joining nodes to a cluster? I kinda figured a cluster was their (kinda janky) alternative to VCSA.

Multiple clusters. You dont necessarily want all your nodes on a single cluster, and in the enterprise you often don’t.

After dealing with clusters before I don’t want any of my machines in clusters.

I wouldn’t be able to function with that level of risk

For us it was more of a liability than anything. We didn’t use any of the high availability features, and every time we needed to remove and readd a host it was a massive pain in the ass and usually broke more things. It was nice for migrating VMs around, but we don’t do that all THAT often.

I’m curious if this datacenter will handle our shitty hosts spontaneously dying and needing to be rebuilt better.