This has always puzzled me, too — how resistant people are to using the correct technologies, always wanting to do something unsupported and very, very complex for some notional gain that never materializes.

I’ve been in this exact scenario multiple times.

An “easy button” for multi-DC is like the quest for the holy grail. I explain to my clients that the answer is right in front of them – local IP addressing, L3 routing, and DNS. But they refuse to accept that, draw their swords, and engage in a fruitless war against common sense. Asymmetry, stateful inspection, ingress routing, split-brain, quorums, host mobility, cache coherency, non-RFC complaint ARP, etc.

From what I can gather, because people don’t understand networking and they do understand when things “look the same,” they think it’s easier to have stretch clusters, stretched L2, non-standard ARP configs and all that, not realizing the absolutely enormous amounts of infrastructure complexity just below the surface that must occur for these things to happen.

They are essentially forcing we infrastructure people to use a car as an airplane and that works about as well as you’d expect, particularly when anything goes wrong.

It makes sense, then, that Cisco is making it easier to use a car as an airplane since so many clients demand that.

What’s weird about it is that the correct solution is actually easier and better both for the client and the infrastructure provider, but try telling that to an MBA who thinks he’s an infrastructure expert because he “can configure his home router.”