VMWare Issues

We have had VMware installed in our environment for a few years now. We have three hosts and they are huge. We have had no problems since deployment...none. Apparently we have been without a support contract for a year now. Last weekend, VMTools was upgraded and none of the VM's were rebooted. So a few VM's slowly but surely became unavailable. As a team, we were able to determine that a handful of drivers, including the network driver, upgraded; causing Windows to freak out. Once we rebooted the VM's, everything worked. Seemed like it was a slow death, only a few servers started to become unavailable, when we figured out what was happening, we scheduled time and rebooted the rest. No other servers experienced this issue after.

We realize we did this to ourselves. We were thankful to be able to fix this ourselves as well however, it made us question having a support contract. We were sent a quote and quite frankly, it's a lot. Our hardware is under warranty through another vendor, so that is not an issue.

My question is, can anybody speak on experience the issues that VMware may see? Especially after the three year mark of life. I don't see any major issues coming up that wouldn't be hardware related. Is the chunk of money we would spend on only a two year contract for support really worth it? We have called for support zero times since deployment and I am confident that if it isn't a hardware related problem, we can solve this issue with not only with our knowledge of the system but when you have tools like Experts Exchange or even the VM Forum....it makes it hard for me to be convinced spending so much money on support for the VMware world.

If this system was known for being problematic, and not from a hardware stand point; I could understand needing support. I just do not see enough issues, any at all to be specific, that would warrant being under a support contract for so much money.

What are your thoughts?