We are having increasing difficulty with Host Profiles as the vSphere product evolves. Most of our issues revolve around the way vSphere enumerates storage hardware as well as other issues surrounding the Storage Configuration component of host profiles. I'm constantly fighting with settings like PSP's for arrays that we don't have, remediation not remediating anything it says it will, etc. VMware has advised me in the past to completely exclude Storage Configuration from my host profiles, but we are increasingly haunted by silly issues such as domain authentication prompts, requests for MAC addresses, etc. There is a distinct behavioral difference between the Web Client's Host Profile editor and the vSphere Client's editor (the scariest of which is a list of host configuration changes for hosts that are already in compliance.) Anyway, we're very interested in moving away from host profiles into something more predictable and less finicky.
What alternatives to host profiles are being used out there to polish off server builds and maintain host configuration compliance?