VMworld 2016 wishlist

So, with another VMworld approaching, I thought I'd jot down a few things I would like to see announced. Not saying any of this is going to happen, but it's what I'd like to see...

Bundle NSX with vSphere

I doubt this will actually happen while VMware is making a lot of money on standalone NSX, but at some point, it needs to bundle the product into vSphere (or one of the vSphere/vCloud/vRealize suites). Of course, I'm still smarting at the loss of vCNS from the vCloud Suite, but even the "cut price" NSX for vSphere was not low enough to make it affordable to most organisations.

If NSX is going be pervasive, it needs to get everywhere, so VMware are going to have to push it out at a lower entry price point to gain mass adoption.

Stable release of vSphere 6.x

Okay, so that may be unfair, but I still read news reports detailing some pretty major bugs. It seems to me that vSphere 6 hasn't been the highest quality release that VMware has ever done. As a result, we have held off going to vSphere 6, and judging by the show of hands at the last VMUG I attended, we're not the only ones.

VMware's answer to Azure Stack

VMware's biggest competition in the private cloud space is only just getting started. If Microsoft are able to make a version of Azure that can run internally and is simple to install and manage (a big "if"), then this will be a big threat to VMware. Microsoft will have the same stack for both private and public clouds and the ability to move between both. A true hybrid cloud.

VMware has been very weak in public cloud (is vCloud Air still a thing?) but has a credible private cloud story. With a concerted effort, it could provide an equivalent stack solution, perhaps leveraging Cloud Foundry for the PaaS platform. But it's going to have to get moving on this before Microsoft deliver something that is actually pretty compelling for many organisations.

vRealize Automation IaaS appliance

vRealize Automation has a reputation for being a bit of a pain to install. Things have apparently improved massively with version 7, but I'm waiting for VMware to remove the Windows IaaS server requirement. I'm hoping that there will be a release that introduces a Linux-based IaaS appliance that we can easily deploy. I'm guessing this is in progress will be released at some point. When this is done, deploying vRA will be a lot simpler.

Let's wait and see what the keynotes reveals...