VMworld 2012 Predictions

VMworld is just around the corner and for those in the server / virtualization space, its a pretty exciting time to see what the market leader is doing next. The market is getting more crowded with other hypervisors and some of them are challenging VMware more than others. Yes, even I will admit that Hyper-V is making some noise. A lot of talk within companies about Microsoft’s licensing advantage and features that are “good enough” for most workloads, its a conversation that many shops will be having when that VMware contract comes up for renewal.

But don’t for a second count VMware down and out. They are innovating left and right and I think still have a commanding lead on all the others in the feature department. And we are in a week of announcements next week showing why VMware will continue their lead.

Here are my predections of what we will see.

  • vRAM is dead. Its been rumored already so nothing big here. They’ve also rumored a hosted vCloud of their own and Avamar being put into the hypervisor.
  • vCloud 2.0. Let’s face it, we know that there are some issues with vCloud. Yeah, it works great for most thing. But there is a lot of room for improvement and some of the simple things you can do in vSphere that you can’t do in vCloud. For example, snapshots. Seriously VMware, this was stupid to leave out. I believe that they will be fixing this as well as some other features such as disk choices for VMs, hopefully some reservation settings and if they pulled out a new HTML5 console app, it would really make my day.
  • Virtual Phone for iOS. Last year with the Horizon applications we saw a virtual phone for Andriod, but nothing for the iOS devices out there. VMware has released a lot of iOS apps over the last year and I’m hoping they’ve come up with a partnership with Apple that allows them to put the virtual phone on iOS.
  • One pane of glass to rule them all. I know that managing multiple hypervisors is typically a dirty word at VMware. They acknowledge that there is competition, but make it sound like they dont’ want to deal with the lower life forms. Well, guess what, users don’t give a damn. There has been a very strong market for the past couple of years for companies to release a control center for any virtualization environment. AWS, VMware, Hyper-V, OpenStack, KVM, Xen, etc etc etc. Its time for VMware to play ball. I realize that’s the DynamicOps purchase is still pretty new, but I could see VMware announcing that they will have the one pane of glass to rule all of your virtualization platforms. Something I think we would all welcome as things get more diverse in our environments.

I’m excited for the conference and look forward to seeing the various vendors, sessions, and the Hands On Labs. I’ll be at VMunderground helping out the crew as a door man in the beginning. But I’ll be around for many beers and hopefully some great conversations.

Looking forward to seeing everyone!