VMworld 2013 Predictions

Another VMworld is upon us and its time for my VMworld 2013 predictions. I’m going to leave out some of the gimme predictions of NSX being released and a new vSphere / ESXi / vCloud. But I’ll go into the some of the features that I think they’ll have. It should be noted, the company I work for is not a part of any beta trials at the moment nor have I had any preview as a vExpert (though one would be nice! *hint hint*).

  1. One Pane of Glass to rule them all Yes, I made this one last year. But this year, I think we’ll actually see it. vSphere will be able to control at least OpenStack and maybe Hyper-V from the one pane of glass.
  2. vSphere Fat Client Dies This is the year that I think we’ll see the death of the fat client. Its 2013, the web seems to be catching on and I think it will be around for a while. I would throw in the death of the dedicated standalone vSphere server on windows, but I don’t think the appliance is ready for that yet. Upgrades are on the VCSA are still pretty painful.
  3. HTML5 web console Please make this one happen VMware. The VMRC that works in Firefox and certain versions of IE on windows only is annoying as hell for vCloud environments. This should be a no brainer seeing as there have been several flings from your labs group that have pretty much shown that this can be done. Let me control things from any browser on any platform.
  4. The year of the desktop…according to VMware Ok, this is a gimme I guess. We’ll see another new enhancement to View / Horizon / Whatever they rebrand it to this year and I still won’t give a crap because its desktop support and I’m not interested in that at all.
  5. PuppetLabs is features in the keynote. If you have been paying any attention at all, you’ll know that Nick Weaver and his band of merry programmers have been quickly automating the heck out of various appliances behind the scenes at vCHS using Puppet. I don’t think we’ll necessarily see Nick on stage, but we’ll see Puppet get some air time showing off the enhanced integration they will now have. I wouldn’t be surprised if a puppet agent is available within the ESXi 5.5 build. This one is probably the biggest stretch but I know I’d be really happy to see it.

Well, there you have it, my 5 predictions for VMworld 2013. Let’s see how wrong I am this year!