Feedback needed for the future of VCSIM

Last week, I had a chance to catchup with a couple of folks over in our Performance Engineering team to talk about VCSIM. For those of you who have not heard of VCSIM before or would like to know how to get started, I highly recommend you check out this article here and here for more details. We had a discussion on a variety of topics including how I and some of our customers are using VCSIM today.

As some of you already know, VCSIM is an internal tool originally developed by VMware Engineering for a very specific set of use cases, it was never intended to be used by our customers. Having said that, I think after talking to Engineering, they understood the value in having such a tool which could be useful to both our customers and partners. In fact, I have even shared a couple of use cases that I believe VCSIM can greatly benefit everyone:

• Exploring and learning about the vSphere API and the basic inventory hierarchy of vSphere objects
• Environment to develop and create various inventory reporting scripts (vCLI, PowerCLI, etc)
• Developing performance metric gathering tools
• Developing vSphere Web Client plugins and being able visualize large inventory of objects

There were some thoughts on how VCSIM could evolve over time from its current implementation as it was designed for a very specific purpose, but it was too early to tell and it would be based on some assumptions. Instead, I thought it might be useful to get feedback into Engineering so they could better understand how VCSIM was currently being used today. To help with this, I have created a very short survey below or you can also directly access it using the link here. Please take a few minutes to provide some feedback on how you currently use VCSIM today. Thanks in advance!

Additional VCSIM Resources:

• vCloud Director Simulator
• Simulating Performance Metrics using VCSIM