At this time last year, I was neck deep in Mastering vSphere 6. I’d agreed to work with my good friend Nick Marshall on this book as a way to gain some experience in writing a book and working with a publisher. It was both valuable and grueling – it gave me a chance to meet people in VMware’s engineering organisation that I wouldn’t have otherwise, but it also led to burning the candle at both ends for a number of months.

I agreed to do this knowing that I wanted to write a book on vRealize Automation. The experience (I assumed) would be invaluable when it came to my master work.

At VMworld, I got to talking with this guy by the name of Jad El-Zein. You’ve probably never heard of him – he’s a guy who occasionally does some interesting things with vRA. Turns out, he was keen to write a book also. We got to talking, and after a few drinks we agreed that we’d be far better off putting our heads together to write something as a team.

Fast forward a few months and here we are. We’ve just completed the onsite beta for vRA.Next. There are some seriously cool improvements, and I’m glad that we delayed writing the book until we had a new release to work with. There are some major changes that I can’t quite talk about yet, but which will be making their way into the book.

How cool are these mock ups? Serious motivation to get the content finished right there!

Now, down to business. A book is only as good as it’s content – this is where you come in. We had originally put together a ToC that was “functionally” based. Having seen what is coming, we decided that we should throw that away and start again.

Jad and I put our heads together and came up with the following outline…. it’s not quite comprehensive but it gives you some insight to what we’re working on. What I want to ask you is the following:

1. What have we missed?

2. What would you love to see us include?

Any feedback you have can be posted here or on twitter.

Grant