VMware's AI Integration Is Here—But Do Sysadmins Actually Want It?

VMware AI is officially a thing now. Not as a buzzword tossed into marketing slides, but as a growing set of features VMware is weaving into its core stack—starting with a chatbot inside vDefend called Intelligent Assist. It's supposed to make security operations smoother, help admins surface insights faster, and eventually plug into more parts of the VMware ecosystem. In other words, VMware wants to show it can keep up with an industry where AI is suddenly expected to be everywhere. But here's the plot twist: the people who actually run VMware environments every day aren't exactly throwing confetti. If anything, the reaction across the community has been a mix of suspicion, eye-rolling, and a sharp dose of reality about what admins actually want from AI tools—especially ones touching production systems. Before VMware AI becomes another check-the-box feature, it has to answer a tougher question: are sysadmins even asking for this? ## The First Wave of VMware AI: Intelligent Assist in vDefend Let's start with what VMware has actually shipped. VMware launched Intelligent Assist, a chatbot integrated into vDefend that uses AI to help teams handle security tasks such as analysis, correlation, and troubleshooting. It's SaaS-based, bundled with vDefend, and marketed as a way to simplify tasks that normally eat up time and attention. For VMware AI's first step, focusing on security actually makes sense. Security teams drown in logs, alerts, and anomalies. There's never enough time, and never enough people. A tool that helps translate messy information into something actionable can be valuable. Some practical things VMware AI claims to support: - Summarizing large or complex alert chains - Offering suggestions on likely root causes - Surfacing logs or telemetry without manual digging - Automating repetitive investigation tasks On paper, this all sounds perfectly reasonable. There's no question the security side of infrastructure is overloaded, and AI could realistically relieve some of that pressure. But the moment VMware AI hit the community, the mood turned fast. Admins weren't rejecting the idea of AI in security—just the idea of AI inside VMware. ## The Community Reaction: Cautious, Snarky, and Mostly Skeptical When someone asked the community about VMware AI capabilities, the responses came in hot. One sysadmin summed up the overall vibe in a single line: *"Why would I want a hallucinating thing directly in my control plane?"* It wasn't a lone concern. Another comment took a more sarcastic angle, saying LLMs might hallucinate less than upper management. It was funny, but underneath the joke was a real concern: sysadmins are not looking for an AI to take over tasks they already do well—especially if that AI could make mistakes that are expensive to fix. Some admins pushed back on the entire idea of pairing mission-critical systems with a generative model. The worry isn't abstract. VMware AI is SaaS-based, which means the assistant sits outside your environment. That brings obvious questions: - What data is being sent to the cloud? - How much context does VMware AI need to do its job? - Does it touch configurations, logs, or metadata that admins don't want to share? - How does this align with GDPR or internal compliance? One user joked they'd love to hand over all their configs and secrets to an external service—clearly pointing out the irony. VMware AI shows promise, sure, but security teams are trained to assume the worst until proven otherwise. Another theme in the conversation was simpler: **VMware AI solves problems admins already handle themselves.** Many pointed out that routine operations aren't the painful parts of running VMware environments. Admins already know how to dig into logs, run commands, or troubleshoot clusters. They've built workflows and scripts over years. They trust those far more than a bot. ## Where VMware AI Might Actually Shine Despite the skepticism, not every comment was doom and gloom. A VMware employee jumped in and hinted that the value of VMware AI isn't the chatbot—at least not directly. Instead, they pointed toward features like machine-learning-based log grouping in VMware Aria Operations, which admins already love. That's a key point: **Admins trust invisible AI more than conversational AI.** AI that quietly improves the product feels helpful. AI that inserts itself into the workflow as a chatbot feels intrusive. Right now, VMware AI seems most promising in places where humans struggle, such as: - Large-scale log clustering - Detecting unusual patterns across clusters - Providing early warning on failures - Suggesting remediation steps before outages - Filtering noise from massive telemetry streams These are tasks where humans can't realistically keep up. If VMware AI can make the platform smarter behind the scenes—rather than trying to become a pseudo-coworker—that's where it can build trust. It's also worth noting that documentation is where admins already use AI the most. Tools like GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity are already part of many admins' workflows—but unofficially. People use them to parse long VMware docs, debug errors, or find obscure configuration details faster. If VMware AI focused on being a smart, VMware-aware search layer instead of a chat-based execution layer, adoption would probably spike overnight. ## The Real Tension: AI vs. Admin Control The deeper issue behind the VMware AI backlash isn't the product itself—it's cultural. Sysadmins are wired to value precision, predictability, and absolute control. AI is wired to generate answers quickly, even if they're sometimes wrong. These two worldviews don't naturally fit. A few realities shape the resistance: **AI hallucinations are unacceptable in infrastructure.** A wrong answer in a chatbot is annoying. A wrong answer in a vSphere environment is a disaster. **Admins prefer deterministic tools.** If they can't predict behavior, they don't trust it. **Chatbots feel like solutions looking for problems.** Admins don't want a "friendlier interface." They want proven automation that doesn't guess. **Security and AI often feel incompatible.** The idea of feeding cluster details into a cloud model is a hard sell. Even if VMware AI matures into a solid product, VMware will have to navigate a community that's trained to be cautious—and for good reason. Infrastructure teams carry the burden of keeping everything alive. They don't get to be wrong. ## So… Does the Industry Really Want VMware AI? Here's where things get interesting. In public threads, admins often resist tools that look like they might automate their expertise. But in private, many already rely on AI daily—just not inside VMware. AI is already being used by: - Senior admins writing scripts faster - Engineers reviewing logs via general-purpose LLMs - Ops teams using AI summaries to speed up troubleshooting - Architects generating templates or YAML faster - Support teams searching massive documentation sets **The demand exists.** **But admins want AI as a helper, not a gatekeeper.** And that's the challenge VMware AI faces. It needs to strike a balance between usefulness and restraint. It needs to support workflows without trying to replace the human judgment that keeps infrastructures stable. If VMware treats AI as an augmentation layer—something that enhances visibility, speeds up triage, and makes sense of chaos—it'll win over skeptics. If instead it tries to push chatbots into every corner of the platform, adoption will stall. VMware AI is still in its early chapters, and the company has time to get it right. The good news is that the community hasn't rejected AI outright—they've rejected chat-first AI that jumps too far, too fast. And that's fixable. ## Final Takeaway VMware AI is real, and it's growing. The company is betting big on Intelligent Assist and AI-powered workflows across vDefend, operations, and eventually more areas of the stack. But the reaction from sysadmins shows VMware can't assume enthusiasm. These users want AI that stays in the background, enhances tools they already trust, and keeps security airtight. If VMware AI evolves in that direction, it could become a genuinely helpful layer of intelligence on top of the ecosystem. If not, well… admins have survived long before AI showed up, and they won't hesitate to ignore tools that don't earn their trust.