I hope that Tesla does extremely well with this move. Removing some gravity out of silicon valley could help spark innovation in other parts of our country that area far more amenable to innovation.

"all but the esxi hosts require AD integration for authentication and vC"
You can use local accounts for authentication and AD is not required. With the introduction of single sign on in 5.1 your identity sources for authentication could be the local OS and LDAP server or any of the other sources SSO supports.

I would love to see the entire stack as drop in appliances as well. VMware has been moving toward this more and more. However, I think this is a two edged sword. The Windows admins of the world are comfortable with MSSQL and W2K8. When you dump them with a SUSE Linux or Redhat distro with embedded databases like vPostgres or Oracle, they tend to throw caution to the wind and not study up on how to maintain such systems.

I manage a cloud with nearly 5000 VMs. In a class today we spun up about 350 on the fly so that engineers could have reference configs available to do their jobs. I'm thinking we'll hit around 6000 VMs by the new year.