It's a truism that professional animator, filmmaker and professor Eric Patrick knows well. His recent work includes Retro Cognition, an 18-minute film that took five years to complete. But a data disaster two decades ago on a nationally syndicated children's show almost derailed Patrick's professional career. That experience led to an overhauled data protection process — and a poignant lesson to share with his students.

Next week marks the start of VMworld 2014, what's sure to be a whirlwind look at the latest and greatest in cloud and virtualization software. IT pros in attendance can expect to learn where the virtualization leader is headed and its vision for virtually managed data centers, among other topics. Here are some wishlist news that the InfoWorld team hopes to see:

According to a recent SpiceWorks report, three-quarters of businesses surveyed already use virtual machines. But for those yet to make the leap, what are the virtualization issues to look out for? And as all IT pros know, the landscape is constantly shifting and new solutions come up all the time. As IT infrastructure becomes increasingly divided among physical, virtual and cloud solutions, how can IT managers ensure their systems are working optimally and data is protected across multiple platforms?

As more companies invest in virtual machines, IT pros are presented with the need to integrate these virtualization environments into the data protection plan. The trouble is that while the data is usually backed up, often the hypervisor configuration is forgotten.