We just finished Explore in Las Vegas, and the various local Explore On Tour events are literally around the corner. I will most likely be in London, Frankfurt, and potentially Paris myself. It looks like Joe Baguley will also be at all of those events delivering the keynote! Why should you go? Well, listen to the episode to find out. We start out with a brief conversation with Joe, and then have Frank Denneman, Martin Hosken, and Lars Fiechtner joining to provide their insights! My call to action, if you are planning on attending, register as soon as registration is open as London sold out fast, and so did the UK VMUG the day after! Listen to the episode on Spotify (bit.ly/3VEnWLw), Apple (bit.ly/4pawc3l), or via the embedded player below or your podcast app of choice!
#101 – Discussing VCF 9.0 and Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA enhancements with Frank Denneman!
It was time to get Frank Denneman back on the show to discuss the enhancements introduced in VCF 9 and Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. Frank goes over all new functionality and all the enhancements like Agent Builder etc. Frank also mentioned various must-attend sessions at Explore, register now, as these will fill up fast:
- Chris Wolf, keynote and breakout
- Shawn Kelly and Justin Murray: Accelerating AI Workloads
- Frank’s AI/ML sessions!
You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you find your podcasts! Of course, you can also simply use the embedded player below.
#100 – What is the Google Cloud VMware Engine all about? Featuring Sai Gopalan and Ken Bocchino
Episode 100, YESSSS! Finally, we managed to get there. For this episode, I invited two Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) product managers to explain what GCVE is all about. We had Dr. Wade Holmes on the show, 84 episodes ago, to introduce GCVE, so it was time to re-introduce GCVE and discuss the current solution, and the benefits it brings with for instance the flexibility in node types, bring your own licensing, disaster recovery, networking, and much more. Ken and Sai had some interesting stories, so make sure to pay close attention! Listen via the embedded player below, or simply go to your favorite podcast player and find the episode there! (Spotify, Apple)
Where is the vSAN Snapmanager Appliance with 9.0?
I was talking to my colleague Paudie and he mentioned various folks were having problems finding the vSAN Snapmanager Appliance for vSAN / VCF / vSphere 9.0. The appliance used to be stored on the Broadcom Support portal under VMware vSAN >> Drivers & Tools, but it is no longer there.
This is not by mistake. Some may have heard about this, others may have skipped over it, but VMware Live Recovery, vSphere Replication, and vSAN Data Protection (which includes the Snapmanager Appliance) have all converged into a single appliance to make your life easier! This means that if you want to enable vSAN Data Protection, you now need to download the VMware Live Recovery Appliance, specifically version 9.0.3.0 or later.
My favorite VMware Explore 2025 sessions!
Yes, it is that time of the year again… VMware Explore season! As I write this, I am in the middle of developing the content for Explore, as I have two sessions approved myself. I created a so-called targeted agenda, so if you want to attend any of the below sessions, just go here.
The two sessions I am presenting can be found here. But for those who don’t want to click, they are:
- Three Times the Performance, Half the Latency: VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture Deep Dive for VMware Geeks [CLOB1067LV] Featuring Pete Koehler and Duncan Epping
- Six Innovations Redefining Storage and Disaster Recovery for VMware Cloud Foundation [CLOB1028LV] Featuring Rakesh Radhakrishnan and Duncan Epping
If you are attending Explore, and are planning on attending those sessions, make sure to register as soon as you can as they were “sold out” in previous years!
Now, for the rest of the content catalog, these are the sessions I hope to be able to attend:
- Deploying Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Lab [CLOB1201LV] hosted by Alan Renouf and William Lam
- The Isolated Clean Room Blueprint for On-Premises Based Cyber Recoveries [CLOB1267LV] hosted by Michael McLaughlin
- A Deep Dive into Memory Tiering with NVMe [CLOB1122LV] hosted by Dave Morera
- Bridging the Gap: Managing Virtual Machines in a Kubernetes World [CLOB1938LV] hosted by Kat Brookfield
- Design and Architect: Multi-cluster Management for Kubernetes at Scale with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 [CLOB1471LV] hosted by Kris Inglis and Hugo Phan
- 10 Amazing New Things with VMware Live Recovery [CLOB1943LV] hosted by Jatin Jindal and Nabil Quadri
- Building Secure Private AI Deep Dive [INVB1432LV] hosted by Chris McCain
- 5 Key Capabilities of Next-Gen Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery with vSAN for All VCF Workloads [CLOB1265LV] hosted by Rakesh Radhakrishnan and Sazzala Reddy
- Design and Architect: Best Practices for Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 [CLOB1427LV] hosted by Prak Kalra and Sushil Suvarna
- Design and Architect: Managing and Operating at Scale with VCF 9.0 [CLOB1487LV] hosted by Ivaylo Ivanov and Michael Kolos
- Real-World Lessons in Rightsizing VMware Cloud Foundation for On-Premises AI Workloads [INVB1300LV] hosted by Frank Denneman and Johan van Amersfoort
If you feel that a session is missing, feel free to leave a comment!