The Virtually Speaking Podcast is back from VMware Explore 2025 with an inspiring conversation featuring Nick Kuhn.

Hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson dive into Nick’s incredible home lab journey—from starting with a single HPZ 440 workstation to building a massive 16-host environment capable of running large language models.

Nick shares how his passion for vSAN sparked the growth of his lab, how winning first place at the 2023 Explore Hackathon with an AI project fueled his expansion, and why he focused on NVIDIA RTX 3090s for the best price-performance. Today, his setup includes multiple quad-GPU systems and supports colleagues through Tanzu Platform, enabling shared workloads and demos.

The discussion explores:

How Nick evolved his lab from hobby to professional resource

Lessons learned with vSAN and GPU collections for AI workloads

Running local LLMs vs. relying on costly cloud subscriptions

The role of Tanzu in delivering a multi-tenant private AI environment

Whether you’re into home labs, AI infrastructure, or VMware tech, this episode shows how curiosity and community can scale into something extraordinary.

👉 Subscribe for more conversations from VMware Explore and beyond.