Unexplored Territory

In Episode 129, Anoop Gunturi, vSAN Platform PM, joins me to explore how the vSAN roadmap focuses on lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the VCF platform. We dive into Enhanced Compression, QLC support for various workloads, vSAN over Fibre Channel, and various key architectural updates designed to optimize storage efficiency! This is a must-listen episode.

• Blog - Lower resource requirements for vSAN
• Anoop's Explore 2026 session - Beat the Hardware Crunch: Lowering TCO with the vSAN Platform
• VCF Sizer - https://vcf.broadcom.com/tools/pcsizer/

DISCLAIMER: This discussion outlines our general product direction and is for informational purposes only. It contains our current intentions, but is not a binding commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any specific feature, code, or functionality by any set date or version. Development, releases, and timing remain entirely at our discretion and may change based on business needs, feedback, or technical feasibility. Do not rely on this roadmap when making purchasing or investment decisions.

I was invited to present a session at ITQon last month, and I decided to bring my portable podcast recording gear to record a few clips with various people from ITQ. As most of the attendees work with VMware solutions and services on a daily basis, I wanted to talk about things they've implemented, seen, and/or experienced.

One thing I want to emphasize, Jeff announced the ITQ Cloud Platform. A managed VCF solution leveraging hardware from local bare metal providers. Available in the Netherlands first, but branching out to other European countries fast. Providing a true sovereign VCF based private cloud platform to all customers!

As mentioned in the intro, this episode is not sponsored by ITQ and neither am I affiliated in any shape or form. I hope you enjoy the conversation with Johan, Jeff, Toine, DJ, Florian, and Paul!

I bumped into Drew Nielsen at Explore in Las Vegas and we briefly discussed the overhauled VCDX Program. Not only did the name change from VMware Certified Design Expert to VMware Certified Distinguished Expert, the whole program has been overhauled with job specific tracks for the various personas. Where the focus was on architects in the past, Broadcom now made the top tier certificationt track accessible for support engineers, administrators, and of course still for architects. Besides sharing the details of the renewed VCDX program, Drew also discusses what has changed for the VCAP exams. If you are interested in getting certified, this is a must listen! Oh, and before I forget, the price of the VCDX exam has been lowered to 250 USD from 995 (and 3000 USD before that).

I flew out to Las Vegas this week to present a few sessions at Explore 2026! I brought my mobile podcast recording kit for the first time and decided to record some clips with various people I ran into at the event. I hope you appreciate the conversations with folks like Alan Renouf, Pete Flecha, William Lam, Frank Denneman, and many more! Make sure to watch some of the recordings of the Explore sessions my guests hosted:

• Frank's Models in Minutes
• Alan and William's Tips and Tricks for running 9.1 in your homelab
• Iwan's Full Stack Troubleshooting
• Brad's Full Stack Engineering
• Duncan's Four Prod Ready VCF 9.1 Storage Capabilities
• Keith's From Gatekeeper to Enabler

I noticed a blog post about a new fling called VCF Inspector last week, so I had to invite the author Alan Renouf to the show to talk us through it. VCF Inspector, in my opinion, is one of those tools that will be very valuable for everyone working with VCF, but especially for consultants and people managing many different environments. Just listen to the episode, and download the tool via the link in the blog post!

For me personally, VMware Explore is the event of the year and a very exciting (and stressful) time. I asked Nikki Sherin from the Explore team to talk us through what we can expect at Explore 2026, and I also asked my good friends William Lam, Alan Renouf, and Pete Flecha to explain to us what excites them most about the event. It was a fantastic conversation and I am definitely looking forward to meeting up with everyone at the event again.

• My Favorite Sessions: ⁠https://event.vmware.com/my/widget/vmware/explore2026lv/1784640936449001Ii9L⁠
• Hackathon: https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2026/06/26/vmwarecode-hackathon-for-explore-las-vegas/

• Schedule Builder: https://event.vmware.com/flow/vmware/explore2026lv/content 

• Living on the edge - https://event.vmware.com/flow/vmware/explore2026lv/content/page/catalog?tab.sessioncatalogtabs=1747347809815001igUo&search=CLOB1260LV

For this episode I invited Iwan Rahabok to talk us through the recent announcement of the 5th edition of the IT Ops Management Guidebook. As I mentioned during this episode, this isn't just a book, this is a Resource Kit!

What changed?

• 1000+ pages, and 4 parts. Lots of additional content & corrections compared to the 4th edition 2 years ago.

• Deeper. More technical.

• Leveling up to support private cloud architect.

• A booklet written for higher up management chain.

• New troubleshooting flows. Done in DrawIO so you can tailor for your needs

• Two brand new calculators

• VCF Ops vCommunity adapters. Built by Onur

• An agentic AI webiste: https://isvara.io/ built by Samir.

What does not change:

• Still free.

• Still editable. So you can customize to your own organisation

Download in the usual place: https://broadcom.ent.box.com/v/OpsYourWorld

I read a few articles the last couple of months on the topic of VCF Edge by Dhruv Tyagi , and with the 9.1 release there were a couple of interesting posts about Zero Touch Provisioning, so it was time to invite him to the podcast and explore what VCF Edge is all about. Of course we also touch on things like Zero Touch Provisioning and how it helps customers deploy and manage thousands of hosts across countless locations. A very unique solution for a very specific problem!

Want to know more, these were some of the documents, blogs, and demos discussed during this episode:

VCF Edge:

• VCF Edge Design Library
  
• VCF Edge Design Blueprint for Manufacturing
  
• VCF Edge Design Blueprint for Defense

ZTP:

• Blog - Zero Touch Provisioning: Activating Edge Sites with VMware Cloud Foundation Edge 9.1
  
• Demo Video - Zero Touch Provisioning: Activating Edge Sites with VCF Edge 9.1
  
• Tech Docs for ZTP

With VCF 9.1 the name of VMware Live Recovery, or Site Recovery Manager, seems to have changed to VCF Protection and Recovery. In this episode Velina explains how this platform provides administrators the ability to recover workloads from different types of scenarios. Whether you deleted a VM (operational recovery), lost a whole datacenter (disaster recovery), or had a security breach and found data encrypted (ransomware recovery), VCF Protection and Recovery has an end-to-end solution for you!

Discussed topics:

• Ransomware Recovery Demo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFjSCyLP384
• Cyber resilience in 9.1 - https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/05/announcing-vcf-9-1-modern-private-cloud-built-for-efficiency-and-resilience/

VCF Native S3 Object Storage is a major feature that was announced with VCF 9.1. Pete Koehler introduced it in episode 118 and I wanted to explore what it is all about in this episode with Rakesh.

Rakesh goes over what was announced with 9.1, what the timelines look like, discusses the use cases for the platform, and reveals what you can expect in the (near) future.

All the topics and links discussed can be found here:

• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/13/native-s3-compatible-object-storage-in-vmware-vsan-for-vcf-9-1/
• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/05/announcing_vsan_in_vcf_9-1/

Disclaimer: VCF Native S3 Object Storage has not been released yet, it has only been announced. As Rakesh has mentioned, the plan is to release it in a future patch release as a tech preview, followed by an "MVP" release after that. As always, there's no commitment to any timeline or delivery of any feature at this stage.