Virtually Speaking Podcast

This episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast features hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson joined by returning guest Pete Koehler for a deep dive into vSAN and the evolving conversation around application versus infrastructure high availability. Pete Koehler highlights recent updates to vSAN Ready Nodes that significantly reduce hardware requirements, including up to 67% less RAM and 50% fewer CPU cores for vSAN storage cluster hosts—bringing notable cost and efficiency benefits. From there, the discussion shifts to availability design strategies. The trio explores the differences between application-level availability (features built directly into the app, such as database clustering or microservices patterns) and infrastructure-level availability provided by the virtualization platform. They cover when each approach makes sense, how they complement each other, and why a balanced strategy delivers the best resilience. Whether you’re a VI admin, an architect, or an application owner, this episode breaks down the real-world tradeoffs and helps you understand where the platform should handle availability—and where the application should take the lead.  

The Virtually Speaking Podcast heads to VMware Explore 2025, where Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Dale Hassinger, winner of this year’s VMware Explore Hackathon.   Dale shares the story behind his team’s winning project: a Model Contextual Protocol (MCP) server built in PowerShell that connects to VMware products and leverages AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to automatically generate dashboards and reports. With AI doing most of the coding, their solution can transform VMware environment data into markdown tables, CSV files, or full graphical dashboards—without additional manual coding.   The team built the project in just two weeks and completed it during the intense four-hour hackathon event. Dale also gives credit to his teammates Don, Amos, Cosmin, and Willie, highlighting how the VMware community comes together through collaboration and innovation.   If you’re curious about how AI is reshaping development and what happens when creativity meets community at VMware Explore, this episode is for you.

At VMware Explore 2025, hosts Pete Flecha and Dave Linthicum sat down with Paul Lembo, CTO for Strategic Americas at Broadcom, to capture the energy and insights from the event. Paul reflects on conversations with customers, partners, and integrators, highlighting how VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is building trust by delivering on promises made the previous year.   One of the biggest crowd-pleasers was the free certification opportunities, where attendees who passed walked away with custom VCF sneakers. Paul shares why this matters for practitioners and how executive sponsorship plays a critical role in successful transformation. He also emphasizes the importance of VMware’s full-stack solutions in helping practitioners succeed, while Dave highlights VMware’s strategy of adding value without forcing customers to rip and replace existing systems.   This conversation showcases VMware by Broadcom’s continued focus on meeting customers where they are, building momentum in private cloud adoption, and enabling organizations to evolve with confidence.

At VMware Explore 2025, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Chandra Prathuri, Product Management, VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, to dive into the automation capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0   The conversation kicks off with an analogy of turtles and tunnels, pointing out how slow and fragmented traditional IT operations can feel. Chandra explains how VCF 9 is designed to eliminate those bottlenecks by giving admins AWS-like self-service experiences on-premises—without the risk of surprise bills.   Key topics include: Automation at scale: Streamlining workflows that typically span compute, storage, network, and security teams. Fleet management: Lifecycle management with minimal downtime, certificate management, and desired state configuration. Governance and cost control: Balancing agility with oversight and financial predictability. Kubernetes and AI readiness: Native Kubernetes support plus GPU time-slicing to optimize workloads (e.g., inference during the day, training at night).   This episode highlights how VCF 9 helps IT teams shift from slow, ticket-based processes to a modern, automated private cloud experience.   👉 Don’t miss future episodes—subscribe to the Virtually Speaking Podcast on YouTube and your favorite podcast platform!  

At VMware Explore 2025 (Day Three), hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Raj Bhat from AMD and Dave Morera from Broadcom to discuss a major announcement: VMware’s support for AMD Instinct MI350 GPUs for Private AI workloads.   Raj dives into the specs of the MI350—288GB of memory and nearly 20 petaflops of performance, packaged in a UBB form factor with eight GPUs connected together—making it ideal for running large AI models. Dave explains how this partnership expands customer hardware choices while delivering the same seamless Private AI software experience powered by VMware Cloud Foundation.   The conversation also highlights: How AMD’s ROCM (Radeon Open Compute Model) framework enables flexibility with AI models. VMware Cloud Foundation’s automation for deploying these GPUs. AMD’s open-source and free software approach, reducing subscription costs. Hardware availability through OEM partners like Supermicro and Dell, with both air-cooled and water-cooled options. Compatibility with both AMD and Intel CPUs.   This session showcases how VMware and AMD are working together to give customers more choice, efficiency, and scalability in Private AI.