Virtually Speaking Podcast

Tigera is the creator of Calico, one of the most widely deployed Kubernetes networking and security platforms in the world, powering millions of Kubernetes nodes globally. In this conversation, Ratan explains why enterprise customers are demanding more advanced networking, observability, and microsegmentation capabilities for modern Kubernetes environments — especially as AI workloads continue to grow.

The discussion covers Calico integration with VMware Kubernetes Service, platform engineering, service mesh, encryption, multi-cluster networking, and how organizations can simplify Kubernetes operations while improving security and performance. They also dive into one of the hottest topics at KubeCon: AI agents. Ratan shares how Tigera is thinking about agent governance, observability, authorization, and securing autonomous AI workloads across hybrid environments.

If you’re building modern Kubernetes platforms, securing AI infrastructure, or operating cloud native applications at scale, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

At KubeCon 2026, Pete Flecha and Jad El-Zein sat down with Mark Lewis, VP of Application Services at Canonical, to discuss the growing partnership between Canonical and Broadcom.

The conversation explores how enterprises are simplifying cloud native adoption with chiseled containers, reducing operational overhead, improving security posture, and accelerating AI initiatives inside private cloud environments. Mark shares how Canonical is helping organizations move faster with production-ready, audit-ready container images, while VMware Cloud Foundation provides the operational platform enterprises already trust.

They also dive into GPU-optimized AI images, Kubernetes operational simplicity, telco use cases, and why making AI infrastructure consumable is one of the biggest challenges organizations face today.

If you’re interested in Kubernetes, AI infrastructure, platform engineering, private cloud, or operational simplicity at scale, this is a great conversation from the KubeCon show floor.

At KubeCon 2026, Jad El-Zein and Frank Denneman sit down with Jeff Chapman from Vectara to discuss how enterprise RAG, vector databases, and AI agents are evolving inside modern private AI environments.

The conversation explores how Vectara integrates with VMware Private AI Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation to help organizations scale AI applications securely across millions of documents while maintaining role-based access control, multimodal ingestion, and sovereign data protections. They also dive into enterprise search, hallucination prevention, citations, agent orchestration, long-running AI agents, GPU efficiency, and why on-prem AI infrastructure is becoming increasingly important for enterprises building production AI systems.

Topics include:

Enterprise RAG vs traditional search

Vector databases and multimodal AI

Role-based access control for AI

AI agents and orchestration

Sovereign AI and air-gapped environments

GPU utilization and scaling AI workloads

VMware Private AI Foundation integration

On-prem AI economics and token costs

#KubeCon #AI #PrivateAI #VMware #VCF #RAG #Agents #Kubernetes #VectorDatabase #EnterpriseAI

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 introduces some of the biggest changes to vSAN in years, and in this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, Pete and John sit down with Pete Koehler, Product Marketing Engineer for vSAN, to break it all down.

 

The conversation dives into how vSAN is becoming simpler to operate, more efficient at scale, and better aligned with modern application and cyber recovery requirements. Pete explains the new Auto RAID capability, the redesigned effective capacity model, enhancements to global deduplication and compression, and how vSAN is reducing operational complexity through more automated, system-managed behavior.

 

The team also explores native S3-compatible object storage for AI and modern applications, support for QLC drives in cyber recovery environments, improvements for migrations between OSA and ESA clusters, and expanded encryption support across storage clusters.

 

Topics include:

• Auto RAID and simplified storage policy management

• Effective capacity and easier capacity planning

• Global deduplication and new compression improvements

• Zstandard (ZSTD) compression for structured data workloads

• Native S3-compatible object storage in vSAN

• QLC storage support for cyber recovery use cases

• OSA to ESA migration flexibility

• Remote datastore enhancements and encryption support

• Cyber recovery and disaggregated storage clusters

• vSAN security improvements in VCF 9.1

Links Mentioned
More Capacity with VMware vSAN Compression and Global Deduplication in VCF 9.1
https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/07/vsan-compression-and-global-deduplication-in-vcf-9-1/
   
Cost-Efficient VMware vSAN ReadyNodes Certified for Cyber Recovery Deployments
https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/07/vsan-readynodes-cyber-recovery/
   
Auto-RAID in VMware vSAN for VCF 9.1 - Comprehensive System-Managed Data Resilience
https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/08/auto-raid-in-vsan-for-vcf-9-1/
   
Simplifying Storage with the New Effective Capacity View in VMware vSAN for VCF 9.1
https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/11/effective-capacity-view-in-vsan-for-vcf-9-1/
   
Greater Flexibility and Security with VMware vSAN Storage Clusters in VCF 9.1
https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/12/vsan-storage-clusters-in-vcf-9-1/

Behind every feature in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is the work that makes it actually run at scale. In this episode, Pete and John sit down with Emad Younis to unpack the details practitioners care about most.

From fleet architecture and latency planning to sizing at massive scale, Emad breaks down how to think about designing VCF environments in the real world. They also cover the shift from SDDC Manager to VCF Operations, how to approach upgrades without going all-in on day one, and what it really means to operate across thousands of hosts.

If you’re planning, designing, or scaling VCF, this is the episode that connects the dots.