Nothing marks the start of quite Explore like the Hands-on Labs Command Center Wall!
Weeks before Explore happens, a small team of dedicated engineers begins designing and building the infrastructure monitoring. The dashboards created are then used to populate the Command Center Wall – these live dashboards monitor the usage, metrics and performance of the infrastructure – in real time! When you sit down to take a lab, your impact shows up on the wall!
This year, the Command Center Wall is showcasing the full power of VCF 9.1 – and there’s a lot to showcase.
A Living Dashboard for a Live Event
The Command Center Wall isn’t just eye candy. Every metric on those displays is pulling live data from the actual Hands-on Labs production environment. What you see is what’s real – if a host goes red, you’re seeing the actual state of the infrastructure. No smoke and mirrors, no synthetic data. Full transparency, live and at scale.
The team behind the wall begins building well before the doors open. Dashboards are architected, tuned, and sometimes built on-site during setup days to make sure everything tells the right story at the right scale. That flexibility – the ability to spin up or modify a dashboard on the fly to meet the demands of a live event – is exactly what the VCF 9.1 platform is designed to enable. It’s the kind of thing you can only appreciate when you’re watching it happen in a real production environment.
VCF 9.1 Takes Center Stage
This year the monitoring is showcasing VCF 9.1 across its full stack. Here’s what’s coming:
VCF Operations has been a staple of the Command Center Wall for several years, and 9.1 brings improvements to dashboards, data presentation, and customization that make it easier to surface the right metrics at the right time. Custom dashboards tailored to the event environment span partner cloud capacity, private cloud hosts, and everything in between – a showcase of just how flexible the platform is.
VCF Operations for Logs is now deeply integrated into the core Operations experience in 9.1, and the CCW puts that integration front and center. A dedicated Logs dashboard built specifically for the Command Center Wall surfaces log insights in a way that’s both visually compelling and operationally actionable – even for first-time viewers.
VCF Operations for Networks rounds out the observability story. At a conference of this scale, network visibility isn’t optional – it’s critical. Operations for Networks delivers end-to-end topology and performance insight, all feeding into the same monitoring fabric that powers the wall.
VCF Telemetry feeds the entire observability pipeline, collecting and forwarding the metrics and signals that everything else depends on. It’s the connective tissue that makes the rest of the stack coherent — the layer you don’t notice until it’s not there.
Newly added for this year are SSP and Memory Tiering:
Security Services Platform (SSP) brings the advanced security services layer of vDefend 9.1 to the Command Center Wall. SSP is integrated with NSX and hosts and manages a suite of security capabilities. These capabilities include Security Intelligence for distributed visibility, traffic flow analysis, and micro-segmentation policy recommendations; Network Detection and Response (NDR) for continuous threat monitoring using IDS/IPS and advanced threat analysis; Malware Prevention Service for file-level protection against known and zero-day threats; and Network Traffic Analysis for identifying anomalies and suspicious behavior across the network. Rounding it out is the Metrics feature, which collects point-in-time and time-series data.. At Explore, those metrics are feeding directly into the live dashboards on the wall – giving the Security Services Platform a natural home on the Command Center Wall display.
Memory Tiering is one of the more technically compelling additions in 9.1. By extending memory capacity across tiered storage, it allows the Hands-on Labs monitoring infrastructure to do more with the same physical footprint.
Come See It for Yourself
The Command Center Wall is worth a few minutes of your time at Explore. Stop by, take in the dashboards, and ask questions. The team that built it is there and happy to talk through what you’re seeing. It’s a rare opportunity to see an enterprise-scale VCF 9.1 deployment doing real work, in real time, at a real event.
See you at the wall.
