Virtually Speaking Podcast

AI investment is accelerating, but how do organizations move beyond spending on AI to actually measuring its business value?

In this episode of the Virtually Speaking podcast, recorded at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and Jad El-Zein are joined by J.R. Stormont from the Linux Foundation’s Tokenomics Foundation and Raj, Head of ValueOps at Broadcom, to explore the emerging discipline of Tokenomics.

Tokenomics goes far beyond counting tokens. With token consumption representing only a portion of the total cost of AI, organizations need a more comprehensive approach to understanding infrastructure costs, model selection, governance, and measurable business outcomes.

The conversation explores how enterprises can optimize AI investments by connecting technical efficiency to business value, selecting the right models for different workloads, and establishing governance frameworks that balance cost, security, data sovereignty, and compliance.

What does it take to build, manage, and scale Kubernetes in the enterprise?

Recorded live at VMware Explore 2026, this episode of the Virtually Speaking podcast welcomes Adam Tucker and May Large from MomentumAI to share their real-world experiences with enterprise Kubernetes, platform engineering, and VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS).

Drawing on their experience with Red Hat OpenShift and large-scale application environments, they discuss the operational challenges of managing Kubernetes at scale, the importance of declarative automation with Cluster API (CAPI), and the considerations involved in evaluating and adopting new platforms.

The conversation also explores practical approaches to migrating containerized workloads, simplifying Kubernetes operations, and enabling infrastructure and platform engineering teams to work more effectively together.

Whether you’re exploring VKS, modernizing your Kubernetes environment, or building a platform engineering strategy, this episode offers practical insights and lessons learned from the field.

AI is fundamentally changing the cybersecurity landscape, accelerating vulnerability discovery, enabling attackers to chain exploits, and forcing organizations to rethink traditional approaches to security and patch management.

Recorded live at VMware Explore 2026, the Virtually Speaking podcast welcomes Bob Plankers and Manish Gaur for a conversation about the evolving threat landscape, AI-powered vulnerability detection, and how VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is helping organizations strengthen their security posture.

The discussion explores how Broadcom is leveraging AI to analyze millions of lines of source code, why traditional CVSS-based vulnerability prioritization may no longer be sufficient, and how a shift toward monthly security patches is changing the way organizations approach lifecycle management.

The conversation also examines the importance of reducing attack surfaces, accelerating patch adoption, and leveraging capabilities such as snapshots, live patching, microsegmentation, and vDefend to improve cyber resilience.

Key Topics:

* How AI is transforming vulnerability discovery and exploitation
* Broadcom’s use of AI for proactive product security
* Why vulnerability chaining challenges traditional CVSS scoring
* Monthly security patches and the need for faster lifecycle management
* Reducing attack surfaces and managing open-source security risks
* Using snapshots and recovery capabilities to reduce patching risk
* Strengthening security through Zero Trust, microsegmentation, and vDefend

What happens when traditional enterprise automation meets agentic AI?

Recorded live at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome Sean Roberts to Virtually Speaking to explore how Automic Automation, an advanced service for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), is helping enterprises orchestrate complex business workloads while preparing for the next generation of AI-driven automation.

From financial services and manufacturing to enterprise applications like SAP and Oracle, organizations rely on automation platforms to execute millions of critical jobs with reliability, scalability, and auditability.

But as enterprises begin introducing AI agents into these environments, new challenges emerge around governance, observability, explainability, and cost control.

Sean explains how Automic Automation provides the foundation for a hybrid approach, combining deterministic workflows with emerging agentic AI capabilities through an intelligent control plane.

In this episode, we discuss:

* Enterprise Workload Orchestration: How Automic Automation manages hundreds of millions of job executions across complex enterprise environments.
* Scalability and Reliability: Supporting tens of thousands of agents, high-throughput execution, failover, and 24/7 operations.
* Deterministic vs. Agentic AI: Why predictable, auditable automation remains essential as organizations adopt AI-driven workflows.
* Intelligent Control Planes: Bringing governance, orchestration, and control to hybrid automation environments.
* Observability and Explainability: Tracking workflow execution, AI decisions, token consumption, and operational performance.
* Private AI and VMware Cloud Foundation: Why data sovereignty, on-premises inference, and AI factories are becoming increasingly important.
* AI Economics and ROI: How enterprises can introduce agentic AI incrementally while maintaining control over cost and business outcomes.

Discover how Automic Automation and VMware Cloud Foundation can work together to provide a scalable, secure foundation for enterprise automation and AI.

Network performance issues don’t stop at the edge of your virtual infrastructure. From physical switches and WAN connections to public clouds and SaaS applications, understanding the entire network is critical to maintaining application performance and accelerating troubleshooting.

Recorded live at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome back Alec Pinkham to discuss the latest innovations in VMware Network Observability and how it extends visibility beyond VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

Alec shares how new capabilities are making network operations quieter, easier, and smarter through intelligent alerting, AI-assisted root cause analysis, and deeper integration with VCF Operations for Networks.

In this episode, we explore:

    ●    Intelligent Alerting: Reduce alarm fatigue by identifying root causes, suppressing redundant alerts, and delivering actionable insights to network operators.
    ●    End-to-End Network Visibility: Extend observability beyond NSX and the virtual environment to physical infrastructure, WAN connections, ISPs, public clouds, and SaaS applications.
    ●    AI-Powered Operations: Accelerate troubleshooting with AI-assisted root cause analysis, continuous testing, and intelligent network configuration management.
    ●    Physical Network Integration: Gain visibility into the physical infrastructure supporting VCF, with monitoring capabilities spanning more than 9,000 certified network devices.
    ●    VCF Operations Integration: Bring network performance data alongside application and host telemetry to improve troubleshooting and collaboration between cloud and network teams.
    ●    Proactive Vulnerability Management: Explore how agentic AI can help identify device vulnerabilities, configuration issues, and remediation opportunities.
    ●    Performance Baselining: Understand why establishing network performance baselines before upgrading to VCF 9.1 helps validate successful deployments.
    ●    Predictive Network Analytics: Discover how anomaly detection and intelligent alarm correlation help operators identify emerging issues and respond faster.

Whether you’re managing a VMware Cloud Foundation environment, operating a hybrid cloud, or troubleshooting complex enterprise networks, this conversation highlights why complete network visibility matters more than ever.

The key takeaway: Network observability isn’t just about understanding what’s happening inside your virtual environment. It’s about knowing where your traffic goes, what it depends on, and how to quickly identify problems across the entire network.

Moving to VMware Cloud Foundation doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. But how do you decide what to keep, what to retire, and where to begin?

Recorded at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson join Chris Kusek, host of Architects Edge, and David Linthicum to discuss the architecture decisions behind a practical VCF adoption strategy. The conversation explores brownfield deployments, hardware compatibility, storage flexibility, and balancing existing investments with the need to reduce technical debt.

They also discuss how memory tiering can help address DRAM constraints and why private AI projects should start with a useful business outcome, an appropriate model, and a clear path to scale.

In this episode:
• Revisit assumptions about VCF requirements and deployment options
• Assess existing infrastructure and build a phased migration plan
• Decide when hardware reuse makes sense and when retirement delivers more value
• Explore memory tiering and capabilities you may already own
• Start private AI use cases on CPUs and scale as demand grows

Rising memory costs and unpredictable AI spending are changing how organizations plan their infrastructure. How can IT teams control costs while building for what comes next?

Live from VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and Jad El-Zein welcome Scott Patti and David Tareen from Lenovo to discuss memory tiering, hybrid AI, and the infrastructure behind VMware Cloud Foundation.

The conversation explores how memory tiering helps address DRAM cost pressures, why tokenomics extends beyond the price of tokens, and how Lenovo Hybrid AI Factory complements VMware AI Factory with infrastructure sizing, stack certification, and deployment services.

They also discuss matching AI inference workloads to CPUs and GPUs, bringing enterprise and AI workloads into a familiar operating model, and Lenovo’s Top Choice Express program for getting infrastructure into customers’ hands faster.

A cracked floor tile. A massive hole. A soldier holding up a rack carrying an entire military base’s communications. What could possibly go wrong?

Recorded live at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome returning guest Jeremy Wright for another edition of Fire, Flood & Blood, where IT practitioners share their unforgettable stories from the field.

Jeremy takes us back to 2007, working as a civilian sysadmin on a U.S. military base in Iraq. An attempt to repair cracked tiles turned into excavation beneath a running data center, leaving a critical communications rack dangerously close to collapse. And that wasn’t the only challenge: an Abrams tank took out aerial fiber, and torrential rain poured onto server racks.

It’s a memorable reminder that infrastructure reliability depends on more than the equipment inside the rack.

AI is changing how cyberattacks are built, how they spread, and how long they can hide. Is your cyber resilience strategy keeping up?

Recorded at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and Jad El-Zein welcome Belu back to the Virtually Speaking Podcast to discuss why perimeter security, immutable backups, and more security tools alone aren’t enough.

We explore how AI enables adaptive attacks, accelerates vulnerability chaining, and lowers the barrier for attackers. Belu explains the importance of detecting and containing lateral movement, addressing fileless threats, and bringing security, compliance, and recovery together through VMware Cloud Foundation.

The conversation also covers an often-overlooked challenge: recovering from a known-good backup so you can restore operations without reintroducing the threat.

You encrypt data at rest and in transit. But what protects it while your applications are using it?

Recorded at VMware Explore 2026, this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast features Bob Plankers and Nick Ford for a practical look at confidential computing and protecting data in use.

Learn how confidential VMs use Intel and AMD hardware technologies to isolate workloads and help protect sensitive memory from privileged access, including access by infrastructure administrators. The conversation covers trusted execution environments, where confidential computing makes sense, performance considerations, and the operational tradeoffs discussed at Explore.

Bob and Nick also explain how existing applications can move into confidential VMs without code changes, and why planning for attestation, key delivery, and data access matters just as much as enabling the technology.

What if your next troubleshooting session started with a conversation instead of digging through logs?

Recorded at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome Victoria and Dave Linthicum to explore how agentic AI can help VMware Cloud Foundation administrators troubleshoot issues, simplify reporting, and get more done.

The conversation examines VCF Intelligent Assist, private AI services, and how AI agents can use logs, telemetry, and VMware knowledge base articles to help identify root causes and guide administrators through resolution. They also discuss connecting existing orchestration workflows through Model Context Protocol (MCP), keeping data on premises, and building in guardrails with human oversight.

Hear how these capabilities can help administrators build their skills, why some use cases can start on CPUs, and what customers should discuss with their account teams to get started.

Can AI help defenders as much as it helps attackers? At VMware Explore 2026, Bob Plankers joins Pete Flecha and John Nicholson to discuss how organizations can use AI to strengthen security while putting practical guardrails around agentic AI.

Bob shares insights from customer conversations, discusses the security focus in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, and explains why patching, isolation, and recovery remain essential. We also explore Secure Boot certificate changes, the “time travel” issue affecting some upgrade paths, and why unnecessary infrastructure dependencies can create security and availability risks.

Bob’s advice: keep it simple, keep it patched, and think through what happens when a connected system goes down or gets compromised.

What happens when AI becomes a new way to interact with your infrastructure?

At VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and guest host Dave Linthicum talk with Scott Rosenberg about agentic observability on VMware Cloud Foundation. Scott explains how agents and MCP servers could bring insights from multiple tools into a more useful conversation, and why the quality of the data and the design of the agents matter more than simply adding more copilots.

They also discuss when to use AI instead of traditional automation, how private AI can help protect sensitive operational data, and why agent access should be tied to individual users. For teams getting started, Scott recommends testing models against a real use case, beginning with read-only access, and expanding only after proving value.

Duncan Epping joins Virtually Speaking at VMware Explore 2026 to discuss the storage and availability topics that caught his attention, and why memory tiering is drawing so many questions from customers.

He also shares how technical conversations at Explore have changed over the years, what he’s looking to learn about AI and networking, and why he makes time to explore the show floor.

AI is moving quickly from experimentation to enterprise-scale inference and agentic applications. The supporting infrastructure must move just as fast.

Recorded at VMware Explore 2026, this episode explores how Supermicro and Broadcom are helping customers simplify the path from bare metal to production AI. The conversation covers customizable AI infrastructure, VCF AI ReadyNodes, rack-scale deployment, liquid cooling, zero-touch provisioning, and the role of VMware AI Factory in accelerating infrastructure deployment and lifecycle management.

You’ll also hear how Supermicro and VMware Cloud Foundation bring hardware, automation, security, and multi-tenant capabilities together to help organizations deploy AI more quickly, securely, and economically.

Partners play a critical role in helping customers take advantage of everything VMware Cloud Foundation has to offer.

Live from VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Krunal Patel of SidePath to discuss what customers are doing with VCF today. The conversation covers the economics of vSAN, integrated security and microsegmentation with vDefend, NSX networking, and the importance of platform-level automation and visibility.

Krunal also shares how SidePath is using vibe coding and AI to build its own internal applications, then moving those workloads from laptops into a governed VCF environment. They close with practical advice for customers beginning their VCF journey: learn the full platform, invest in hands-on training, and build the right foundation before adopting individual technologies.

What does it take to move from AI experimentation to a production-ready environment?

Recorded at VMware Explore 2026, Vijay Ramachandran, Vice President of Products for the VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, joins Pete Flecha and John Nicholson to explain how VMware AI Factory provides a simplified path from bare metal to model serving.

They discuss how VMware AI Factory brings AI into the familiar VCF operating model, with support for a broad choice of servers, GPUs and models. Vijay also explains how VCF helps automate deployment and ongoing operations while providing the governance needed to control which models users can access.

The conversation also covers the role of the AI Gateway, model optimization and how running AI on-premises can help organizations better manage token economics and infrastructure costs.

VMware certification is evolving alongside VMware Cloud Foundation. At VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Drew Nielsen, Brett Guarino, and VCDX #1 John Arrasjid to break down what has changed and what it means for certification candidates.

The conversation covers the expanded VCAP portfolio, new domain-based and role-based paths for administrators, architects, and support professionals, and the evolution of VCDX from “Design Expert” to “Distinguished Expert.” They also discuss the streamlined defense process, remote participation, lower costs, the growing importance of Kubernetes, and the right (and wrong) ways to use AI while preparing a design.

Whether you’re beginning your certification journey or pursuing VMware’s highest-level credential, the advice is simple: get hands-on experience, keep learning, and don’t quit.

Live from VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha sits down with longtime friend of the podcast William Lam to discuss how customers can design and architect their path to a modern private cloud with VCF 9.1.

William shares what he heard directly from customers during VMware’s Technical Advisory Board and packed interactive design workshops. They discuss practical upgrade paths for existing vSphere environments, options for brownfield and greenfield deployments, hardware compatibility, simplified operations, NSX networking, automation, and the new flexibility available with VCF 9.1.

Whether you are planning an upgrade ahead of upcoming end-of-support deadlines or evaluating your broader private cloud strategy, this conversation offers practical guidance for moving forward with confidence.

How do you apply Zero Trust consistently across virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and rapidly changing applications?

Live from VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Chris McCain to discuss how VMware vDefend brings security controls directly into the hypervisor. They explore how tagging, dynamic groups, and application visibility can replace complicated IP-based rules and help infrastructure and development teams secure workloads at scale.

Chris also explains why AI-driven threats are bringing security back to the forefront, how virtual patching can give application teams more time to respond to vulnerabilities, and why vDefend is an important tool in an organization’s ongoing Zero Trust journey.