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 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.

Recently I realized I hadn't had Bob Plankers on the show yet, so it was time to get him to join the show and talk all things security.

Bob goes over all the various features we introduced related to security in VCF 9.1, and also gives a quick overview of what we've had available in VCF and vSphere for decades now.

All the topics and links discussed can be found here:

• https://github.com/vmware/vcf-security-and-compliance-guidelines
• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/08/06/confidential-computing-vmware-cloud-foundation-9-0/
• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/08/05/security-vmware-cloud-foundation-9-0/
• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/05/platform-security-vcf-9-1/

Broadcom just announced VCF 9.1, so it was time to get an expert on the show to talk us through the enhancements that will be coming for vSAN specifically. As always, Pete Koehler shared all the facts and figures of the release. He discusses Global Dedupe, Native S3 Object Storage, Ransomware Protection and Recovery and much more!

• vSAN 9.1 announcement
• vSAN Compression and Global Dedupe in VCF 9.1
• Cyber Recovery Ready Nodes!
• vSAN Auto-RAID

Arvind is back to provide an update on all things Memory Tiering. The interest in Memory Tiering is high due to insane memory prices and supply chain issues. Arvind goes over the basics of memory tiering and provide an insight into what to expect in the upcoming release of VCF/vSphere when it comes to Memory Tiering!

Some of the items discussed:

• Performance whitepaper here: https://www.vmware.com/docs/memtier-vcf9-perf
  
• Memory tiering doc's which describes how to disable it on a VM: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/vsphere/9-0/how-do-i-activate-memory-tiering-in-vsphere-.html
  
• Many different blogs, and an assessment script by Dave Morera: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/vcf-advanced-memory-tiering/

I sometimes get confused when people talk about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Fleets, Instances, and Domains! So I decided to invite Gary Blake to the show to explain to us all the various constructs, how they relate to each other, and what you should take into consideration when you are designing a VCF-based infrastructure! You can find the links to some of the discussed articles and documents below.

• VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Latency Diagram
• On-Prem VVD for Ransomware Recovery
• VCF Design Guide

Recently, Frank published a series of blog posts on GPU resource management. I invited Frank to the show to explain why GPU resource management is different than CPU and memory management in vSphere. Frank goes over all the intricate details, and as always, dives deep into the various constructs involved. I highly recommend reading the articles which are part of the following series, and make sure to also check the tool Frank developed, as this helps visualizing the challenges you may face today, or potentially in the future!

• https://frankdenneman.ai/ai-infrastructure/
• 
  https://frankdenneman.ai/understanding-ai-memory/
• 
  

Recently there was a big announcement about the adoption of vSAN Storage Clusters by Audi. All the reasons for me to invite Kalyan back to the show. During this episode, Kalyan not only discusses what was announced specifically with Audi, but also goes over some of the recently introduced functionality like vSAN traffic seperation, vSphere only clusters support for stretched with vSAN Storage Clusters, and much more!

Some of the discussed papers and blogs:

• Audi case study: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/03/27/audi-introduces-smart-manufacturing-with-vcf-edge/ 
• Lower requirements for vSAN: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/11/14/driving-down-storage-costs-with-lower-hardware-requirements-for-vsan/

I've been on the Virtually Speaking podcast several times, so it was time to invite one of the hosts to the Unexplored Territory Podcast and discuss his favorite topic, hardware configurations, and the bill of materials!

John Nicholson goes over all the ins and outs of procuring new hardware and talks about ordering components for existing hardware. We discuss NICs, Switches, Ready Node configurations, Emulated Ready Node configurations, NVMe devices, and much more.

During the discussion, various blogs and videos were mentioned, make sure to check those as well!

• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2023/07/26/expanded-hardware-compatibility-for-vsan-express-storage-architecture/
• https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/326476/what-you-can-and-cannot-change-in-a-vsan.html
• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2023/07/27/yes-you-can-change-things-on-a-vsan-esa-readynode/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjen1ER8ASc
• https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video/6360757998112

A few episodes ago we had Yves Hertoghs on the show to discuss networking, so I decided it was also time to discuss security. As Chris McCain has been at the forefront of networking and security at VMware for over a decade, it only made sense to reach out and invite him to introduce vDefend!

Not only was Chris part of the Explore keynote, but he also delivered various excellent sessions on networking and security in the past couple of years, and I would highly encourage you to watch those as well!

• Explore 2025 - Demystifying VMware vDefend Distributed Security Within VMware Cloud Foundation
• Explore 2025 - Building Secure Private AI Deep Dive

In 2025 the first VMUG Connect event was held in the US, and as it was a big success VMUG decided to repeat that formula in Amsterdam, Minneapolis, Toronto, Dallas and Orlando. I invited Brad Tompkins to the show to explain what these VMUG events are all about, and also provide some insights into the world of VMUG.

I have the pleasure, and honor, to host a keynote session in Amsterdam at Connect in March. I hope to see all of you there. For more details on pricing, locations, and more, make sure to visit the VMUG Connect website. Also, if you are planning on attending, I would highly encourage you to book asap as we've seen Explore on Tour selling out everywhere...

After Rakesh and I shared the news at Explore, and Explore On Tour, that vSAN would potentially be able to use Fibre Channel as a transport layer, the phone has been ringing nonstop. It was time for me to invite Rakesh and ask him to explain what vSAN over FC is all about. In this episode Rakesh covers the why, the what, but unfortunately the when is still a question. Nevertheless, this episode is a must-listen!

Discussed papers/links:

• vSAN vs Traditional Storage video
• vSAN beats all-flash top storage system