Virtually Speaking Podcast

At KubeCon 2026 in Amsterdam, Jad El-Zein and John Nicholson sit down with Duffie Cooley, Field CTO at Isovalent, to talk about eBPF, Cilium, Kubernetes networking, and the growing partnership between Isovalent and VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS).

The conversation dives into how Cilium integrates with VKS as a day-zero add-on, how eBPF changes networking and observability inside Kubernetes, and why technologies like BGP, ECMP, and kube-proxy replacement matter for scalable modern platforms.

Duffie also explains how Isovalent and VMware networking strategies complement each other, how enterprise capabilities extend beyond open source Cilium, and why add-on ecosystems are becoming critical for platform engineering teams operating Kubernetes at scale.

If you’re building modern Kubernetes platforms, exploring VKS, or trying to simplify networking and security operations, this episode is packed with practical insights from one of the pioneers behind the technology.

Guest: Duffie Cooley, Field CTO – Isovalent

Hosts: Jad El-Zein & John Nicholson

Event: KubeCon 2026 – Amsterdam

etworking has traditionally been one of the biggest barriers to private cloud agility. In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Dimitri Desmidt from the VMware Cloud Foundation Networking team to explore how VCF Networking simplifies network operations in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1.

The discussion covers how VPCs, connectivity policies, IP Address Management (IPAM) integration, and network automation allow infrastructure teams to provision networking services directly from vCenter without requiring deep networking expertise or constant coordination with network administrators.

Dimitri walks through real-world examples showing how VCF Networking delivers self-service networking, multi-tenancy, simplified application isolation, and integrated network services while preserving the flexibility and scale required by modern private cloud environments.

If you’ve ever wanted networking to be as easy to consume as compute and storage, this episode is for you.

Troubleshooting complex IT environments isn’t just about technology, it’s about people, process, and collaboration.

Recorded at VMware Connect 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Kim Delgado and Mandy Bosco-Wilson (better known as Team Kandy) to discuss collaborative troubleshooting methodologies that help organizations solve problems faster and more effectively.

The conversation explores common troubleshooting anti-patterns, the importance of psychological safety, blameless inquiry, scientific troubleshooting methods, and real-world examples of complex issues spanning vSAN, Kubernetes, Cloud Native Storage, networking, and infrastructure operations.

Kim and Mandy share stories from the field, including how a seemingly simple issue bounced between multiple support teams before collaborative troubleshooting uncovered the true root cause. They also discuss strategies for handling multi-vendor incidents, avoiding siloed thinking, and creating environments where everyone can contribute to finding solutions.

Whether you’re a VMware administrator, platform engineer, SRE, architect, or IT operations leader, this episode offers practical techniques you can apply to your own troubleshooting processes.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (and 9.1) is generating a lot of excitement, but many organizations are still operating with assumptions based on older VCF releases.

In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Bill Oyler from Presidio to separate fact from fiction and discuss what customers are actually experiencing as they adopt VMware Cloud Foundation 9.

Bill shares lessons learned from customer migrations, including brownfield convergences, external storage support, infrastructure readiness assessments, and some of the most common upgrade pitfalls organizations encounter. The conversation covers everything from Enhanced Linked Mode and distributed switches to certificates, firewall rules, hardware compatibility, and practical planning considerations for successful VCF 9 adoption.

Whether you’re evaluating VMware Cloud Foundation, preparing for a migration, or already planning your upgrade, this episode provides valuable insights from real-world customer engagements and deployments.

#VirtuallySpeakingPodcast #VMware #VMwareCloudFoundation #VCF9 #VMUG #PrivateCloud #vSphere #vSAN #Broadcom

In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, we’re live from VMUG Connect in Minneapolis with Brock Peterson and Dale Hassinger from Broadcom for a conversation about community, blogging, automation, AI, and career growth.

Brock and Dale share how community involvement, technical blogging, VMUG participation, hackathons, and simply putting your work out into the world can create real career opportunities. Dale talks about his journey from customer and community contributor to Broadcom employee, while Broc explains why blogs still matter as practical, reusable technical content for customers and practitioners.

The conversation also explores how AI is changing the way infrastructure teams work, from troubleshooting YAML and building automation to creating apps, dashboards, and AI-driven home lab workflows. Whether you’re looking to grow your career, start blogging, present at a VMUG, or experiment with AI and automation, this episode is packed with practical encouragement from two long-time community contributors.give me some alternate titles.

• Brock's Blog: https://www.brockpeterson.com/
• Dale's Blog: https://www.vcrocs.info/

At KubeCon 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with VMware by Broadcom’s Frank Denneman to explore one of the biggest infrastructure conversations happening in AI today: should Kubernetes workloads run on bare metal or virtualized infrastructure?

The discussion dives deep into how AI workloads are changing infrastructure design, why Kubernetes and virtualization are becoming increasingly connected, and how technologies like DRS and Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) are evolving to support modern GPU-intensive environments.

Frank explains the operational, security, and resource management challenges organizations face as AI adoption accelerates — especially when dealing with expensive GPU clusters, multi-tenant AI workloads, and the rise of AI agents.

Topics include:

• Why virtualization still matters for Kubernetes and AI
• GPU scheduling, topology awareness, and resource isolation
• DRA (Dynamic Resource Allocation) in Kubernetes
• AI infrastructure efficiency and GPU utilization
• Security and isolation for AI agents and workloads
• Token governance and AI operational guardrails
• Lessons learned from decades of virtualization applied to AI infrastructure

If you’re trying to understand where Kubernetes, virtualization, and AI infrastructure are headed next, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

At KubeCon 2026, Pete and John sit down with Myles Gray, Product Marketing Engineer at Broadcom, to talk about what enterprises often underestimate when adopting Kubernetes. Myles shares lessons learned from years of working directly with Kubernetes platforms, platform engineering teams, and enterprise customers trying to move from experimentation into real production environments. The conversation dives into the operational realities of Kubernetes — including long-term maintenance, upgrades, GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, open source integrations, security scanning, and why the ecosystem around Kubernetes matters just as much as Kubernetes itself.

They also explore concepts like “golden paths to production,” Argo CD, Harbor, OpenTelemetry, container image security, Cloud Native Buildpacks, and how organizations can standardize application delivery without creating hundreds of fragmented deployment pipelines.

If you’re trying to understand how enterprises are operationalizing Kubernetes at scale — and why platform engineering is becoming so important — this conversation is packed with practical insights.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 brings major updates to vSphere, and in this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Feidhlim O’Leary for a deeper technical look at what’s new.

The conversation explores how vSphere 9.1 improves lifecycle management, streamlines firmware and driver updates, enhances VM management, and expands memory tiering capabilities introduced in earlier releases. Feidhlim also shares insights into observability improvements, operational simplification, and the types of day-to-day enhancements that practitioners will immediately appreciate.

From certificate management and lifecycle automation to performance optimization and hardware enablement, this episode focuses on the practical operational improvements that make vSphere 9.1 one of the most substantial platform releases in recent years.

If you’re running VMware Cloud Foundation or vSphere environments at scale, this is a great technical overview of the updates infrastructure teams should know about. #VMware #vSphere #VCF #VMwareCloudFoundation #virtuallyspeakingpodcast

What’s New with vSphere in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1?

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/12/whats-new-with-vsphere-9-1/

VMware vCenter Virtual Hardware Gets an Upgrade in vSphere with VCF 9.1

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/12/vcenter-virtual-hardware-upgrade/

Non-Disruptive VMware vCenter Patching in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2026/05/12/vcenter-quick-patch/

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

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.

Cyber threats are evolving fast, and traditional defenses are no longer enough. In this episode, Pete and John sit down with Belu De Arbelaiz and Jacob Garrison from CrowdStrike to explore how VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is redefining cyber resilience.

They break down the rise of AI-driven attacks, the shift toward malware-free breaches, and why identity compromise is now one of the biggest risks. The conversation dives into Advanced Cyber Compliance (OCC), the new isolated clean room for recovery, and how integration with CrowdStrike Falcon brings behavioral analysis into the recovery workflow.

From detection to validation to recovery, this episode shows how organizations can confidently recover from attacks and get back to business faster.

Edge environments are growing fast, but managing them at scale is anything but simple. In this episode, Pete and John sit down with Rick Walsworth to explore how VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is transforming edge deployments.

From zero-touch provisioning and built-in security to lifecycle management and massive scale, Rick breaks down how organizations can deploy and manage thousands of remote sites with consistency and control. The conversation also covers emerging use cases like AI at the edge and real-world examples like software-defined manufacturing.

If you’re looking to simplify edge operations while maintaining security and scalability, this episode is a must-watch.

AI is easy to demo but hard to run in production. In this episode, Pete and John sit down with Chris Wolf, Global Head of AI at Broadcom, to break down what it actually takes to operationalize AI.

They explore how customers are moving from experimentation to real-world Private AI on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, where it fits alongside public cloud models, and how to identify use cases that deliver measurable business value. The conversation also dives into intelligent model routing, MCP governance, GPU and CPU flexibility, and why production inference requires a full platform approach.

If you’re trying to separate AI hype from reality, this episode connects the dots.

Storage is at the center of rising infrastructure costs, and in this episode, Pete and John sit down with Rakesh to explore how VCF 9.1 is tackling that challenge head-on.

From cutting hardware requirements in half to introducing global deduplication and native S3 object storage, this conversation dives into how vSAN is evolving to support modern workloads while driving down costs. They also explore new cyber recovery capabilities that bring compute, storage, and networking together for a more complete resilience strategy.

If you’re looking to understand how storage is changing in the AI and cloud-native era, and what it means for your environment, this episode is packed with insights.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 introduces a wide range of improvements across the platform, and in this episode, Pete and John sit down with William Lam to walk through the updates that matter most to practitioners.

From zero-touch provisioning and faster patching to fleet management, real-time metrics, and the evolution of the VCF management platform, William shares a hands-on perspective shaped by real-world testing and customer feedback.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is all about making the platform easier to consume and operate at scale. In this episode, Pete and John sit down with Dilpreet, Head of Engineering for VCF, to explore how that vision comes to life.

From the introduction of VCF Automation and Kubernetes-based APIs to multi-cluster management and faster deployment models, this conversation focuses on simplifying how infrastructure is delivered and managed. They also dive into VKS 3.6 updates, including faster cluster deployment, expanded ecosystem support, and contributions to the CNCF community.

If you’re looking to understand how VCF 9.1 improves developer experience, automation, and platform operations, this episode is a must-watch.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 brings major updates across compute, storage, and networking, and in this episode, Pete and John sit down with Vijay, product lead for core infrastructure, to break it all down.

From smarter memory utilization to native object storage and improved cyber resilience, this conversation focuses on the features that directly impact how customers run and scale their environments. Vijay also shares how VCF 9.1 simplifies networking integration and helps bridge the gap between virtual and physical infrastructure.

If you’re looking to understand the core infrastructure innovations in VCF 9.1 and what they mean for real-world deployments, this episode delivers the highlights.