Virtually Speaking Podcast

In this episode of Virtually Speaking, hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson continue their Advanced Services series with a deep dive into VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance (ACC)—now generally available for VMware Cloud Foundation customers.

Joined by Belu De Arbelaiz and Adam Hawley from VMware’s product management team, the conversation explores why cyber compliance and resilience have become mission-critical, and how ACC helps organizations move beyond manual, point-in-time audits to continuous enforcement and recovery.

The discussion covers how ACC uses VMware Salt technology to define desired state configurations, detect drift, and automatically remediate issues at scale—monitoring tens of thousands of endpoints from a single control plane.

The team also explains how ACC brings together compliance management and cyber disaster recovery, helping organizations meet evolving regulatory requirements such as DORA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and HIPAA while proving real-world recoverability.

You’ll also learn how ACC aligns with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, addresses credential-based and fileless attacks, and enables better collaboration between infrastructure, security, and compliance teams—all within a single VCF-integrated platform.

If you’re responsible for compliance, security, or resilience in a private cloud environment, this episode breaks down why Advanced Cyber Compliance is becoming a foundational capability—not an optional add-on.

Topics covered include:

• Why compliance must be continuous, not point-in-time
• Desired state configuration and automated drift remediation
• Scaling compliance and visibility with VMware Salt
• Cyber and ransomware recovery for on-prem VCF environments
• Meeting global regulatory and audit requirements
• Aligning security, compliance, and infrastructure teams

Like, subscribe, and explore the full VCF Advanced Services series for deeper dives into each capability.

VMware Cloud Foundation Advanced Services are often misunderstood — or overlooked entirely.

In this episode of Virtually Speaking, we kick off a new series focused on how VCF Advanced Services extend the platform beyond core infrastructure to address real-world challenges in cyber resilience, security, application delivery, data services, and operations.

Rick Walsworth joins the show to provide a high-level overview of how VCF Advanced Services help customers address real-world challenges such as cyber resilience, zero trust security, application delivery, database automation, network visibility, and business operations.

In this episode, we cover how VCF Advanced Services help customers:
 • Strengthen cyber resilience with Advanced Cyber Compliance (ACC)
 • Implement zero trust security with vDefend
 • Modernize application delivery with Avi Load Balancer
 • Simplify database operations with Data Services Manager (DSM)
 • Gain end-to-end visibility with Network Observability
 • Optimize cost and operations with ValueOps for VCF
 • Secure identities and access across the platform

The episode also explains why Private AI has moved from an advanced service to a core VCF capability, reflecting its growing importance in modern private cloud environments.

This conversation sets the foundation for the series, with future episodes diving deeper into each service alongside subject matter experts.

▶️ Watch the episode to get a clear, practical understanding of VCF Advanced Services and how they fit into real customer environments.

This episode sets the foundation for the series, with upcoming deep dives into each service featuring VMware subject matter experts.

In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome Vincent Riccio, VMware automation expert, for a deep dive into SaltStack automation and its role inside VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Advanced Services.

Vincent explains how SaltStack, delivered through VMware’s Advanced Cyber Compliance (ACC) service, brings powerful configuration management, state enforcement, and automated remediation to modern private cloud environments. We explore how SaltStack continuously maintains desired system states, detects drift, and automatically corrects issues in seconds — all at scale.

You’ll learn:
• How SaltStack’s master–minion architecture enables secure inbound-only communication
• The difference between configuration management and state management
• How the reactor + beacon system enables real-time automated drift remediation
• Built-in compliance and vulnerability scanning using CIS benchmarks
• Resource requirements for SaltStack appliances in lab and production environments
• Multi-language automation support with YAML, Python, and JSON
• Robust Windows management with WinRepo
• How SaltStack integrates into VMware’s broader automation and VCF advanced services ecosystem

Vincent also shares real-world insights into scaling SaltStack, Postgres database sizing, compliance scanning depth (including hundreds of Ubuntu security checks), and how this modular, Python-based platform helps customers automate faster, safer, and smarter.

If you’re exploring VCF automation, private cloud operations, or infrastructure-as-code, this is an episode you don’t want to miss.

This episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast features hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson joined by returning guest Pete Koehler for a deep dive into vSAN and the evolving conversation around application versus infrastructure high availability. Pete Koehler highlights recent updates to vSAN Ready Nodes that significantly reduce hardware requirements, including up to 67% less RAM and 50% fewer CPU cores for vSAN storage cluster hosts—bringing notable cost and efficiency benefits.

From there, the discussion shifts to availability design strategies. The trio explores the differences between application-level availability (features built directly into the app, such as database clustering or microservices patterns) and infrastructure-level availability provided by the virtualization platform. They cover when each approach makes sense, how they complement each other, and why a balanced strategy delivers the best resilience.

Whether you’re a VI admin, an architect, or an application owner, this episode breaks down the real-world tradeoffs and helps you understand where the platform should handle availability—and where the application should take the lead.

The Virtually Speaking Podcast heads to VMware Explore 2025, where Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Dale Hassinger, winner of this year’s VMware Explore Hackathon.

Dale shares the story behind his team’s winning project: a Model Contextual Protocol (MCP) server built in PowerShell that connects to VMware products and leverages AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to automatically generate dashboards and reports. With AI doing most of the coding, their solution can transform VMware environment data into markdown tables, CSV files, or full graphical dashboards—without additional manual coding.

The team built the project in just two weeks and completed it during the intense four-hour hackathon event. Dale also gives credit to his teammates Don, Amos, Cosmin, and Willie, highlighting how the VMware community comes together through collaboration and innovation.

If you’re curious about how AI is reshaping development and what happens when creativity meets community at VMware Explore, this episode is for you.

At VMware Explore 2025, hosts Pete Flecha and Dave Linthicum sat down with Paul Lembo, CTO for Strategic Americas at Broadcom, to capture the energy and insights from the event. Paul reflects on conversations with customers, partners, and integrators, highlighting how VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is building trust by delivering on promises made the previous year.

One of the biggest crowd-pleasers was the free certification opportunities, where attendees who passed walked away with custom VCF sneakers. Paul shares why this matters for practitioners and how executive sponsorship plays a critical role in successful transformation. He also emphasizes the importance of VMware’s full-stack solutions in helping practitioners succeed, while Dave highlights VMware’s strategy of adding value without forcing customers to rip and replace existing systems.

This conversation showcases VMware by Broadcom’s continued focus on meeting customers where they are, building momentum in private cloud adoption, and enabling organizations to evolve with confidence.

At VMware Explore 2025, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Chandra Prathuri, Product Management, VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, to dive into the automation capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

The conversation kicks off with an analogy of turtles and tunnels, pointing out how slow and fragmented traditional IT operations can feel. Chandra explains how VCF 9 is designed to eliminate those bottlenecks by giving admins AWS-like self-service experiences on-premises—without the risk of surprise bills.

Key topics include:

• Automation at scale: Streamlining workflows that typically span compute, storage, network, and security teams.

• Fleet management: Lifecycle management with minimal downtime, certificate management, and desired state configuration.

• Governance and cost control: Balancing agility with oversight and financial predictability.

• Kubernetes and AI readiness: Native Kubernetes support plus GPU time-slicing to optimize workloads (e.g., inference during the day, training at night).

This episode highlights how VCF 9 helps IT teams shift from slow, ticket-based processes to a modern, automated private cloud experience.

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At VMware Explore 2025 (Day Three), hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Raj Bhat from AMD and Dave Morera from Broadcom to discuss a major announcement: VMware’s support for AMD Instinct MI350 GPUs for Private AI workloads.

Raj dives into the specs of the MI350—288GB of memory and nearly 20 petaflops of performance, packaged in a UBB form factor with eight GPUs connected together—making it ideal for running large AI models. Dave explains how this partnership expands customer hardware choices while delivering the same seamless Private AI software experience powered by VMware Cloud Foundation.

The conversation also highlights:

• How AMD’s ROCM (Radeon Open Compute Model) framework enables flexibility with AI models.

• VMware Cloud Foundation’s automation for deploying these GPUs.

• AMD’s open-source and free software approach, reducing subscription costs.

• Hardware availability through OEM partners like Supermicro and Dell, with both air-cooled and water-cooled options.

• Compatibility with both AMD and Intel CPUs.

This session showcases how VMware and AMD are working together to give customers more choice, efficiency, and scalability in Private AI.

The Virtually Speaking Podcast is back from VMware Explore 2025 with an inspiring conversation featuring Nick Kuhn.

Hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson dive into Nick’s incredible home lab journey—from starting with a single HPZ 440 workstation to building a massive 16-host environment capable of running large language models.

Nick shares how his passion for vSAN sparked the growth of his lab, how winning first place at the 2023 Explore Hackathon with an AI project fueled his expansion, and why he focused on NVIDIA RTX 3090s for the best price-performance. Today, his setup includes multiple quad-GPU systems and supports colleagues through Tanzu Platform, enabling shared workloads and demos.

The discussion explores:

• How Nick evolved his lab from hobby to professional resource

• Lessons learned with vSAN and GPU collections for AI workloads

• Running local LLMs vs. relying on costly cloud subscriptions

• The role of Tanzu in delivering a multi-tenant private AI environment

Whether you’re into home labs, AI infrastructure, or VMware tech, this episode shows how curiosity and community can scale into something extraordinary.

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On day three of VMware Explore 2025, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Drew Nielsen to explore the economic value of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

Drew explains how customer sentiment has shifted since last year—organizations have moved past the “five stages of grief” around perpetual licensing and are now fully embracing VCF. He highlights how VCF 9 with memory tiering delivers measurable savings:

• ~40% less costly than public cloud

• ~50% less costly than building a traditional three-tier data center

The discussion dives into hardware refresh strategies, emphasizing NVMe drives as essential for memory tiering, and introduces the Private Cloud Maturity and Optimization Tool (PCMO). The PCMO now goes beyond cost modeling with new upgrade readiness features, helping customers identify blockers and prepare for VCF 9 adoption.

Whether you’re evaluating cloud costs, planning your next hardware refresh, or considering a VCF upgrade, this conversation offers practical insights on how to maximize value from your private cloud investments.

👉 If you’d like to explore your own customized cost model, VMware’s sales teams and partners can help you get started with just four simple inputs.

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