Virtually Speaking Podcast

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.