Join us for an exciting keynote session where Krish Prasad, Senior Vice President and General Manager, VCF Division, provides the latest updates on VCF as a platform for private cloud innovations. The session will also highlight key findings from a recent global study examining how peer organizations are shaping their private and public cloud strategies. Learn about the advancements in upcoming VCF 9, including core platform enhancements, integration with Generative AI workloads, and expanded Kubernetes capabilities. You’ll also hear real-world success stories from EMEA customers using VCF to drive business value, simplify operations, and accelerate innovation. Finally, learn about benefits and opportunities for the VMUG Advantage community to help you stay ahead in your cloud journey.

For most Broadcom customers, 2024 was a year of change. This presentation will talk about what a Broadcom customer (who happens to be the Vice President of VMUG) did in 2025 to prepare for: - The new normal - Post Broadcom acquisition - Tips, negotiation tricks and honest tales of how their renewal agreement went down - Understanding the new product landscape and how to choose a level that works for your company - Architecture changes you can make to reduce the cost of your next agreement - How we used Broadcom and VMUG’s new partnership to assist with Professional Development. Additionally, we will cover the new VMware Cloud Foundation certification exams, and cover Matt’s VCP-VCF Administrator exam experience, as well as the software that passing the exam unlocked.

Discover Private AI, an approach that combines the power of AI with the control and security of the private cloud. With VMware Cloud Foundation and NVIDIA AI Enterprise, learn how to deploy an AI Proof of Concept while ensuring data sovereignty and compliance. We’ll also share our experience at ITQ, including key challenges, best practices, and lessons learned when implementing AI solutions in VMware environments.

In this session, OVHcloud’s expert, François Loiseau (Global Director of Research & Development) and Laurent Blin (Global Product Marketing Manager), will share our experience in OVHcloud’s latest innovation project in VMware automation and migration. This session focuses on our cutting-edge solution for automating the transition from existing Hosted Private Cloud environments—built on vSphere, vSAN, and NSX—to our new VMware Cloud Foundation as a Service (VCF aaS) offering, powered by VMware Cloud Director (VCD). This talk will provide in-depth insights into the technical and strategic aspects of such a large-scale migration, from planning and execution to overcoming challenges and ensuring minimal downtime. Key takeaways will include: How OVHcloud ensures the success of its customers' VMware environments at scale. The methodology and tools used to streamline vCenter upgrades at scale. Lessons learned from migrating a massive number of systems. Best practices for managing large, complex infrastructures while maintaining system stability. Discover how we leverage automation to streamline complex migrations, minimize downtime, and reduce operational overhead. We'll walk through the architecture, tooling, and key decision points that drive a smooth and cost-efficient migration experience. Whether you're planning your move or comparing pricing models, this session will arm you with the technical and financial insights needed to make the shift with confidence.

Some trips go smoothly—this wasn’t one of them. A two-month solo journey turned into a test of resilience, problem-solving, and adaptability. I faced mechanical breakdowns, lost gear, and had to rely on strangers in unexpected ways. But in every setback, I found a lesson that reshaped how I see challenges—not just in travel but in everyday life. In this session, I’ll share stories and insights on why difficult moments often lead to the most valuable experiences. Whether you’re a traveler, an IT professional, or just someone who wants to get more out of life, this talk will challenge how you see obstacles.

Join us for a session on "Why Upgrade to VCF 5.2 Now?" where we'll delve into the strategic advancements that VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 offers, setting the stage for a seamless transition to VCF 9. This session highlights the top reasons to upgrade today, including Live Patching, enhanced storage innovations, centralized management, VCF Import, Unified Cloud Admin Dashboard and more. This session will not only provide you with insights into these key features but also demonstrate why adopting VCF 5.2 now is a critical step towards leveraging the full potential of VCF 9, enhancing your private cloud's agility, scalability, and efficiency.

Cisco ACI and VMware NSX are often seen as competing solutions for network and security virtualization, but what if they could work together to create a more robust, scalable, and secure infrastructure? In this session, we’ll break the myth that these two technologies are rivals and demonstrate how they can complement each other to deliver enhanced automation, policy-based security, and streamlined operations. To ensure everyone is on the same page, we will start with a brief introduction to Cisco ACI, covering its core principles and how it differs from traditional networking approaches, especially for VMware professionals who may not be familiar with it. We’ll then explore how organizations can integrate ACI’s network-centric approach with NSX’s micro-segmentation and security capabilities. This session will also highlight the benefits of using VMware NSX on top of an existing ACI deployment, showing how NSX brings advanced security, workload mobility, and software-defined network policies that enhance ACI’s capabilities. By leveraging both platforms strategically, IT teams can gain greater agility, centralized control, and improved security without being locked into a single-vendor solution. Whether you’re working with ACI, NSX, or both, this session will provide practical insights on maximizing their strengths for a more efficient and resilient network architecture.

Learn how Pure can help to build business continuity and streamline disaster and cyber recovery for VMware environments. Make sure you have copies of your data available and can recovery at high speed in order to meet your SLAs

“VMware’s pricing changes have forced organizations to rethink their datacenter cost management strategies. While FinOps is commonly associated with cloud environments, the FinOps Foundation has recently expanded its framework to include Scopes—and Datacenter is now officially part of the equation. In this session, we’ll map the FinOps Framework to a VMware-based datacenter, focusing on cost visibility, optimization, and automation. You’ll learn how to track costs more effectively, rightsize workloads, optimize licensing, and drive efficiency—all without migrating to the cloud. We’ll also explore how to align IT teams, finance, and leadership around cost-aware decision-making for on-prem environments. If your VMware bill keeps increasing and you need a new approach to cost management, this session is for you!”

Discover how IGEL delivers secure, seamless endpoint solutions, ensuring a smooth, safe transition to Omnissa. Empower your workforce with robust security, simplified management, and optimized performance.

Ready to take your certification game to the next level? Join recently certified VMUG leaders for a virtual session packed with practical advice, honest insights, and real-world tips to help you prepare for the VCF-VCP exam. They’ll walk you through what study strategies worked best, what to expect on exam day, and how certification has boosted their careers. Whether you’re already studying or just curious about what it takes, this session will give you the confidence—and the game plan—you need to succeed.

GitOps is a powerful concept, but can be very daunting to implement. In this talk, I will go over the process and tooling of how we implemented GitOps at our organization. While the content will not focus on either, the audience should have a passing knowledge of Terraform and Git.

For years VMware has written extensions in java or Kotlin to extend the monitoring capabilities of VCF Operations. Then we had a technology partner, Blue Medora, take over most of them and writing a bunch of new ones. With the new licensing there has been some rationalizing the existing packs. The remaining ones are now free. But a new tool was introduced to write your own management packs: the management pack builder! Intro - architecture of Operations, what is in the database? - APIs, relationships and more - installation of management pack builder Demo - what is the philosophy of the product? - installation - overview Use cases - monitor backup - import those old monitoring platforms - where to get more info We will build a management pack together!

In a tech world increasingly dominated by the cloud, endpoints are more critical than ever. This session explores why they matter and how to make them faster, smarter, and more efficient (including some epic demos) Technologies we will cover: deployment with Omnissa Workspace ONE UEM, Omnissa App Volumes on physical devices and validating everything with Login Enterprise for Physical Endpoints! (We are pretty sure you have never seen this in a session before!) And for the grand finale: “Dominate the Race, Rule the streets “. Who will claim the title of Physical Endpoint Champion? Start your engines — this is the Need for Physical!

Get ready to accelerate your coding journey in this hands-on workshop! We’ll start by exploring API calls using Postman, diving into the fundamentals of crafting and testing these requests. Once we’ve mastered the API basics, we’ll shift gears and transform these calls into TypeScript code, leveraging its precision and scalability. Along the way, you’ll gain insider tips and tricks from real-world automation projects, where everything is powered by TypeScript. By the end of this session, you’ll have the skills and confidence to turbocharge your automation workflows with VMware Aria Automation and TypeScript.

In the battle for peak performance, your VMware environment is both your greatest weapon and your greatest challenge. Like a seasoned general, you must master the art of efficiency—tuning physical nodes, clusters, and virtual machines with precision to achieve victory. This session will equip you with the strategies and tactics needed to maximize application and infrastructure performance without spending a single dollar. You will learn how to harness the full potential of your existing resources through disciplined CPU scheduling, memory optimization, storage fine-tuning, and network enhancements. Adapt, optimize, and conquer inefficiencies as we reveal the hidden levers of performance tuning. Join me and transform your VMware environment into a well-oiled war machine. Where every workload runs at peak efficiency, and no resource is wasted. Victory is within reach, and it won’t cost you a thing. This is the way!

A succesful Kubernetes platform begins and ends with the application running on top of it. In this session we explain how we learned this valuable lesson through experience, with real-life customer examples and… a 1993 first person shooter.

As an MSP, delivering Disaster Recovery solutions is critical. We’ve relied on VMware SRM for years, however, the recent license price increase lead us to explore alternatives. To replace SRM, we decided to leverage our existing Dell PowerMax arrays to build a custom DR solution named SAM (Site Availability Manager). It is based on metroclusters, DRS rules, and a homemade PowerShell-based application to manage the DR process. The approach integrates VMware DRS rules to assign VMs to the site of their choice. Clients can choose between hard-pinning, which strictly places VMs at a specific site for controlled DR scenarios, or soft-pinning, which allows automatic failover in case of site failure. In our solution a DRS rule can be considered as the equivalent of an SRM recovery plan. Our custom app orchestrates the execution of DR plans. It consists in PowerShell scripts run locally, and launches a web dashboard built in Vue.js allowing the operators to easily the DR operation, and generates a comprehensive DR report for the clients. Daily jobs also collect DRS rule data from the vCenters into SQL tables, which power Grafana dashboards for monitoring purpose. And we’re also developing a web app to simplify the management of the DR plans, which consists of plain JSON files.

Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) enables users to create supervisor namespaces and then provision virtual machines and other deployable workloads. In this session we will be exploring how to use Avi to load balance the virtual machines. Including a demo!

VMware Live Recovery is now integrated into VCF Operations! In this session, we will explore the new data protection features of the VCF Operations platform. We will discuss how to install and configure various VLR offerings and address some common challenges associated with this process. Finally, we will wrap up the session with a demonstration of setting up the VLCR and VLSR management packs.