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.

VCF 9.0 demonstrates that VMware by Broadcom is fulfilling its commitment for radical simplification, from Build, Operations, Consumption, and Protection. Join me as we explore the developments of the previous twelve months. The new VCF installer incorporates a lot of changes on how a VCF Fleet is built. VCF Operations is the core, and will be the single pane of glass for your entire VCF Fleet. Will it be different, yes, but it will feel quite the same. We’ll discuss the biggest changes, and what effects this has on the architecture possibilities. After that it is time to demo! (TBD)

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.

“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!”

In this demo-packed session we will deep dive in the latest changes in VCF Operations related to vSAN - brand new screens related to storage health, utilization and performance monitoring. Also we will cover the improved and built from the ground up Performance Diagnostics feature which can help you analyze, optimize and get the best performance from your servers. Last but not least we will discuss what is coming next in VCF Operations with regards to vSAN and storage.

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!

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!

Check what Operations has to offer as VCF has several products and several consoles, making it a challenge for Infra Admins to configure, manage and operate VCF as a single product. Check how we want to help you as Admin to Operate Modern Infrastructure faster and easier way. Join the session on VCF Aria Operations to learn what’s new in the cloud management field.

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.

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.

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.