My first VMware Explore was in 2018 (VMworld). It was a pinnacle year for me. There were around 23,000 people there with so many different vendors, parties, and more. It was called the land of free t-shirts and for good reason. I still have around 20 t-shirts from the past couple of VMworlds I went to. I remember having to wait in a huge crowd of people to get into the expo, with the pre-show of people, following the explosion of “Can I scan your badge?”. I remember checking into the excalliber and thinking vegas was the most amazing, and yet disgusting city I had ever seen. Everytime I went to Mandalay Bay for the sessions though I was blown away at how amazing it was. It was so big with an insane amount of sessions around networking, compute(numa, drs, etc), and storage. Storage was huge that year if I remember correctly, but I was there for automation, the redheaded stepchild of VMware. I still remember the feeling of elation being part of a community, learning about vExpert, VMUG and more. It was a core memory, and one I look back to.

To say this explore is a shell of what it was is an understatement. The expo is half the size of the room, the sessions are smaller, and the long lines at the bathroom are much easier to navigate (on the positive side). The problem with VMware isn’t the tech, and has never been the tech. Its how VMware deals with its customers, and partners. And seeing around 4000 people total at VMware Explore this year. Its easy to see that relationship has been strained. Like a bipolar kid trying to tell their parents where they want to eat, VMware has bounced all over the place with their customers telling them what licensing they have, what pricing, how it will be deployed/consumed and more. Its been a wild ride.

But…

VMware is coming back, from some of the already announced integrations and products that definitely turns my head. The technology of VMware has always been stellar and amazing. Hard times come to us all, and hard times have come for VMware for sure, not from a business perspective because Hock is making his money back, but from a customer relationship the problems are plentiful.

Now that explore is over, there are a ton of things to dig into, VCF Operations, and Automations doing some crazy new things (of course I’ll be playing with that in the lab), as well as additional fun around Private AI. I know NVIDIAs push towards a Kubernetes framework for AI will push customers to adopt this new framework, allowing new capabilities for their applications, and AI integration. Very cool things coming in this year, and I can’t wait for 2026.

As I keep working with customers, and friends around challenges with VMware, it’s clear, that VMware has not lost its teeth, nor has it lost its budgetary capabilities. The problem VMware had was, “Naked vSphere”, which was people utilizing vSphere, and vCenter, and nothing else. It’s truly sad when I saw these customer, because they only cared about the virtualization, and most didn’t even use it for HA or VMotion. By moving to VCF these customers must make the decision of using an enterprise platform, or a free version (Proxmox, KVM, Hyper-V, etc). This removes the half-way option, but does increase that cost.

I may be optimistic, and I may see things issues that are not prevalent in many customers, but I know the function, and options are available far beyond what the naked vSphere options customers even knew possible.

For those wondering for a quick recap: there is a playlist here to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS59PDILCfE&list=PLeFlCmVOq6yv60SRcelW0ftPGcnUKcBoB