Unexplored Territory

I flew out to Las Vegas this week to present a few sessions at Explore 2026! I brought my mobile podcast recording kit for the first time and decided to record some clips with various people I ran into at the event. I hope you appreciate the conversations with folks like Alan Renouf, Pete Flecha, William Lam, Frank Denneman, and many more! Make sure to watch some of the recordings of the Explore sessions my guests hosted:
Frank's Models in Minutes
Alan and William's Tips and Tricks for running 9.1 in your homelab
Iwan's Full Stack Troubleshooting
Brad's Full Stack Engineering
Duncan's Four Prod Ready VCF 9.1 Storage Capabilities
Keith's From Gatekeeper to Enabler

I noticed a blog post about a new fling called VCF Inspector last week, so I had to invite the author Alan Renouf to the show to talk us through it. VCF Inspector, in my opinion, is one of those tools that will be very valuable for everyone working with VCF, but especially for consultants and people managing many different environments. Just listen to the episode, and download the tool via the link in the blog post!

For me personally, VMware Explore is the event of the year and a very exciting (and stressful) time. I asked Nikki Sherin from the Explore team to talk us through what we can expect at Explore 2026, and I also asked my good friends William Lam, Alan Renouf, and Pete Flecha to explain to us what excites them most about the event. It was a fantastic conversation and I am definitely looking forward to meeting up with everyone at the event again.
My Favorite Sessions: ⁠https://event.vmware.com/my/widget/vmware/explore2026lv/1784640936449001Ii9L⁠
Hackathon: https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2026/06/26/vmwarecode-hackathon-for-explore-las-vegas/
Schedule Builder: https://event.vmware.com/flow/vmware/explore2026lv/content 
Living on the edge - https://event.vmware.com/flow/vmware/explore2026lv/content/page/catalog?tab.sessioncatalogtabs=1747347809815001igUo&search=CLOB1260LV

For this episode I invited Iwan Rahabok to talk us through the recent announcement of the 5th edition of the IT Ops Management Guidebook. As I mentioned during this episode, this isn't just a book, this is a Resource Kit!
What changed?
1000+ pages, and 4 parts. Lots of additional content & corrections compared to the 4th edition 2 years ago.

Deeper. More technical.

Leveling up to support private cloud architect.

A booklet written for higher up management chain.

New troubleshooting flows. Done in DrawIO so you can tailor for your needs

Two brand new calculators

VCF Ops vCommunity adapters. Built by Onur

An agentic AI webiste: https://isvara.io/ built by Samir.

What does not change:
Still free.

Still editable. So you can customize to your own organisation

Download in the usual place: https://broadcom.ent.box.com/v/OpsYourWorld

I read a few articles the last couple of months on the topic of VCF Edge by Dhruv Tyagi , and with the 9.1 release there were a couple of interesting posts about Zero Touch Provisioning, so it was time to invite him to the podcast and explore what VCF Edge is all about. Of course we also touch on things like Zero Touch Provisioning and how it helps customers deploy and manage thousands of hosts across countless locations. A very unique solution for a very specific problem!

Want to know more, these were some of the documents, blogs, and demos discussed during this episode:

VCF Edge:
VCF Edge Design Library

VCF Edge Design Blueprint for Manufacturing

VCF Edge Design Blueprint for Defense
ZTP:
Blog - Zero Touch Provisioning: Activating Edge Sites with VMware Cloud Foundation Edge 9.1

Demo Video - Zero Touch Provisioning: Activating Edge Sites with VCF Edge 9.1

Tech Docs for ZTP