165: GreyBeard talks VMware Explore’24 wrap-up with Gina Rosenthal, Founder&CEO Digital Sunshine Solutions

I’ve known Gina Rosenthal (@gminks@mas.to), Founder&CEO, Digital Sunshine Solutions seems like forever and she’s been on the very short list for being a GBoS co-host but she’s got her own Tech Aunties Podcast now. We were both at VMware Explore last week in Vegas. Gina was working in the community hub and I was in their analyst program.

VMware (World) Explore has changed a lot since last year. I found the presentation/sessions to be just as insightful and full of users as last years, but it seems like there may have been fewer of them. Gina found the community hub sessions to be just as busy and the Code groups were also very well attended. On the other hand, the Expo was smaller than last year and there were a lot less participants (and [maybe] analysts) at the show. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

The really big news was VCF 9.0. Both a new number (for VCF) and an indicator of a major change in direction for how VMware functionality will be released in the future. As one executive told me, VCF has now become the main (release) delivery vehicle for all functionality.

In the past, VCF would generally come out with some VMware functionality downlevel to what’s generally available in the market. With VCF 9, that’s going to change now. From now on, all individual features/functions of VCF 9.0 will be at the current VMware functionality levels. Gina mentioned this is a major change for how VMware released functionality, and signals much better product integrations than available in the past.

Much of VMware distinct functionality has been integrated into VCF 9 including SDDC, Aria and other packages. They did, however, create a new class of “advanced services” that runs ontop of VCF 9. We believe these are individually charged for and some of these advanced services include:

• Private AI Foundation – VMware VCF, with their Partner NVIDIA, using NVIDIA certified servers, can now run NVIDIA Enterprise AI suite of offerings which includes just about anything an enterprise needs to run GenAI in house or any other NVIDIA AI service for that matter. The key here is that all enterprise data stays within the enterprise AND the GenAI runs on enterprise (VCF) infrastructure. So all data remains private.
• Container Operations – this is a bundling of all the Spring Cloud and other Tanzu container services. It’s important to note, TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) is still part of the base vSphere release, which allows any VVF (VMware vSpere Foundation) or VCF users to run K8S standalone, but with minimal VMware support services.
• Advanced Security – include vDefend firewall/gateway, WAF, Malware prevention, etc.

There were others, but we didn’t discuss them on the podcast.

I would have to say that Private AI was of most interest to me and many other analysts at the show. In fact, I heard that it’s VMware’s (and supposedly NVIDIA’s) intent to reach functional parity with GCP Vertex and others with Private AI. This could come as soon as VCF 9.0 is released. I pressed them on this point and they held firm to that release number.

My only doubt is that VMware or NVIDIA don’t have their own LLM. Yes, they can use Meta’s LLama 3.1, OpenAI or any other LLM on the market. But running them in-house on enterprise VCF servers is another question.

The lack of an “owned” LLM should present some challenges with reaching functional parity with organizations that have one. On the other hand, Chris Walsh mentioned that they (we believe VMware internal AI services) have been able to change their LLM 3 times over the last year using Private AI Foundation.

Chris repeated more than once that VMware’s long history with DRS and HA makes VCF 9 Private AI Foundation an ideal solution for enterprises to run AI workloads. He specifically mentioned GPU HA that can take GPUs from data scientists when enterprise inferencing activities suffer GPU failures. Unclear whether any other MLops cloud or otherwise can do the same.

From a purely storage perspective I heard a lot about vVols 2.0, This is less a functional enhancement, than a new certification to make sure primary storage vendors offer full vVol support in their storage.

Gina mentioned and it came up in the Analyst sessions, that Broadcom has stopped offering discounts for charities and non-profits. This is going to hurt most of those organizations which are now forced to make a choice, pay full subscription costs or move off VMware.

The other thing of interest was that Broadcom spent some time trying to soothe over the bad feelings of VMware’s partners. There was a special session on “Doing business with Broadcom VMware for partners” but we both missed it so can’t report any details.

Finally, Gina and I, given our (lengthy) history in the IT industry and Gina’s recent attendance at IBM Share started hypothesizing on a potential linkup between Broadcom’s CA and VMware offerings.

I mentioned multiple times there wasn’t even a hint of the word “mainframe” during the analyst program. Probably spent more time discussing this than we should of, but it’s hard to take the mainframe out of IT (as most large enterprises no doubt lament).

Gina Rosenthal, Founder & CEO, Digital Sunshine Solutions

As the Founder and CEO of Digital Sunshine Solutions, Gina brings over a decade of expertise in providing marketing services to B2B technology vendors. Her strong technical background in cloud computing, SaaS, and virtualization enables her to offer specialized insights and strategies tailored to the tech industry.

She excels in communication, collaboration, and building communities. These skills to help her create product positioning, messaging, and content that educates customers and supports sales teams. Gina breaks down complex technical concepts and turn them into simple, relatable terms that connect with business goals.

She is the co-host of The Tech Aunties podcast, where she shares thoughts on the latest trends in IT, especially the buzz around AI. Her goal is to help organizations tackle the communication and organizational challenges associated with modern datacenter transitions.