Hackathon Champions: AI-Powered Innovation at VMware Explore 2025
The Virtually Speaking Podcast heads to VMware Explore 2025, where Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Dale Hassinger, winner of this year’s VMware Explore Hackathon.
Dale shares the story behind his team’s winning project: a Model Contextual Protocol (MCP) server built in PowerShell that connects to VMware products and leverages AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to automatically generate dashboards and reports. With AI doing most of the coding, their solution can transform VMware environment data into markdown tables, CSV files, or full graphical dashboards—without additional manual coding.
The team built the project in just two weeks and completed it during the intense four-hour hackathon event. Dale also gives credit to his teammates Don, Amos, Cosmin, and Willie, highlighting how the VMware community comes together through collaboration and innovation.
If you’re curious about how AI is reshaping development and what happens when creativity meets community at VMware Explore, this episode is for you.
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Private Cloud Momentum: Insights from Broadcom CTO Paul Lembo
At VMware Explore 2025, hosts Pete Flecha and Dave Linthicum sat down with Paul Lembo, CTO for Strategic Americas at Broadcom, to capture the energy and insights from the event. Paul reflects on conversations with customers, partners, and integrators, highlighting how VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is building trust by delivering on promises made the previous year.
One of the biggest crowd-pleasers was the free certification opportunities, where attendees who passed walked away with custom VCF sneakers. Paul shares why this matters for practitioners and how executive sponsorship plays a critical role in successful transformation. He also emphasizes the importance of VMware’s full-stack solutions in helping practitioners succeed, while Dave highlights VMware’s strategy of adding value without forcing customers to rip and replace existing systems.
This conversation showcases VMware by Broadcom’s continued focus on meeting customers where they are, building momentum in private cloud adoption, and enabling organizations to evolve with confidence.
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Fleet Management, AI, and Self-Service with VCF 9.0
At VMware Explore 2025, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Chandra Prathuri, Product Management, VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, to dive into the automation capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0
The conversation kicks off with an analogy of turtles and tunnels, pointing out how slow and fragmented traditional IT operations can feel. Chandra explains how VCF 9 is designed to eliminate those bottlenecks by giving admins AWS-like self-service experiences on-premises—without the risk of surprise bills.
Key topics include:
Automation at scale: Streamlining workflows that typically span compute, storage, network, and security teams.
Fleet management: Lifecycle management with minimal downtime, certificate management, and desired state configuration.
Governance and cost control: Balancing agility with oversight and financial predictability.
Kubernetes and AI readiness: Native Kubernetes support plus GPU time-slicing to optimize workloads (e.g., inference during the day, training at night).
This episode highlights how VCF 9 helps IT teams shift from slow, ticket-based processes to a modern, automated private cloud experience.
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At VMware Explore 2025 (Day Three), hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Raj Bhat from AMD and Dave Morera from Broadcom to discuss a major announcement: VMware’s support for AMD Instinct MI350 GPUs for Private AI workloads.
Raj dives into the specs of the MI350—288GB of memory and nearly 20 petaflops of performance, packaged in a UBB form factor with eight GPUs connected together—making it ideal for running large AI models. Dave explains how this partnership expands customer hardware choices while delivering the same seamless Private AI software experience powered by VMware Cloud Foundation.
The conversation also highlights:
How AMD’s ROCM (Radeon Open Compute Model) framework enables flexibility with AI models.
VMware Cloud Foundation’s automation for deploying these GPUs.
AMD’s open-source and free software approach, reducing subscription costs.
Hardware availability through OEM partners like Supermicro and Dell, with both air-cooled and water-cooled options.
Compatibility with both AMD and Intel CPUs.
This session showcases how VMware and AMD are working together to give customers more choice, efficiency, and scalability in Private AI.
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Kuhn Labs: Turning a Hobby into AI Infrastructure
The Virtually Speaking Podcast is back from VMware Explore 2025 with an inspiring conversation featuring Nick Kuhn.
Hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson dive into Nick’s incredible home lab journey—from starting with a single HPZ 440 workstation to building a massive 16-host environment capable of running large language models.
Nick shares how his passion for vSAN sparked the growth of his lab, how winning first place at the 2023 Explore Hackathon with an AI project fueled his expansion, and why he focused on NVIDIA RTX 3090s for the best price-performance. Today, his setup includes multiple quad-GPU systems and supports colleagues through Tanzu Platform, enabling shared workloads and demos.
The discussion explores:
How Nick evolved his lab from hobby to professional resource
Lessons learned with vSAN and GPU collections for AI workloads
Running local LLMs vs. relying on costly cloud subscriptions
The role of Tanzu in delivering a multi-tenant private AI environment
Whether you’re into home labs, AI infrastructure, or VMware tech, this episode shows how curiosity and community can scale into something extraordinary.
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The Virtually Speaking Podcast is a weekly technical podcast dedicated to discussing VMware topics related to private and hybrid cloud. Each week Pete Flecha and John Nicholson bring in various subject matter experts from VMware, recently acquired by Broadcom, and within the industry to discuss their respective areas of expertise.
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