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188 Sessions. Here Are the Ones Worth Watching.

Nine themes, the ten most-watched, and three picks worth your time. AgentMinder took the top slot, and the CPU scheduler session is badly undervalued.

Mohammad Siddiqui

— 9 min read
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188 Sessions. Here Are the Ones Worth Watching.

All 188 recorded sessions from VMware Explore 2026 in Las Vegas are now on demand. That is a lot of catalogue to stare at, so this is a navigable version: broken into themes, with the most-watched sessions in each, and links straight to the video.

View counts are as at early September, so they tell you what the room and the early on-demand audience gravitated toward rather than what is objectively best. Useful signal, not gospel.

188
SESSIONS ON DEMAND
127
CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE
4
OFFICIAL TRACKS
9
THEMES BELOW

Broadcom split the catalogue into four tracks: Cloud Infrastructure, Modern Apps, Network and Security, and Innovation. Cloud Infrastructure carries 127 of the 188 sessions, which makes it too big to be a useful filter. The nine themes below are my own grouping, cutting across the official tracks.

The ten most-watched

If you want the shortest possible read on where attention went:

  1. AgentMinder: The New Standard for Agentic Security , SECB1828LV, 150 views
  2. VCF State of the Union: Optimizing Costs and Closing Security Gaps in the AI Era , CLOB1276LV, 118 views
  3. Operationalizing Cyber Defense and App Resilience for the Agentic AI Era , SECB1789LV, 89 views
  4. A Deep Dive: What's New for VMware vSphere in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 , CLOB1082LV, 88 views
  5. Choosing the Right Path to VMware Cloud Foundation 9: Upgrade Converge Import or Rebuild , CLOB1257LV, 68 views
  6. Avoiding the RAM-pocalypse: Unlock Total Cost of Ownership Savings with VMware Memory Tiering , CLOB1046LV, 65 views
  7. VMware Salt: Automating Workload Configuration and Compliance , CLOB1073LV, 60 views
  8. What's New in VMware Cloud Foundation Operations , CLOT1139LV, 53 views
  9. Introducing VMware AI Factory: The Software-Defined Foundation of VMware Private AI Cloud , CLOB1244LV, 51 views
  10. Conquer the 2026 Hardware Crisis: VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 Optimization Strategies , CLOB1266LV, 47 views

Two things stand out. AgentMinder took the top slot with 150 views, roughly 27% ahead of the next session, which tells you agentic security was the story of the week rather than AI infrastructure itself. And the RAM-pocalypse session on memory tiering economics beat most of the feature sessions, which says the DRAM cost problem is landing hard.

By theme

Click any theme to expand. Each shows the most-watched sessions in that group.

Core platform and what's new  - 65 sessions, 804 views

The vSphere, VCF 9.1 and state-of-the-union sessions. Start here if you are catching up on the release rather than hunting a specific topic.

Plus 57 more in this theme in the full catalogue.

Security, compliance and recovery  - 25 sessions, 539 views

The most-watched category by a distance. Agentic security, confidential computing, compliance automation and the recovery scenarios.

Plus 17 more in this theme in the full catalogue.

AI, GPU and agentic  - 26 sessions, 557 views

AI Factory, the model runtime, agentic risk, and the sessions on running inference on infrastructure you own.

Plus 18 more in this theme in the full catalogue.

Kubernetes and applications  - 21 sessions, 281 views

VKS, GitOps, and the app estate. Includes the 90-minute hands-on that was one of the most watched sessions of the week.

Plus 13 more in this theme in the full catalogue.

Operations and automation  - 15 sessions, 291 views

VCF Operations, Salt, the SDK, lifecycle management and the automation provider/consumer model.

Plus 7 more in this theme in the full catalogue.

Networking  - 12 sessions, 240 views

VPCs, EVPN-VXLAN with Arista, Avi, and what changed in 9.1 networking.

Plus 4 more in this theme in the full catalogue.

Storage and memory  - 12 sessions, 200 views

vSAN, memory tiering, and the sessions aimed squarely at the DRAM cost problem.

Plus 4 more in this theme in the full catalogue.

Upgrade and migration  - 5 sessions, 162 views

Choosing between upgrade, converge and import. The path-selection session is the single most useful hour if you have a 5.2.x estate.

Design and architecture  - 7 sessions, 103 views

The Design and Architect track, plus CPU tuning, edge architectures and the homelab session.

If you only watch three

My picks, weighted toward things that change a design rather than describe a feature.

1. Choosing the Right Path to VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (CLOB1257LV)
Upgrade, converge or import. If you have a 5.2.x estate ahead of you, this is the hour that saves the most downstream rework, and the path decision is expensive to reverse.

2. Unlocking Performance with the Next-Gen Topology-Aware CPU Scheduler (CLOB1112LV)
Qasim Ali and Haoqiang Zheng on the engineering behind the 9.1 scheduler. Only 23 views, which is a shame given it underpins the SAP HANA 2-VMs-per-socket certification and the 30% SQL Server throughput number. If you do sizing work, this is undervalued.

3. Trust No One: Confidential Computing and Security Inside VMware ESX (CLOB1154LV)
The technical detail behind the AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX announcements. Confidential computing is now a placement attribute rather than a specialist island, and this explains the mechanics.

Sessions worth more attention than they got

A few that are sitting well below the view counts they deserve.

  • Design and Architecture: Managing and Operating a Private Cloud (CLOB1145LV, 7 views) , a Design and Architect track session with single-digit views, which says more about session scheduling than content.
  • Designing Around Licensing: Operational Patterns for Infrastructure (CMTYQT1670LV, 5 views) , a community session on the thing everyone complains about and nobody designs for deliberately.
  • Running VMware Cloud Foundation 9 at Home: Design Patterns, Pitfalls, and Practical Advice (CODEQT1435LV) , homelab sessions consistently teach more about the platform's real constraints than vendor sessions do.

How to actually work through this

The failure mode with a 188-session catalogue is predictable. You bookmark twelve, watch none, and by the time you get to them the release has moved on.

Pick three. Put them in the calendar as real appointments rather than aspirations. Then book an hour afterwards with whoever else on your team watched, with one question on the agenda: what changes in our estate because of this? If the answer is nothing, that is a legitimate outcome, but say it out loud. A session watched without a resulting backlog item was entertainment, not enablement.

Sources

Session titles, codes, speakers and view counts are from the public Explore video library. View counts as at early September 2026 and will have moved since.

Views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

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