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Explore 2026 Starts Today What I'm Watching From Sydney

Four days at the Venetian, and I'm following it from the wrong timezone. Here's the shortlist, and why the announcements from last week already tell you where the platform is going.

VMware Explore runs 31 August to 3 September at the Venetian. I'm watching from Sydney this year, which mostly means catching keynote reaction at breakfast and picking through session recordings afterwards.

The interesting thing is that the most substantial technical news of the last fortnight has already landed, before anyone got on a plane. Four posts in the last week of August: a topology-aware CPU scheduler, confidential computing on both AMD and Intel silicon, and an NVIDIA hypervisor certification. Read together they're one argument the platform is getting better at understanding the hardware underneath it, and a set of long-standing reasons for keeping workloads off virtual infrastructure are weaker than they were.

So the sessions I'm most interested in are the ones that put engineering detail behind those claims.

The Shortlist

Next-Gen Topology-Aware CPU Scheduler (CLOB1112LV) Qasim Ali and Haoqiang Zheng on the work behind the 9.1 scheduler. The published numbers are up to 30% higher SQL Server throughput, up to 26% on Oracle, and peak PostgreSQL latency in VMmark cut roughly in half. The result that matters most commercially is the SAP HANA certification at two VMs per socket on Granite Rapids with SNC-2 enabled. Broadcom has said a detailed performance whitepaper is coming; if you do sizing work, that's the artefact to wait for.

Hardening and Securing VMware Cloud Foundation (CLOT1184LV) Bob Plankers and Ken Werneburg. The security blueprint including zero-trust and regulatory guidance. Plankers has been the reference on vSphere hardening for years, and this is the session whose content lands directly in a security architecture document. If your team watches one recording, this is my pick.

Unlock the Future: Transitioning to VMware Cloud Foundation (CLOT1136LV) Kyle Gleed and Jared Burns on the upgrade roadmap. Worth pairing with the 5.2.x to 9.1 upgrade guide and the Upgrade Planning Tool. The documentation gives you the sequence; a session like this gives you the failure patterns that don't get printed.

Conquer the 2026 Hardware Crisis (CLOB1266LV) Sandeep Byreddy and Junchi Zhang on extracting more from constrained hardware. The supply environment is real and it's now an official Broadcom storyline. For estates with fixed refresh budgets, the tiering and consolidation content here converts directly into deferred capital expenditure.

How vSphere Kubernetes Service Changes the Game (CLOB1241LV) Jay Thontakudi and Himanshu Singh. The operating-model session for teams running containers and VMs on one platform. Pairs with the VKS policy bundle for the governance half of the story.

The Numbers Behind the Programme

Broadcom's planning material cites a survey of 1,800 IT decision-makers: 56% are running or planning production AI inferencing in private cloud, 62% of IT leaders are significantly concerned about AI infrastructure costs, and AI infrastructure and operations is the top enterprise skills gap at 40%.

Those three numbers explain most of the session catalogue. Production AI on private infrastructure, cost pressure, and a workforce that hasn't caught up yet.

If You're There

Two new small-group interactive workshop tracks run daily Monday through Wednesday one on designing and architecting private cloud infrastructure, one on consumption and management across teams. Deliberately limited seats, so they fill first. Worth booking before the keynote rather than after.

If You're Not

Recordings land afterwards, and the failure mode is obvious: they sit in a tab until they're stale. The thing that makes them useful is a deadline and a debrief. Assign the sessions, set a date, and spend an hour afterwards on what changes in your estate as a result. A session watched without a resulting backlog item was entertainment, not enablement.

I'll cover anything significant as it lands.