VMware Explore 2025

Viva Las Vegas - A kind of travelogue.

At the beginning of the year, I had the pleasure of flying to the USA, and now I’m on my way to Las Vegas. After a slightly delayed departure, I arrived in Vegas after an 11.5-hour flight in a “comfortable” 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, for those who do not use the metric system. Perhaps one more small note. I won’t write much about the sessions; anyone who wants to can look them up in William Lam’s repository. I want to focus more on the vibe of the event here—that is, I’ll try to. I’m not really a travel blogger.

But before I talk or write about Explore itself, I’ll first write a little about Las Vegas. When you hear Las Vegas, you have a certain cliché in your head—at least I do. The city is loud, flashy, and never sleeps, and what can I say, it’s all true. The entertainment dial is turned up to 11—a sea of lights from flashing hotels, casinos, and some very obscure billboards, or even trucks that serve as rolling, illuminated billboards. As a German, this is a culture shock at first.

But if you prefer something a little quieter, I can give you two recommendations. These are certainly not insider tips, but then again, I’m not a travel blogger.

Hoover Dam and Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge

Visiting Hoover Dam feels like standing in front of a monument that engineers built just to prove they could. In short, it’s a huge thing.

The concrete wall on the border between Nevada and Arizona was completed in 1936 and still supplies electricity to millions of households today. The Hoover Dam is so massive that it slows down the Earth’s rotation slightly when Lake Mead is full—only a tiny fraction of a second, but the idea alone makes me smile. When you’re at the dam, you can walk back and forth between two states and two time zones. That gives you an extra hour to drink beer—I mean coffee.

Right next to it is the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, better known as the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge. From here, you have a spectacular panoramic view of the dam—almost like something out of a postcard.

There is a museum at Hoover Dam, but I skipped it and therefore can’t really say anything about it. However, my colleagues who visited it thought it was good. I preferred to go directly to the Valley of Fire to have more time there.

Valley of Fire

The Valley of Fire is located about 80 km northeast of Las Vegas and can be reached in less than an hour by car. The park covers around 186 square kilometres, making it the oldest and largest state park in Nevada. It goes without saying, but it’s a desert and it’s hot, so be sure to take water with you. You can buy some at the visitor centre or fill up empty bottles for free. It was about 110 degrees Fahrenheit that day, which is around 43 degrees Celsius, which a taxi driver said was cool. To me, it felt like sticking my head in a hot air fryer. It may not be the best idea to drive to a desert in the summer, but the landscape makes up for it.

I don’t think I’ve ever sweated so much in my life, but it was a fantastic day. There are five signposted short walks, all between one and two miles long, which are manageable with sufficient sun cream and water. There is also a road through the park, allowing you to cruise through beautiful and striking scenery in a typical American car.

If that’s too low-tech for you, you can also visit the Sphere. It’s like an IMAX cinema on steroids, although that doesn’t really do it justice.

Sphere

Who doesn’t know it, the gigantic sphere that peeks shyly into one hotel room or another? The Sphere is approximately 112 metres high and 157 metres in diameter, a rather large sphere that uses LEDs on the outside to display dancing cats, smilies and other things 24/7. You can see it as you approach the airport.

We watched Postcard from Earth by Darren Aronofsky, and what can I say? Audiovisually, it was the most impressive experience I’ve ever had. It’s very difficult to describe, and even the YouTube videos you can find don’t do the experience justice. If you have the opportunity to visit the sphere, then do it. Highly recommended.

Explore 2025

But enough with the travel tips, let’s get started with the event. Since I’ve only been to European events so far, the first big difference to Barcelona is that Explore is located on several floors of a hotel. This makes the event a little more compact and not quite as sprawling as at the Fira Gran Via. Depending on which hotel you’re staying in, you might not even see daylight—if you want to avoid it.

In terms of organization, everything was once again tip-top. Easy check-in, easy to find your way around, friendly staff everywhere who helped you find your way. What immediately stands out is that it’s less busy than expected. I don’t have any figures, but the days of 10,000 visitors and more are long gone. However, with the absence of EUC, Carbon Black, and smaller partners, this was to be expected. From a visitor’s point of view, however, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as you could get into every session without any problems, even if you hadn’t registered in advance or the session was officially fully booked. There were no long queues anywhere, and there were always plenty of snacks, refreshments, and coffee available. I’ve had different experiences in Barcelona.

Day 1

Day 1 started for me with a session on edge computing. It was co-hosted by Audi. Edge computing is a really exciting topic, and my employer evoila will also be presenting it at our in-house exhibition. So it was fascinating to hear about the topic from a customer perspective and learn how Audi is using it. The possibility of building a compact single-host edge cluster with vSAN storage, NSX networking, and automation tools such as ArgoCD in a VCF context has a lot of potential.

After that, I attended a session with Tim Burkhard, who explained the network control plane. Since NSX is my area of expertise, there was nothing new for me here, but sessions with vGandalf are always entertaining and bring out the fanboy in me.

11/10 I would definitely attend again. Of course, a photo with him is a must.

I then went on to other sessions, including William Lam’s, but this time I didn’t manage to get a photo. Next time, then. In between, I attended the vExpert Community meeting, picked up my swag, and talked to lots of vExperts.

Community

And while we’re on the subject of community, I was overwhelmed by how many people stopped to say hello. I can hardly put it into words, but it was incredible. Thank you so much, it was amazing, and I am grateful to everyone who reads my LinkedIn posts or my blog. I’m still surprised when someone asks me if they can take a photo with me. Thank you for this incredible support.

Photo credits go to Sebastian Garcia. An absolutely friendly person. Thank you for the nice conversation.

Day one ended with the welcome reception, after which my colleagues and I hit the Vegas nightlife.

Day 2

The second day started with little sleep and slight jet lag at breakfast on the Explore. Although breakfast is a funny thing—I understand it to mean something else. This was more like lunch. After enough coffee, I headed to the general keynote, which had the somewhat unwieldy title Shaping the Future of Private Cloud and AI Innovation. What was special about the general keynote for me was that I was asked if I would like to contribute a video clip for Paul Turner’s part.

My contribution was shown alongside four other well-known vExperts, including William Lam, Melissa Palmer, Eric Sloof and Duncan Epping. Seeing my own face on the main stage in Las Vegas, alongside the other great vExperts, was a bit strange but also great at the same time.

I filmed my part from the audience and uploaded it to YouTube.

The complete keynote can currently only be viewed directly at VMware.

After this highlight, I withdrew to prepare myself mentally for the upcoming certification. With the full pass, you could complete various certifications on site, and I took the opportunity to take my VCP VCF9 Administrator exam, which I successfully completed. As a small bonus, everyone who successfully certified received a pair of sneakers.

Swag is always welcome.

In addition to the general keynote, the highlight for me was the session by Duncan Epping and Rakesh Radhakrishnan entitled Innovations Redefining Storage and Disaster Recovery for VMware Cloud Foundation 9. I found it particularly exciting that it will be possible to use vSAN over Fibre Channel in the future, which makes me, as an old storage guy, especially happy. It should be possible to connect a vSAN storage-only cluster to an existing FC fabric via FC, allowing vSAN and FC storage to be used simultaneously. This combines the best of both worlds and allows drop-in replacements to be implemented without making my FC fabric obsolete.

The day ended with the VMUG reception at Wakuda, where Hock Tan personally addressed the VMUG community. He promised VMUG support and emphasized how important VMUG is for VMware and Broadcom.

There was plenty of space for pleasant conversations at Wakuda. Here, I had the opportunity to chat with Edd. By the way, you should check out his blog.

After that, I threw myself into the nightlife just like before. That’s a pattern and it will continue.

Day 3

This day started off rather leisurely for me. I didn’t have a session until 11, so I used the time to prepare this article and chat with a few vExperts. I also took a closer look at the expo and the community hub and had a few conversations there as well. I then attended the VMUG Leaders and VMware Champions Meet-up and tried in vain to take another exam. Unfortunately, there were no more slots available, and my place on the waiting list didn’t help either.

As part of VMware Champions, there will also be a session on VPCs with me. Exact details are not yet known.

Sadly, I missed the vExpert group photo while trying to get a spot for the exam. My colleague Steven Schramm and I then went to the Knight Welcome Reception.

Work hard, play hard. Afterwards, there was the Explore closing party on the pool deck of the Palazzo hotel with music and cool refreshments. Which was, of course, fantastic.

For most of the evoila team, this was also the last day of Explore. For Steven and me, things continued on Thursday with an exclusive full-day event for Broadcom Knights.

Knight Day

The day started at 8 a.m. with an update on the Knight program and what changes will be made. Spoiler alert: I have to complete a number of certifications. The rest of the day was spent looking at the roadmap and a condensed version of the last three days.

Since the day is under NDA, I can’t say anything about the roadmap except that I’m looking forward to the many new features in VCF 9.X. The day ended with an evening event at the Excalibur Hotel called Tournament of Kings. In a not-too-historically-accurate version of the European Middle Ages, the battle between good and evil was fought over a cold beer and fried chicken.

It was dramatic, loud, American, and very entertaining. Thank you for the wonderful day, dear Knight Team.

Last words

Since everything must come to an end, Friday was our departure day, and we spent our last dollars on food and boarded our flight back across the pond. What remains? A great event, wonderful conversations, new and old faces, and a lot of gratitude for everything. Thanks also to my employer, evoila, who sent 13 people to Las Vegas, making us the largest German group there. Oh, and we achieved Pinnacle status, which is also worth mentioning. I’m already looking forward to the upcoming Knight exclusive events and Explore on Tour in Germany.