Small IT Team, Big Upgrade: USSFCU’s Journey to VCF 9
In this VMware Explore 2025 edition of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson talk with Raj Reddi from the United States Senate Federal Credit Union (USSFCU) and Alexis Colon, Sr. Solutions Architect at Broadcom.
Raj shares how USSFCU—serving a sensitive membership that includes Senate and Supreme Court communities—successfully upgraded from VCF 5.2 to VCF 9 with minimal downtime, despite having a lean IT team of just 22 people.
Key highlights include:
🔹 How Private AI is being leveraged for advanced fraud detection and member protection
🔹 The role of careful planning and strong partnerships in executing a smooth upgrade
🔹 Why the unified nature of VCF 9 eliminates siloed infrastructure and accelerates innovation
🔹 Lessons learned from aligning technical design with business initiatives
This conversation is proof that with the right approach and trusted partners, even small IT teams can deliver enterprise-grade innovation and resilience.
👉 Watch the full episode to hear how USSFCU modernized with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.
#VMwareExplore #VCF #VirtuallySpeakingPodcast #PrivateAI #FraudDetection #Broadcom #FinancialServices
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VCF Core Innovations That Matter: Vijay Ramachandran at VMware Explore 2025
In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, recorded at VMware Explore 2025, hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Vijay Ramachandran, VP of Products for Core Infrastructure at Broadcom.
Vijay shares the latest innovations in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) that are reshaping core infrastructure:
🔹 Memory Tiering – a technical feature that’s seeing surprisingly high customer engagement
🔹 vSAN Global Deduplication – cluster-wide dedupe for better efficiency and cost savings
🔹 Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) – simplifying network configuration and bringing cloud-like networking to VCF
The discussion also dives into new security and resilience capabilities, including:
✔️ Confidential Compute
✔️ Hypervisor-level EDR integration
✔️ Ransomware recovery for on-prem environments
Vijay also announces a tech preview for object storage, addressing a long-standing customer request with a built-in solution.
Looking ahead, he shares the future direction of VCF—expanding security, advancing data protection, and extending enterprise-grade VM features into the Kubernetes ecosystem to power modern apps.
👉 Don’t miss this deep dive into the future of VMware Cloud Foundation!
#VMwareExplore #VMwareCloudFoundation #VCF #VirtuallySpeakingPodcast #PrivateCloud #Broadcom
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Private AI for Everyone: Inside VMware’s Biggest VCF 9.0 Update
At VMware Explore 2025, hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Himanshu Singh to unpack one of the biggest announcements: Private AI is now natively built into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF 9.0).
With this shift, customers no longer need an add-on service—all Private AI capabilities are included as part of VCF entitlement, making AI more accessible and integrated than ever.
Key highlights from the conversation:
🔹 AI-Native VCF – Private AI becomes part of the core platform for every customer.
🔹 GPU Advancements – Support for NVIDIA Blackwell B200 and RTX Pro 6000, plus new AMD Instinct MI350 series GPUs.
🔹 Networking Improvements – Enhanced Direct Path IO for NVIDIA ConnectX-7 and BlueField-3.
🔹 Data Privacy & Sovereignty – Built-in security and virtualization efficiency to run AI with confidence.
Himanshu explains how these innovations bring together modern infrastructure, advanced accelerators, and trusted security to help organizations adopt AI while maintaining full control over their data.
👉 Subscribe to the Virtually Speaking Podcast for more VMware Explore 2025 coverage and insights into the future of private cloud and AI.
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IT That Saves Lives: Mary Washington Healthcare’s VMware Cloud Foundation Journey
In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, recorded at VMware Explore 2025, hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Michael Miller, IT Systems Architect at Mary Washington Healthcare.
Mike shares his inspiring career journey from working the midnight help desk shift to leading IT architecture at a healthcare organization where uptime isn’t just about business continuity—it’s about saving lives.
He walks through Mary Washington Healthcare’s modernization journey:
🔹 Transitioning from legacy infrastructure to hyperconverged VxRail
🔹 Implementing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) for automation and consistency
🔹 Leveraging automation for certificate updates and password rotations, reducing human error
🔹 Gaining real-time visibility through metrics to optimize system performance
The discussion highlights the critical role of IT in healthcare, the importance of professional implementation, and how automation and modernization with VCF directly improve system reliability—and ultimately, patient care.
👉 Don’t miss this story of IT transformation where technology and healthcare intersect.
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VMware & Canonical Join Forces: Ubuntu Optimized for VCF
At VMware Explore 2025, hosts Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Himanshu Singh to discuss the expanded partnership between VMware and Canonical—bringing together the world’s #1 private cloud and the #1 cloud OS.
Himanshu explains how Ubuntu OS with Canonical’s 10-year enterprise support is now bundled as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) entitlement, simplifying operations for enterprise customers. A key highlight is the introduction of “chisel containers”—lightweight Ubuntu images optimized for specific workloads. These minimal containers reduce image size from ~200MB to ~50MB, improving efficiency and dramatically lowering vulnerabilities (their demo dropped CVEs from 16 to just 1).
The conversation also explores how the partnership addresses air-gapped environments by delivering pre-compiled virtualized GPU drivers, enabling faster, more secure AI deployments.
Whether you’re running Kubernetes, modern applications, or AI workloads, this partnership delivers a more secure, efficient, and enterprise-ready private cloud platform.
👉 Subscribe to the Virtually Speaking Podcast for more VMware Explore 2025 coverage!
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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