VMware Inc.

Which I guess brings us to the actual software we're using to handle that abstraction layer.

Because we've got two primary options in the virtualization space for this kind of local development, right? VirtualBox and VMware?

Yeah, those are the big two.

And I know VirtualBox is like the classic open source choice.

Yeah.

And you can script it super easily with tools like Vagrant.

But I don't know, VMware has always felt a bit more performant to me when handling things like graphics rendering or complex networking.

Yeah, you're not wrong there.

Hello, I'm Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and your host for the Cloud 2030 Podcast.

In this episode, we dig in to all things virtualization, VMware, the VMware Explorer market announcements, but much more importantly, how the market is looking at virtualization as a whole platform.

We have a special guest.

Byron Dill from Summit.

I run a small consultancy in Silicon Valley.

I've been around for a long time as well.

My work has often been around early aspects of virtualization, orchestration, and choreography in kind of the early days of VMware and its competitors.

And my... work mostly for the last 15 or so years has been in distributed compute, distributed data, and a lot of it has been AI for not quite 10 years, having started working with some of the NLP work that was being done just prior to the

In the news because of AI.

It's in the news because of some choices that Broadcom VMware have made.

It's been in the news because of what the IBM Red Hat folks have been doing.

And we'll talk about some of those here as we go on through the podcast.

It can be very, very brutal.

contractual terms, you have minimum commitments, termination fees, and things like that from the business side that make it really, really, really hard to explore other options.

It does help when your contracts come to an end, and we'll get to the VMware here in a minute.

But that's another example.

Hey, welcome to the Virtually Speaking Podcast, coverage of VMware Explorer 2026, here with one of my good friends, old, old, old friend of the podcast.

Not that he's old, but he's an old friend of the show, Mr. William Lamb, welcome back.

Old? I think I'm almost 21, I think, right? I'm gonna drink now.

Fantastic events.

Obviously, working with the customers as well.

I actually spoke to a couple of customers and they said that's one of their favorite parts of Explore is actually going to the C-Tab because they, and they said this, they said, and they said, VMware like literally wants to hear the good and the bad because they want to make it.

So it's actually a, it's actually a popular thing.

Any takeaways for you on that event?

Was it April or May or something of this year? Microsoft kind of pushed through an encryption upgrade for accounts that would be Kerberostable so that they take more horsepower away.

you know therefore time therefore you have a lower rate of success at cracking those hashes so i my my success rate in cracking curb roastable hashes has dropped significantly but anyway that was in good shape no as rep roastable users couldn't get into any sql boxes took a look at scanning all their land side stuff, looked for MFPs with default passwords, out of date ESXi and VMware boxes, all that stuff looking really, really good.

And their file shares yielded just a couple things that were more like, Well, people had a passwords.doc and it was right sitting there on their desktop.

And that was interesting, but it didn't have anything to do with their corporate accounts.

I worked at the FDIC for a little bit.

I was working at VMware, a technology company.

So I got to see firsthand kind of the term that's been thrown around a lot lately, the fraud, waste, and abuse in our federal government.

We won't get into that, but I worked as a contractor for the government and I saw firsthand just kind of the ridiculousness that exists there.

let me take this.

So one of the area where customers liked us and loved us is, let's imagine you have a VMware or one of this hypervisor environment, and you have some back-end storage that is either NFS or iSCSI.

That's where your VMDKs, for example, the objects for the VMs are residing.

It is incredibly different, incredibly hard, I should say, to troubleshoot an issue or flow that traverses through the fabric from your storage to your server or server to your storage.

let me take this.

So one of the area where customers liked us and loved us is, let's imagine you have a VMware or one of this hypervisor environment, and you have some back-end storage that is either NFS or iSCSI.

That's where your VMDKs, for example, the objects for the VMs are residing.

It is incredibly different, incredibly hard, I should say, to troubleshoot an issue or flow that traverses through the fabric from your storage to your server or server to your storage.