VMware Explore 2025, held August 25-28 at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas, delivered deep technical insights and a wave of new capabilities across private cloud, AI-native systems, security, and infrastructure automation. Over 400 sessions, hands-on labs, and expert roundtables offered practitioners the chance to unpack the latest in VMware’s product stack – from Cloud Foundation to data services and advanced compliance tooling. Attending VMware Explore 2025 was a milestone for me — not just because of the technology announcements, the deep technical content, and social networking, but because it was my first time ever attending VMware Explore in Las Vegas.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 — AI-Native Platform

A dominant message throughout Explore 2025 was the evolution of private cloud into an AI-native platform — able to meet both enterprise infrastructure needs and AI workload demands without unnecessary complexity.

  • VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 took center stage. Broadcom highlighted how the unified platform now delivers built-in AI capabilities, stronger security, and enhanced manageability to help enterprises modernize infrastructure and accelerate AI adoption. 
  • Private AI Services: Announcements emphasized making AI a first-class workload within VMware Cloud Foundation. This approach embeds AI services — including partnerships with silicon and accelerator vendors — directly into the core cloud stack rather than as bolt-on features. 
  • Cyber Resilience & Compliance: A major focus across sessions was strengthening cyber defenses and compliance in private and hybrid cloud environments — particularly with automation-driven Zero Trust features and broad threat detection capabilities. 

These technology directions underscored VMware’s positioning as a platform that blends traditional enterprise cloud needs with emerging AI demands — offering choice across compute, security, and developer tooling.

Product Innovations and Launch Highlights

VMware Explore – as always – also in 2025 was a launchpad for several major offerings and enhancements that resonated across the community:

  • New private AI as-a-service capabilities inside VMware Cloud Foundation. 
  • Tanzu Data Intelligence platform, designed to help teams get more value out of modern apps and analytics. 
  • Tanzu Platform 10.3 expands observability, fleet management, and AI-readiness.
  • Expanded features in VMware vDefend and VMware Avi Load Balancer for improved security and operations. 
  • A suite of other tools and enhancements aimed at developers, operators, and cloud architects. 

This blend of innovation spoke to a broad audience — from hands-on technical practitioners digging into low-level details, to executives evaluating strategic AI and multi-cloud investments.

Ecosystem Integration and Hardware Acceleration

Explore 2025 highlighted VMware’s growing ecosystem partnerships, especially around AI acceleration and optimized application stacks:

NVIDIA & AMD Support

  • NVIDIA Blackwell GPU integration with VCF delivers enhanced throughput for AI and HPC workloads, backed by support for ConnectX-7 and BlueField-3 DPUs.
  • AMD collaboration brings ROCm Enterprise AI support and MI350 GPU acceleration into VCF environments, enabling retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and inference use cases.

Canonical Partnership

Aligned with both AI and container workloads, Ubuntu-based stacks (including Ubuntu Pro and Chiseled Ubuntu) provide secure, up-to-date OS foundations for Kubernetes and AI workloads.

These integrations help bridge the gap between infrastructure and workload requirements, unlocking performance benefits without sacrificing manageability.

Practical Learning and Hands-On Labs

Beyond product announcements, Explore 2025 put a heavy emphasis on practical technical depth – with hands-on labs, expert-led workshops, and certification offerings designed for immediate learning and career growth.

We as attendees were able to dive into labs on VCF operations, AI workload deployment, security best practices, and networking configurations – giving us tools and experience we could apply to real environments right away.

Plus having the opportunity to take the new VCF 9.0 VCP exams for free at VMware Explore, and earning some nice VMware by Broadcom sneakers when passing – although Hock Tan called them ugly while attending the VMUG reception at Wakuda ;-). I accepted this challenge and passed the “VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Administrator” exam at the first try. Taking the exam onsite at Explore was a great experience – surrounded by deep technical sessions, hands-on labs, and conversations with engineers and architects who live and breathe VCF 😀

Final thoughts and outlook

VMware Explore 2025 again delivered on technical depth with strong sessions, relevant product roadmaps, certification opportunities, and practical takeaways for engineers and architects. The focus on emerging trends like private AI and unified cloud infrastructure was timely and reflected broader industry shifts.

However, for me as a long-time Explore attendee in Barcelona, organizational and community challenges were hard to ignore this time. Lower attendance, a scaled-down partner presence, community frustration tied to pricing and licensing changes, and a probably more subdued overall atmosphere tempered the excitement a bit. 

VMware Explore 2025 also launched a new global phase, called “Explore on Tour”, bringing curated content, labs, and expert engagement to cities around the globe including Mumbai, London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo and Frankfurt later this year. 

As usual the final note – you can check out the recordings of the sessions from the official video library at: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/search