Take 5 with Tom Fenton: My Five Must-See VMware Explore 2025 Sessions -- Virtualization Review

Take 5 with Tom Fenton: My Five Must-See VMware Explore 2025 Sessions

By Tom Fenton
07/11/2025

Every year, I create a must-see list of VMworld/Explore sessions. These are the sessions that interest me most at the conference. This year looks pretty solid, especially with VMware's big push to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 and the transformational changes we see in AI.

Below are my top five sessions for this year and my thoughts about this year's catalog.

Catalog Overview
Explore 2025 will once again be held at the Venetian in Las Vegas Aug. 25-28, the week before Labor Day. I believe that this is the last year that they are contracted to have the conference at this location, so it will be interesting to see what happens to Explore next year.

This year's catalog includes approximately 200 entries, comprising of a welcome reception, the conference party, a general session, 131 breakout sessions, 28 expert roundtables, 25 quick talks, and 18 tutorials. I will be focusing on the breakout sessions.

The catalog is organized into tracks and session types, and it can be filtered by these categories, as well as other criteria, and searched for specific keywords.

I find this helpful as I can quickly focus on topics that interest me.

VMware Cloud Foundation
There are 71 entries in the catalog for VCF. This comprises one-third of the sessions. Forty-two were breakout sessions, 10 were Meet the Expert Roundtables, 13 were Quick Talks, and there were six tutorials.

The first one that caught my eye was INVB1158LV - Accelerating AI Workloads: Mastering vGPU Management in VMware Environments.

GPUs constitute a significant investment for any company that is looking at using AI/ML workloads. This session promises to cover virtualizing and managing NVIDIA GPUs in VMware environments. I don't know much about GPU sharing, vGPU profiles, performance benchmarks, and best practices for vGPU placement, so I hope that this session will shed some light on it for me. I also hope that it covers stun-time for vMotion and monitoring tools.

As a home labber, without production-grade hardware, I still want to explore the new features of VCF 9.0. So, the next session that sparked my interest was CLOB1201LV - Deploying a Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Lab.

I hope to learn how to deploy a complete private cloud solution using VCF 9. It should help with resource-optimized techniques, and I will be able to experience the platform's full power using my minimal compute, storage, and networking resources. I also hope to learn that even if my hardware isn't on the hardware compatibility list (HCL), if it will still work.

If you are considering building or expanding your lab environment to prepare for VCF 9.0, this session is one you will want to attend.

Deep Technical Sessions
One of the technologies that I am interested in but haven't been able to spend any time with is VMware's new NVMe memory tiering. CLOB1122LV - A Deep Dive into Memory Tiering with NVMe appears to be a good session to bring me up to speed on the topic, including how it works and how to utilize it.

AI Sessions
AI is all the rage, and it is not an accident that one quarter (50) of the sessions have AI in their title. Combing through this list, it was tough to narrow it down to just a session or two. But I did.

I love a good demo, or even better, one that goes off the rails. Session INVB1446LV - Unlock Innovation with VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA promises to have a live demo of VMware's Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA.

The last session in my list wasn't about implementing or understanding technology, but rather the business aspect of it. INVB1153LV - How Rio Tinto Is Creating an AI Platform of the Future covers how a company, Rio Tinto, uses AI for everything from driverless trucks/trains to automated drilling and blasting rigs.

Catalog Criticisms
I do have some criticisms of the layout of the catalog this year. First, I couldn't find a way to see who was presenting the sessions. As the abstract didn't list them like it has in previous years.

I used the search function for some of my favorite presenters, such as Cormac, Lam, and Horschman. I finally got a hit on Duncan, as the abstracts did list the presenters, but for the majority of the session, the presenters weren't listed.

This seems like a significant oversight, as some presenters have a style that I can relate to and enjoy seeing them present. This seems like a significant oversight.

Further complicating the decision of which session to attend, the thumbnails for the sessions were too small to show the entire title. This made it tiresome to search the catalog. For example, in one session, all I could read was "10 Amazing Facts That Prove VCF Is the Right Single ...." The right single for what?

To find out, I needed to click Learn More.

Although this looks like a fine session, it was not what I was looking for. I spent far too much time repeating this process.

Another complaint I have is one that I somewhat understand, but I still want to mention it. Let's talk about what I didn't find in the catalog. I searched for "EUC", "Citrix", "Horizon", "VDI", "DaaS", "Workstation," and "Fusion" and came up empty. It is somewhat understandable that VMware's focus is on things other than end-user computing. However, it would still have been nice to offer the EUC community a session or two, especially with the end of support for Windows 10 approaching, and with their disinvestment of Horizon, they could now talk about Citrix. I would bet that VMware still has many users running Citrix and Horizon on its platform. Looks like this might have been a lost opportunity.

I must have woken up in a grumpy mood. Another nitpick I have with the catalog is how difficult it is to send a URL to a session. The only way I could find is to get a link is to search for the session ID and use it in the URL that it creates. So, for example, the URL for session NVB1153LV is

https://event.vmware.com/flow/vmware/explore2025lv/content/page/catalog?search=INVB1153LV%20&tab.sessioncatalogtabs=1747347809815001igUo&search.level=1517937137830004asmP&search.level=1517937137830003aCWu#_gl=1*n4uiuj*_gcl_ag*Mi4xLmswQUFBQUFEaTNTdlVoX3VrTG9uUUR0bll6YkJNX3FEd0tIJGkxNzUwMjY0MTQ2

which was tied to the web session that I was working on, so it would be useless to send to anyone else.

I found that I could shorten it down to

https://event.vmware.com/flow/vmware/explore2025lv/content/page/catalog?search=INVB1153LV

which seems to work. It just seems like they could have made the URLs a little bit more shorter and friendly.

That said, the sessions do look good this year, and I am excited to attend the conference.

Enjoy Vegas!

Remember that Vegas is more than gambling and the strip, so if you have a few extra days to spend in Vegas, check the blog I wrote a few years ago entitled "Five (Other) Things to Do in Vegas at VMware Explore 2023!" and go out and explore the area, especially if this is the first time you are in Vegas.

Hopefully, these suggestions will get you started on discovering what sessions you want to attend this year. Sessions tend to fill up quickly, so be sure to reserve your seats early. The entire Explore 2025 catalog can be found here and you can register here.

See you in Vegas for VMware Explore 2025!!!

About the Author

Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.