Keynote VMware explore 2025

The keynote is always one of the most exciting parts of VMware Explore. There’s nothing quite like watching a massive hall fill up with thousands of VMware enthusiasts. As we entered the main stage, music was playing, and the organizers were dancing while guiding everyone to their seats. The energy in the room was motivating, setting an inspiring tone for what was to come.

The keynote kicked off with Hock Tan, who laid out his vision for VCF 9. VMware is unifying its core products vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and Aria into a single platform designed to deliver a true private cloud experience on-premises. His central theme was all about reducing friction in the enterprise, and he highlighted three big friction points he sees today.

Friction point 1: Developer velocity vs. IT control
Hock emphasized that developers don’t care about infrastructure, they just want to write code using their favorite DevOps tools. With VCF 9, containers run as seamlessly as virtual machines, giving developers infrastructure at the speed they need. He also pointed out how organizations often struggle with fragmented teams, developers, IT admins, networking, and security all working in silos. VCF 9 helps break down those barriers by uniting compute, networking, and storage into one platform. The result? A faster path to production for applications.

Friction point 2: Speed vs. security
Traditionally, speed has come at the cost of security, often requiring a pile of external agents to fill the gaps. With VCF 9, security is built in from the ground up, no extra overhead needed.

Friction point 3: Legacy IT vs. the platform for what’s next
Many enterprises are still weighed down by legacy systems. In the past, the answer was often to rush to the public cloud. But, as Hock explained, that’s no longer the only way forward. VCF 9 represents the culmination of 25 years of VMware innovation, enabling organizations to modernize while staying on-premises. It’s not about abandoning what you have, it’s about evolving it.

One line from Hock’s talk really stuck with me:
“If you are doing cloud, do it right.”

After sharing his vision, Hock introduced the first customer speaker of the session, giving us a chance to hear how these ideas are playing out in the real world.

After the customer story wrapped up, Paul Turner took the stage. He started with a quick look back at VMware’s journey, how it all began with virtualization and has now evolved to focus on private cloud, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation. What makes VCF especially powerful, he explained, is its flexibility: it can be delivered anywhere on-premises, at the edge, through hyperscalers, or via service providers. It’s about enabling IT to move at the speed of developers.

Paul also highlighted VMware’s scale and innovation, noting that most of their largest customers are already running VCF in their environments. Over the years, VMware has invested more than a million engineering hours and secured over 8,000 patents to get to this point.

From there, Paul introduced five VMware experts, each sharing their favorite feature in VCF 9:

William Lam – Live Patching in VCF Operations
Apply patches without downtime. You can download, schedule, and deploy updates—all while staying online.
Melissa Palmer – SecOps Dashboard
A new dashboard that provides greater visibility and insights into your organization’s security posture.
Eric Sloff – Health & Diagnostics in VCF Operations
Tools to proactively catch issues like expiring certificates, capacity bottlenecks, or system anomalies before they cause problems.
Duncan Epping – vSAN Global Deduplication
Post-process deduplication that boosts space efficiency without impacting performance.
Daniel Krieger – Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs)
The ability to spin up a VPC in under 30 seconds—no networking expertise required.

Next, a new customer was invited to the stage to share their story—how they run their business and the impact VCF has had on their IT operations. It’s always inspiring to hear real-world examples of just how much VCF can transform the way organizations approach technology.

Afterward, Paul Turner returned to the stage and shifted the focus to "what’s next" for VMware Cloud Foundation. He framed it around three big themes:

Infrastructure at the speed of the developer
Private AI as a service
Cyber-resilient data

Then came the first set of announcements. The standout: Private Cloud with Canonical Ubuntu, the world’s #1 cloud OS. This integration promises to deliver significant benefits, including:
End-to-end enterprise support across Ubuntu OS, Kubernetes containers, and VCF plus faster, more secure patch management for critical vulnerabilities.

Better Security & Efficiency with Chiseled Containers
Lightweight Ubuntu containers for runtimes like Python, .NET, and Go reduce storage use, speed up image transfers, and shrink the attack surface for safer, faster app delivery.

Faster AI Deployments with GPU Drivers
Precompiled GPU drivers in Ubuntu images simplify deployment, even in air-gapped environments—boosting performance, cutting deployment time, and removing the need for on-node driver compilation.

After sharing the first announcements, Paul Turner welcomed Sabina Anja to the stage for a live demo.

Her session brought VMware’s vision of “Infrastructure at the Speed of Developers” to life. She demonstrated how VCF enables self-service infrastructure managed directly through Git, with built-in security guardrails and full end-to-end visibility. The takeaway was clear: platform teams can give developers the freedom they want while still maintaining the control and governance the business needs.

After Sabina’s demo, Paul returned to the stage, calling this “the accelerated path to production.” He then introduced the next speaker, Chris Wolf.

Chris wasted no time and jumped straight into showcasing VMware’s new intelligent assistant an AI-powered chatbot integrated directly into the platform. You can ask it questions about your environment, and it provides actionable insights on the spot.

To demonstrate, Chris walked through a real-world scenario: troubleshooting a virtual machine with unusually high CPU usage. With the assistant, the issue was quickly identified and resolved.

I have to say, I really liked this feature. It’s going to save IT teams a ton of time on troubleshooting and let them focus more on building and innovating.

After the demo a partnership with AMD was announced, enabling support for their Instinct MI350 GPUs and enterprise AI software, tailored to fine-tuning LLMs, RAG workflows, and inference tasks.

Not long after the AMD announcement, Chris Wolf took the stage again with another major update: Private AI as a Service is now a core part of VCF 9.0.

He highlighted that AI has become mainstream in enterprise IT, with more than 70% of organizations planning to run AI models on private clouds driven by cost efficiency, data privacy, and compliance requirements.

The big news? Private AI is now natively integrated into VCF 9.0. This means all customers, both new and existing, can access private AI services directly through their VCF subscription, without needing additional infrastructure or external cloud providers.

The final announcement came from Paul Turner, who introduced VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Advanced Cyber Compliance. This new offering strengthens VCF with automated compliance enforcement, ransomware recovery, and enhanced platform security, specifically tailored for enterprises operating in regulated industries.

I really enjoyed the keynote at VMware Explore 2025—the way the presentation flowed between Broadcom leaders and customer stories made it both engaging and relatable. One of my favorite announcements was that Private AI is now a core part of VCF 9, and Chris Wolf’s demonstration really brought it to life, showing how seamlessly AI workloads can be deployed and managed. Overall, I loved the energy and engagement around VCF 9, and it was exciting to see the platform’s potential for developers and IT teams alike.

Summary of key announcements:

🐧Ubuntu Partnership: Optimizing VCF for AI and Containers

🧠 AMD Collaboration: Enhancing AI Capabilities

🔐 VCF Advanced Cyber Compliance

🤖 Intelligent Assist for VCF

🧠 Private AI Becomes Core to VCF 9.0