#779 - Explore Highlights a Great Show this Year!

Bob and Eric talk about 2027 New year and the Explore 2027 call for papers, vSphere Express price list and more.

Tony talks about his new Home Lab post [Wondernerd.net/about/my-home-lab](http://Wondernerd.net/about/my-home-lab) which has a complete VCF 9.1 environment which he bought used off Ebay piece by piece and also has a NVIDIA L4 GPU for Private AI support. He uses it for virtual desktop environment running Omnisa Virtual environments as well as Agentic Linux environments for agent enablement. Great blog, good show.

Eric, Bob and Tony talk about the new vExpert Open Beta program for vexpertstage.aruba-consulting.com for those who want to see the new IRC chat environment as well as vExpert Gigs and the New Country/City directory.

Why spend 1 day a week learning AI, because it's moving that fast, how to design your Data Center with AI capabilities, and everything else you can learn from VMUG Connect Orlando.

Bob and Matt talk about the news around vSphere Standard Article about being available again and how it effect community lab environments. Also mention of Advantage 1 year license without a a VCP certification for study purposes.

Drew NIelsen comes talks about the new VCAPs, VCP certifications and the VCDX defines that happened at Explore in Vegas. The VCDX program is back!

Bob and Eric cover all the highlights from the Explore 2026 in Vegas this year. It was crowded with 4800 attendees and things were busy. Hackathon was twice as big as before, VMware{code}labs were full with Kubernetes and the Hub was crowded and buzzing. VCF 9.1 with integrated VKS and AI was what was happening.

As we all learn about VKS on VCF, it's an adventure to explore the Platform engineering. Leif worked on a VKS blog looking at the big considerations when looking at VKS.

Piotr talks about how he managed his 9.1 upgrade and the Powershell calling REST API's to avoid a subnet trap where traffic is blocked between subnets during install.

Dale Hassigner, 2025 Hackathon winner comes on the show to discuss what's happening for 2026, for AI learning to AI building, it should be a great Hackathon this year. With over 100 people signed up, we expect a record attendance.