This week I traded customer work for the Amsterdam Marriott and spent five days at Broadcom Activate (22–26 June), on the PS/EAP practitioner track — the one aimed squarely at the people who actually design, build, and run complex VCF environments in the field. As an ITQ consultant, that’s my corner of the world, so this was less marketing keynote and more rolled-up-sleeves.
Monday eased us in with the practitioner keynote, a look at VCF adoption trends, and a session on Agentic AI security with VCF that hinted at where operations is heading. The welcome reception at Bar TWLV did its job too — half the value of these events is the hallway track.
Tuesday was the firehose: a full day of VCF 9.1 across compute, upgrades, networking & storage, Operations, Automation, and vSphere Kubernetes Service, each backed by a short live lab. Getting hands on 9.1 the same week it’s fresh — straight from the product teams who built it — is the kind of thing you simply can’t get from release notes.
Wednesday and Thursday split into breakouts, and I spent both days in the VCF Operations & Automation room. The Operations sessions went deep on cost efficiency management, what-if scenarios, the troubleshooting workbench, and — the one I’d been waiting for — advanced and custom dashboard configurations. Day two rolled into Automation: overview and design, blueprints, IaaS services, and Orchestrator extensibility. Given how much custom-dashboard and super-metric work I’ve been buried in lately, this was the most directly useful track I could have picked — the depth went well past the usual slideware.
And then the part that made the week count: I sat two exams at the free onsite testing center — and passed both. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architect and Advanced VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Storage are now in the bag. Doubling up in one week was ambitious — the storage specialist in particular took some serious prep going in — but clearing both in a single week made the whole trip feel like it counted double.
It wasn’t all sessions and exams, either. The evenings were their own kind of value — a full week alongside ITQ colleagues, away from the day-to-day, with good dinners, plenty of beers, and the unhurried conversations that just don’t happen over Teams. Those hours did as much for the week as any breakout did.
What I’m taking back to clients: VCF 9.1 sharpens a lot of the operational rough edges, the Operations tooling — custom dashboards, what-if scenarios, the troubleshooting workbench — is exactly what makes day-2 life easier, and practitioner-level depth like this is genuinely hard to find anywhere else. Five intense days, two exams passed, and a notebook full of things to break in the lab. Worth every minute.
The original article was posted on: www.hollebollevsan.nl
