We are live in Barcelona at VMware Explore 2024, the first VMware Explore since the acquisition by Broadcom was finalised. A lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same. We are back at Gran Fira and we from soulTec are back in the same hotel.

We were one of the few partners invited to the Partner Technical Leadership Forum. This exclusive session took place on Monday morning.

Certification Changes

One of the biggest innovations concerns certification. Broadcom has recently transferred all VCP / VCAP / VCIX certifications to the new certifications. Our engineers have received numerous emails with the new Broadcom certifications..

However, VCIX and VCDX will disappear in the short to medium term, at least for the partners. A new distinction will be made between platform and product. The former VCP exams now mainly deal with the platform (VCF, VVF) while the more advanced VCAP exam is dedicated to the specific products. The VCAPs are no longer differentiated according to deploy and design. This automatically eliminates the VCIX, which was only a distinction if both VCAPs of a track were passed.

What happens with VCDX? The VMware Certified Design Expert is one of the most difficult exams and has only been achieved by just over 300 individuals in about 10 years. According to Richard Carlson of Broadcom, this program will disappear. It will be replaced by Broadcom Knights. You can find out more about the Knights program in another blog post here soon because we at soulTec will follow through on this and become Knights.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9

The biggest innovation on the product side will be VCF 9. Broadcom is changing a lot with this release. We will mention a few highlights here, but we will write further blog posts for more details.

With the VCF Operations Console comes a new UI for an overview of the entire VCF environment. This is also accompanied by the One Fleet Lifecycle, which means that the lifecycle of the entire environment is managed from one UI.

The tags from NSX and vSphere are now also integrated. Rules can now be built in NSX that take vSphere tags into account.

vSAN 9 will improve the snapshot technology and introduce global deduplication.

Next steps

We are still at VMware Explore and enjoying the large number of technical sessions. Some of our team participated in the VMware Code Hackathon on Tuesday evening and had a lot of fun. We hope to see you at VMware Explore. If not this year, then maybe next year?