VMware Communities Roundtable

VMware Communities Roundtable is a live-recorded conversation about VMware infrastructure and the user community that forms around it. Eric Nelson opens each recording by greeting listeners wherever they are in the world, then introduces his regular co-host, Bob Plankers. It starts loose. Ant season, a cold snap in the Bay Area and a Mardi Gras parade all get discussed before the pair reach anything technical. The informality is part of the appeal, but it is not the whole show. When the talk turns to infrastructure, it gets specific fast. In one excerpt, a guest describes a nested VCF 5.1 lab built on four ESXi hosts, each given extra drives so vSAN had a cache disk and a data disk. The install got hung up on DNS entries and routing checks before it finally went through. The follow-up questions are the kind a home-lab builder would ask: whether Holodeck was involved, how many hosts were needed and what drove those choices. Another conversation covers vDefend and AVI and asks whether network administrators will push back on vDefend the way they once did on NSX. The answer shifts the problem from software to people. It compares teams that cooperate with the old habit of filing a ticket and waiting weeks. The VCF installer gets similar scrutiny: the cloud manager now bundles vSphere, vSAN and NSX, so a lab can end up carrying two copies of everything. Community business runs through the episodes as well. There is talk about the reviewers who work through vExpert applications country by country. There is also talk about choosing conference speakers, where one strong writer of session descriptions can end up picked for far too many slots. Pricing and deadlines come up too, from the early bird cutoff for Explore to a flat community rate that gets no discount. VMUG Advantage appears in more than one episode title, and the VMUG Connect conference in St. Louis gets a news mention. Broadcom stays in the background, including a wry aside about being community funded. Other titles cover disaster recovery and business continuity, Aria Operations super metrics, homelab hardware for VCF and the vExpert awards. Guests named in titles include Lei Wang, Marc Crawford, E Kubla, and Tamecka McKay, who is listed as a CIO in a title that mentions FT Lauderdale's Police Department. The recordings are also streamed live, and VMware TV and X are among the outlets mentioned. Sign-offs stay casual. One ends with thanks to the person wrangling the audio and a push to go find barbecue for lunch. For a first listen, the nested VCF 5.1 conversation with Marc Crawford is the show at its most hands-on.