AI Qubits You Need for Your VMware Explore Schedule

You got approval to attend VMware Explore this year! That’s fantastic, I look forward to seeing you there. By now you have probably started to build your schedule in session builder. I have a few Explore sessions you might want at the top of your list. And some of you might be wondering what AI Qubits are.

As of today, they don’t exist, they aren’t real. They sound cool though, don’t they? I’ll be presenting on topics related to both qubits and AI this year at Explore. We’ll be breaking down topics to their atomic parts and spinning them to get the answers people are curious about.

I bet that means you’re curious about what all these sessions are.

There are four of them, and they range from introductory to deep dives and futuristic exploration of topics. The four sessions you will want to attend are:

• Quantum Computing: What Are You Scared Of? [INVB1447LV] on Thursday, August 29^th at 10:15 AM
• Unlocking the Magic of Gen-AI in VMware VCF: Where Dreams Meet Reality [CMTY2254LV] on Thursday, Aug 29th at 9AM
• Unlocking vGPU Power: From Code to vCenter Plugin [CODE2229LV] on Monday, August 26th, at 11AM
• Empowering Virtual Environments: The vGPU Resource Scheduler Plug-in [CMTY2241LV] on Monday, August 26th at 1PM

Needless to say, you should be able to find me fairly easily Monday and Thursday (hint check the community space).

You are probably wondering about all these sessions and they’re making your head spin faster than a couple of entangled qubits.

Let’s start with the breakout session on quantum computing. John Arrasjid (VCDX001) and I are talking about the perceived perils of quantum computing. You may have even heard that quantum computing is going to break encryption sometime “really soon” and it’s going to be pandemonium. We’re going to demystify all this and talk about what it will take to achieve this, where we’re at currently, and what IT teams can start doing today to protect themselves from the big scary quantum computers whose qubits are smaller than the tip of a pin. Never have so many big companies and governments been scared of something so small, welcome to the future.

Speaking of the future let’s look at the session on unlocking the magic of Gen-AI. This isn’t a deep technical community session that will teach you to deploy an AI model on VMware VCF in under 30 minutes. That would be pretty cool, and I think it can be done, but that’s not what we are talking about in this session. Gina Rosenthal and I are going to break apart all the hype around AI and make it easier for folks to understand from how does AI and LLMs even work to what is RAG and why we need it. We also answer the question why you would want to run AI in a VCF virtual environment. This is going to be a fun session that allows almost anyone to sound good in a room and know what they’re talking about.

Now it’s time to dive to the depths of things you can do with AI in my VMware Code session on taking code and turning it into a vCenter plugin. That’s exactly what I will demonstrate in this 25-minute Code session. Here a few years back I created some simple but powerful scripts that most people know as “VDI by day and Compute by Night.” The idea is simple you have all these users on virtual desktops (AKA Omnissa Horizon) with Virtual GPUs (vGPUs). Well, most users only use those desktops for about 1/3 of the day the rest of the time those resources are idle. My scripts allow you to recover those unused GPU resources and run your AI or other GPU intensive workloads on the idle GPUs.

I’ve converted those scripts into python and a REST API, during my code session, we are going to take that API and use it as the base for a vSphere plugin. We’ll explore the underlying structure of a plugin and all the things that need to exist to create one. Then we will do exactly that. Take my code and turn it into a functional plugin allowing you to reclaim vGPU resources in your environment.

That brings me to the last session I’ll be presenting at Explore. I’ll show you how to install my resource recovery plugin in your own test/dev environment along with what you can do with it. It’s got some cool features not found in the scripts and it should make administering vGPU environments a lot nicer. I’d share some of the features, but they’re not all written yet, so you’ll have to wait for Explore.

As a bonus, you will also want to attend Jodi Shely and John Arrasjid’s session on Resilient Infrastructures: Self-Healing with VCF, Aria & VMware Ecosystem [VCFB1444LV]. I’ve had a preview of the deck for this session, and this is one of the holy grails of IT, self-healing environments. If you manage an enterprise IT environment you’ll want to be in the audience and see how the concept of resilient infrastructures can help you move beyond keeping the lights on.

That’s a lot of content on the buzz worthy topics of AI and quantum computing. If you are attending explore and are even thinking about AI or quantum computing these are some of the sessions, you cannot afford to miss. They will help provide clarity on how both are continuing to grow and transform the datacenter and improve operations.

I challenge you to plunge your hands into the quantum foam at VMworld this year, seize some qubits, and elevate your knowledge.