Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash

This is just a very short post where I will set out some of my plans for the coming year. What are your goals for 2026? Feel free to start a discussion in the comments.

Following on from a disruptive 2024, I had hoped that 2025 would be more settled. However I ended up making another change in the first half of the year and it has taken me some time to find my feet again. So now I feel that I can really make the most of my time and plan for a few personal projects. Here’s what I’ll be doing in 2026 and what I’ll be writing about…

VCF 9 Homelab Upgrade
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Yes, I still have a homelab. For me as a consultant it’s a very valuable resource as my customers don’t tend to like me experimenting with their production systems! Sadly my current homelab doesn’t meet the minimum supported specification for VCF 9. Plus, with each host only having 8 CPU cores (16 threads), some solutions are a bit out of my reach.

Early in 2026 I will be upgrading some of my hosts with more compute resources. I plan to share plenty of details about hardware choices and deployment experiences etc. as I go.

VCF Automation 9
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One of the updates that will be unlocked in my homelab by the VCF 9 update with VMware VCF Automation 9. I’ve been working with this product since version 5 was around and I don’t plan to stop any time soon! Having it deployed in my homelab will give me much more freedom to learn and share about the new capabilities. As I said above, I have to be careful when it’s someone else’s environment!

VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS)
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Similarly, VKS is something that I’ve learned a lot about both as part of my day job and in my homelab. Many of my homelab services run in VKS clusters. Aside from migrating those to VCF 9, I have a few plans that I want to explore.

Packer Provisioner for Salt
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Whilst I don’t envisage massive changes for this in the short-term, there are some roadmap items that I want to tick off. I also expect that I will have to keep up-to-date with any changes to the Salt Minion.

Certification
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I haven’t kept up with my certifications in the last 18 months. I used to help write a number of the VMware certification exams, which helped keep me current. Who knows, I might get involved in that again, or I might just sit a few exams. As well as VMware certifications, I also plan to take my HashiCorp certifications (which have now lapsed) and some Kubernetes exams also.

Secret Project
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I have a personal project that I’ve been working on over the last few months. The technical bit is 99% done, it’s just all of the documentation and supporting artefacts that I need to finish. Otherwise I’d tell you about it now. I’m looking forward to debuting this though.

Events
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I haven’t been to many events over the last 18 months or so. Most recently I did travel to Amsterdam for a HashiCorp User Group (HUG) meetup. I hope to get back there for KubeCon in March as well as to a few more events throughout the year.