 Welcome to the Palo Alto Studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. We're here for a special CUBE conversation and special report, big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7. I'm here with Krish Prasad, SVP, and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner, VP of vSphere product management. Guys, thanks for coming in and talking about the big news. Thank you for having us. You guys announced some interesting things back in March around containers, Kubernetes, and vSphere. Krish, tell us about the hard news. What's being announced? Today, we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7. John, it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years. We previewed it as Project Pacific a few months ago. With this release, we are putting Kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform. What that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on Kubernetes and containers, as well as traditional VM-based applications on the same platform. And it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers a cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release. This is a key part of our Tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year. And it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications. And the specific news is vSphere 7 is general availability. General availability of vSphere 7. Yes. Okay, so let's on the trend line here. The relevance is what? What's the big trend line that this is riding? Obviously, we saw the announcements at VMworld last year and throughout the year. There's a lot of buzz. Chef Kjelsen says there's a big wave here with Kubernetes. What does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend? Yeah, so what Kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation. They're trying to modernize their IT applications. And the best way to do that is build off your current platform, expand it, and make it an innovative, an agile platform for you to run Kubernetes applications and VM applications together. And not just that, customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment, both on-prem and public cloud together. So they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack, but modernize their infrastructure stack, which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications, Kubernetes, or container-based applications and VMs. What's exciting about this trend, Chris, we were talking about this at VMworld last year and we've had many conversations around cloud native, but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business. I mean, this is really the move to the cloud. If you look at the successful enterprises, even the suppliers, the on-premises piece, if not move to the cloud native marketplace technologies, the on-premises isn't effective. So it's not so much on-premises going away. We know it's not, but it's turning into cloud native. This is the move to the cloud generally. This is a big wave. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, John, if you think about it, on-premise, we have significant market share. We have by far the leader in the market. And so what we are trying to do with this is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using, but bring their application, modern application development on top of the same platform. Today, customers tend to set up stacks, which are different, right? So you have a Kubernetes stack. You have a stack for the traditional applications. You have operators and administrators who are specialized in Kubernetes on one side, and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side. With this move, what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform. You can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had. And at the same time offer the developers what they like, which is Kubernetes DialTone, that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications. Yeah, Paul, Pat said Kubernetes is going to be the dial tone of the internet. Most millennials might even know what dial tone is, but what he meant is that's the key fabric that's going to orchestrate. And we've heard over the years, skill gap, skill gap, not a lot of skills out there, but when you look at the reality of skills gap, it's really about skills gaps and shortages. Not enough people. Most CIOs and Chief Information Securities that we talk to say, I don't want to fork my development teams. I don't want to have three separate teams. I don't have to. I want to have automation. I want an operating model that's not going to be fragmented. This kind of speaks to this whole idea of interoperability and multi-cloud. This seems to be the next big wave behind hybrid. I think it is the next big wave. The thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model. They like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way. And we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem, to Google Cloud, to Amazon Cloud, to Microsoft Cloud, to any of our VCPP partners. You get the same cloud operating experience. And it's all driven by a Kubernetes-based dial tone. It's effective and available within this platform. So by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for, that's what's key in version seven. Does Pat Gelsinger mean, when he says dial tone of the internet Kubernetes, does he mean always on or what does he mean specifically? Just that it's always available. What's the meaning behind that phrase? No, the first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure, which is the VMware Cloud Foundation and be able to work with a set of APIs that are Kubernetes APIs. So developers understand that, they are looking for that, they understand that dial tone, right? And you come to our VMware Cloud Foundation that runs across all these clouds, you get the same API set that you can use to deploy that application. Okay, so let's get into the value here of vSphere 7. How does VMware and vSphere 7 specifically help customers? Isn't just bolting on Kubernetes to vSphere, some will say, is it that simple? Or you're running product management, no, it's not that easy. Some people will say, you're just bolting Kubernetes on vSphere. It's not that easy. So one of the things, if anybody's actually tried deploying Kubernetes first, it's highly complicated. So definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt-on, but it's certainly not like that. We are making it incredibly simple. You talked about IT operational shortages. Customers want to be able to deploy Kubernetes environments in a very simple way. The easiest way that you can do that is take your existing environment that are out in 90% of IT and just turn on the Kubernetes dial tone. And it is as simple as that. Now, it's much more than that. In version seven as well, we're bringing in a couple of things that are very important. You also have to be able to manage at scale. Just like you would in the cloud, you want to be able to have infrastructure almost self-manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself. And so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large-scale environments, both on-premise and public cloud environments at scale. And then associated with that as well is you must make it secure. So there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security, which is how can we actually build in a truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT? Yeah, I mean, I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here. The way we are addressing that is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with Kubernetes the same way they administered the older releases. So they don't have to learn anything new. They are just working the same way. We are not changing any tools, process, technologies. So same as it was before? Same as it was before. More capability. And developers can come in and they see new capabilities around Kubernetes. So it's best of both worlds. And what was the pain point that you guys are solving? Obviously the ease of use is critical. Obviously operationally I get that. As you look at the cloud native developer side because infrastructure as code means is app developers on the other side taking advantage of it. What's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7? So I think it's multiple factors. So first is we've talked about agility a few times, right? There is dev ops is a real trend inside in IT organizations. They need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker. They need to be able to respond to the business. And to do that, what they are doing is they need infrastructure that is on demand. So what we're really doing in the core Kubernetes kind of enablement is allowing that on demand fulfillment of infrastructure so you get that agility that you need. But it's not just tied to modern applications. It's also all of your existing business applications and your modern applications on one platform, which means that you've got a very simple and low cost way of managing large scale IT infrastructure. So that's a huge piece as well. And then I do want to emphasize a couple of other things. We're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications, for SAP HANA databases, where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there. And you have all of the capabilities like the GPU awareness and FPGA awareness that we built into the platform so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications. So you've got the ability to run those applications as well as your Kubernetes and container based applications. That's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement, right? That's right, yeah. It's quite powerful that we've actually brought in, basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers, whether that's through containers or through VMs. Chris, I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and the community, but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned. I get the lifestyle improvement, life cycle improvement. I get the application acceleration innovation, but the intrinsic security is interesting. Could you take a minute and explain what that is? Yeah, so there's a few different aspects. One is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment. And that means that you need to have a way that the key management, that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom, as we would call it. You want to have a controlled environment that some of the worst security challenges inside in some of the companies has been your internal IT staff. So you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment independent. We've got vSphere Trust Authority that we released in version seven that actually gives you a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom, effectively your certificates. So you've got this continuous runtime. Now, not only that, we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform so that you've got native security of even your application ecosystem. Yeah, that's been coming up a lot in conversations with carbon black and the security piece. Krish, obviously vSphere everywhere, having that operating model makes a lot of sense, but you have a lot of touch points. You've got cloud, hyperscalers, you've got the edge, you've got partners. So we are the dominant market share in private cloud. We are on Amazon, as you well know, Azure, Google, IBM cloud, Oracle cloud. So all the major clouds, there is a vSphere stack running. So it allows customers, if you think about it, right? It allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective of where their workload is residing. They can set policies, compliance, security. They set it once, it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud. And it's all supported by our VMware cloud foundation, which is powered by vSphere 7. Yeah, I think having that, the cloud is API based, having connection points and having that reliable, easy to use is a critical operating model. All right guys, so let's summarize the announcement. What do you guys take, your takeaway from this vSphere 7? What is the bottom line? What's it really mean? I think what we're, if we look at it for developers, we are democratizing Kubernetes. We already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere. We are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators, they can now manage Kubernetes environments. You can manage it by simply upgrading your environment. That's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage. So I think that is one of the key things that's in here. The other thing though is there is, I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere, that can run in your data center, in Google's, in Amazon's, in Microsoft's, in, you know, thousands of DCPP partners, you have one hybrid platform that you can run with and that's got operational benefits, that's got efficiency benefits, that's got agility benefits. Krish, yeah, I just add to that and say that, like we want to meet customers where they are in their journey and we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way. And I think the announcement that we made today with vSphere 7 is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey without making trade-offs on people, process and technology. And there is more to come. Look, we are laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi-cloud. And so you'll see more capabilities coming in the future, stay tuned. Well, one final question on this news announcement, which is awesome, vSphere core product for you guys. If I'm the customer, tell me why it's going to be important five years from now. Because of what I just said, it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds, right? Which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the cloud. So think about it. If you go to Amazon Native and then you have a workload in Azure, you're going to have different tools, different processes, different people trained to work with those clouds. But when you come to VMware and you use our cloud foundation, you have one operating model across all these environments. And that's going to be game changing. Great stuff, great stuff. Thanks for unpacking that for us. Congratulations on the announcement. Thank you very much. vSphere seven news special report here inside theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special CUBE conversation and kind of the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere 7.0. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today. We're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a senior director of product management at VMware. And I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. It feels pretty good. Great to be here. All right, so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect. What is so different about vSphere 7? Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news. And I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud. So this really is the realization of that vision. It is. Yeah, so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned, what that was was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware Cloud Foundation portfolio. And as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on-premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads but also modern workloads as well. Right, all right. So I think you brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we jump over to there and let's see what it looks like. You guys can queue up the demo. Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware Cloud Foundation for and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is a developer is actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. It's the self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the kube control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes APIs and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so that's not just provisioning workloads though. This is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a container registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now the developer's infrastructure, as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view where on the right-hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left-hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means what a developer calls their IT department and says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name. They see the same information. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna push the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application-focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications. Like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure so I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy-based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS. So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory and all that's gonna be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere, but to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides, you know, seeing the VMs and things that developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created, the compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again, from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data is invaluable. It often saves hours just to try to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised that they've been managing Kubernetes all this time. It just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all of those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancers, stores, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. Well, that's pretty wild. You know, it really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined kit teased out at VMworld, which was, you know, the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing. But devs see Kubernetes and really bringing those together in a unified environment. So that depending on what your job is and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see in this kind of unified environment. Yeah. Yeah. As the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes base one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as the traditional vSphere interface APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. Right. And then, and really it was interesting too, you tease that a lot. That was a good little preview of people knew they're watching, but you talked about really cloud journey and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, kind of cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two wins of the spectrum and getting from one to the other, but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. Yeah, no, I think we think a lot about it like that, that we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud and involves modernizing applications. And as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes, either you're here where you are, kind of the old current world and you've got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very air prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, as you call it, the messy middle, I would say it's more like, how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time in resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps, each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it. But one of the fundamental things is we're now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities what the application can do. And that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense. As you said, not all applications need to make that move, but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. Did you see that? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that, you know, certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from, you know, looking historically at how we managed infrastructure. One of the things we enable in vSphere seven is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or, you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere seven is elevate all of that to application-centric management. So you actually look at an application and say, I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level, right? Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did was something like vSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so vSAN really turned that around, it allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jarrah's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload is not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. You've got some containers in there, some VMs probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud. And so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. Right, and why this is important is because it's this application-centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications? And more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? Yeah, well, you look at something like a modern app that maybe has 100 VMs that are part of it. And you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and hardened and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that. And I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today, you might log in and see 1000 VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before, because we automate so much of that operation. And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e. building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level, and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction. It actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other, but in fact now they can both get what they need to get done done and do so as quickly as possible, but also being safe and in compliance and so forth. So there's a lot more to this, this is a very significant release, right? Again, a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant kind of re-architecture of many, many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific, but is now just part of vSphere. And certainly that is a very large aspect of it, but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and take a look at what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified life cycle management and then really focused on security as a second one. And then applications as well, both including the cloud native apps that fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying life cycles. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, VLCM. And the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster? We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and out today. It's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really, really simple and really easy to automate as well. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the sevens is probably not an inconsequential task. And yeah, and going forward and allowing, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. We just got back from RSA. Thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. But everyone always talks about security. It's got to be baked in from the bottom to the tops. Talk about kind of the changes in the security. So it done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation. Things around simplifying certificate management. Dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one, what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats, including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them, but how do you implement the concept of least privilege? Or zero trust as a very hot topic in security. So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server, which is in turn very locked down. Only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, these untrusted hosts haven't been modified. We know they're okay, so they're okay to actually run workloads on. They're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is just better leveraging kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you go with things like FPGAs and GPUs and kind of all of the various components that power these different applications, which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed. So you've done a lot of work there as well. Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerators coming out. We all know about GPUs and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3D rendering, but FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization, i.e. silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And what you find is all the things we found before, you find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, putting security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because in some ways you think, well, wow, shouldn't we be past this as an industry? Shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if we go to the next slide, what we see is that with bit fusion you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos of infrastructure together. So they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. So it's pretty interesting because the classifications of the assets now are much, much larger, much varied and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity slash challenge that you guys are addressing. They're getting a lot more diverse, yep. And so like a couple other things just, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities, things around DRS and VMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that VMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. A lot of this stuff is not just kind of brand new cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps, people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. All right, so Jarrod, I'll give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while. There's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them? What should they be excited about? What are you excited for them in this new release? I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple of years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities. Awesome. Well Jarrod, congratulations to get both of you for getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more with technical deep dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. Thank you. Thank you. All right, he's Jarrod. He's Ken on Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Hi and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and we're digging into VMware's vSphere 7 announcement. We've had conversations with some of the executives, some of the technical people, but we know that there's no better way to really understand the technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it. So really happy to have joined me for the program. I have Phil Buckley-Meller, who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond. Phil, thanks so much for joining us. Hi Stu. All right, so Phil, let's start. Of course, British Telecom, I think most people know what BT is and it's a really sprawling company. Tell us a little bit about your group, your role, and what's your mandate. Okay, so my group is called Service Platforms. It's the bit of BT that services all of our multi-millions of our customers. So we have broadband, we have TV, we have mobile, we have DNS and email systems and it's all about our customers. It's not a B2B part of BT, you with me. We specifically focus on those kind of multi-million customers that we've got in those various services. I mean, in particular, my group is for, we do infrastructure, so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so or just past boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above. Okay, great. We definitely are going to want to dig in and talk about that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams. But let's talk a little bit first. We're talking about VMware. So how long's your organization been doing VMware and tell us what you see with the announcement that VMware is making for BCR7? Sure, well, I mean, we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about 12, 13 years, something like that. And it's an absolutely key part of our infrastructure. It's written throughout BT really in every part of our operations, design, development and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products. And so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment. And as you know, in particular with serverless and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that, we're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while. We currently use extensively, we use vSphere, NSXT, VROPS, log insight, network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications. And our operations teams know how to use that. They know how to optimize. They know how to capacity plan and troubleshoot. So that's great. And that's been like that for a half a decade at least. We've been really, really confident with our ability to deal with VMware environments. And along came containers and like I say, multi-cloud as well. And what we were struggling with was the inability to have a little pane of glass really on all of that. And to use the same people and the same processes to manage a different kind of technology. So we've been working pretty closely with VMware on a number of containerization products for several years. Now I work really closely with the vSphere integrated containers guys in particular. And now with the Pacific guys with really the ideal that when we bring in version seven and the containerization aspects of version seven we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container. That's really the holy grail, right? So we'll be able to allow our developers to develop our operations team to deploy and to operate and our designers to see the same infrastructure whether that's on-premises, cloud or off-premises and be able to manage the whole piece in that respect. Okay, so Phil, really interesting things you walked through here. You've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years. I want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds great. I manage all the environment, but containers are a little bit different than VMs. If I think back from an application standpoint it was let's stick it in a VM, I don't need to change it. And once I spin up a VM, often that's going to sit there for months, if not years as opposed to I think about a containerization environment. I really want a pool of resources. I'm going to create and destroy things all the time. So bring us inside that organizational piece. How much will there need to be interaction and more interaction or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team? Well, yes, I mean, you're absolutely right. The nature and the time scales that we're talking about between VMs and containers is wildly different. As you say, we probably almost certainly have VMs in place now that we're in place in 2018, certainly, I imagine. I haven't really been touched whereas as you say VMs, a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time. There are parts of our architecture that require that. In particular, the very client-facing bursty stuff, it does require spinning up, spinning down pretty quickly. But some of our other containers do sit around for weeks, if not months. It really does depend on the development cycle aspects of that. But the hard bit that we've really had was just the visualizing it. There are a number of different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment, allow you to troubleshoot and so on. But they are new products, they're new things that we would have to get used to. And also it seems like there's an awful lot of competing products, quite a Venn diagram in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that. So again, coming back to being able to manage through vSphere, to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how they behave in terms of their networking, to be able to essentially put our deployments on rails by using in particular tag-based policies means that we can take the owners of security, we can take the owners of performance management and capacity management away from the developers, you don't really care about that a lot of the time, and they can just get on with their job, which is to develop new functionality and help our customers. So that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies and making sure that they're adhered to. But again, we know how to do that with VMs through vSphere. So the fact that we can actually apply that straight away just towards slightly different compute unit, which is really what we're talking about here, is ideal. And then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well, because we do use multiple clouds where AWS and there's your customers and work between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything other than be excited about and to take up. Yeah, Phil, I really like how you described really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand, right, there's things that developers care about, they want to move fast, they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about. And we talk about some of the new world and it's like, oh, can the platform underneath just take care of it? Well, there's some things platforms take care of, there's some things that the software or your team is going to need to understand. So maybe if you could dig in a little bit, some of those, what are the drivers from your application portfolio? What is the business asking of your organization that's driving this change and being one of those, Tailwind's pushing you towards Kubernetes and the Visture 7 technologies? Well, in all comes out to the customers, right? Our customers want new functionality, they want new integrations, they want new content, they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well. So they're the real ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services. So we have to address that really from a development perspective. It's our developers that have the responsibility to design and deploy those. So we have to, in infrastructure, we have to act as a firm foundation really underneath all of that, that allows them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted, is performance, we understand where the capacity requirements are coming from in the short term and in the long term for that and is secure as well, obviously, is a big aspect to it. So really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted. Great, Phil, you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as your VMware farm. Want to make sure if you can explain a little bit, a couple of things. Number one is when it comes to your team, especially your infrastructure team, how much are they involved with setting up some of the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud? And secondly, when you look at your applications or some of your cloud, some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud. And I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around. But maybe if you can clarify those pieces as to what cloud really means to your organization and your applications. Sure, well, I mean, to us, cloud allows us to accelerate development, which is nice because it means that we don't have to do on-premises, capacity uplifts for new pieces of functionality or so. We can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud. But very often applications really make better sense, especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time. I mean, yes, there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching. Same goes for broadband, really. But we generally, we're a, well, more than an eight hour application profile. So what that allows us to do then is to have applications that, when it makes sense, we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for data protection reasons or whatever, then we can do that as well. But where we, say for instance, we have a boxing match on and we're going to be seeing an enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our order journey to allow them to view that and to gain access to that. Well, why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity? So we do absolutely have hybrid applications, not necessarily hybrid blocks. We have blocks of sub-applications, you know, dozens of them really to support our whole platform. And what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platforms that I mentioned, that some of the, some of those application blocks have to run inside, some can run outside. And what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that again by policy as to where they run and to, you know, have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running, how they're running and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well. And that way we best serve our customers. We, you know, we get to get our customers, yeah, what they need. All right, great. Phil, final question I have for you. You've been through a few iterations of looking at VMs, containers, public cloud. What advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at, say a year or two ago? Well, I'll be honest, I was a little bit surprised by vSphere 7. We knew that VMware were working on trying to make containers on the same level, both from a management deployment perspective as VMs. I mean, they're called VMware after all, right? We knew that they were looking at that. But I was surprised by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really. It's, you know, if you look at the whole Tanzu stuff and the mission control stuff, I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves from an application perspective, you know, and to really leap forward. And this is, between version six and seven, I've been following these since version three at least. And it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture, the aims to what they want to achieve with the application. And, you know, luckily, the nice thing is that if you're used to version six, it's not that big a deal. It's really not that big a deal to move forward at all. It's not such a big change to process and training and things like that. But my word, there's an awful lot of work underneath the covers. And I'm really excited. And I think all the people in my position should really just take it as an opportunity to revisit, well, revisit what they can achieve with, in particular with vSphere and with Incombination with NSXT, it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slides about it unless you've seen the product, just how revolutionary the version seven is compared to previous versions, which have kind of evolved for a couple of years. So yeah, I think I'm really excited about it. And I know a lot of my peers or the companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well. So yeah, I'm really excited about the whole piece. Well, Phil, thank you so much. Absolutely, no doubt this is a huge move for VMware, the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around, help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go. Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.