 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. Oh, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, live from the home of the New England Patriots, and for the ninth year, the VTUG Winter Warmer. This is, I'm Stu Miniman, and joining me for this segment, I'm glad to have a user on here, it's Rog Rickshinty, who's a senior systems engineer with Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Rob, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me. All right, so Rob, you're a native New Englander here, live in Vermont, work in New Hampshire. Have you been to the VTUG before? That's my first VTUG actually, yes. All right, have you been to Gillette before? I've been to Gillette before, yes, many times. Excellent, and excited for Sunday? Oh, definitely, this is what you do on Sundays. Yeah, so we're real excited. Talk to us a little bit about what's your role at Dartmouth Hitchcock, obviously in the medical field there, tell us a little bit about what you do and what your IT look like. Okay, yeah, I work at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, I work primarily as a virtual zaker and architect, I do direct-to-services on it as well. Our team's fairly good, about nine people on it, but it's growing and the medical industry is changing and encompassing affiliations and on our team we're trying to keep up with that and virtualization has played a huge part in that, how we keep up with infrastructure and changes and it's really evolved since we've been working with it over the last eight, nine years. Yeah, I mean every company has to deal with the growth and the changes that are going on when you add things like government compliance on there, you've got all the HIPAA and everything else, so those are big challenges. Give us some feeds and feeds, how many locations you got, do you have like know how many servers you have, things like that? Yeah, locations, we have six main locations, we are bringing on affiliations left and right these days as funding sources change. Number of servers, we're up right around 1,000 servers, everything grows and leaps and bounds in those days and we are a service provider for the customers which are the patients and getting that whatever is needed for the patients. All right, so 1,000 servers, you know how many applications you have and are most of them a single operating system or what have you got? They used to be single operating systems, single servers down the road over the years, they've turned into applications that have 10, 12 servers up to our PeopleSoft applications may have 25 or 30 servers. You're talking about VMs. VMs as well, yes. And you are, just to be clear, you're in all Microsoft environment, running Hyper-V, correct? Correct, we have a majority of our environment is Hyper-V, we do have VM, we're in the environment as well but we straddle between the two but we are a majority Hyper-V environment, have been for quite some time. Okay, and you told me you're Microsoft MVP and you've been doing Hyper-V for a while now. Yeah, 2007 we were in one of the early betas of it, we actually used Virtual Server 2005 before that so we've been on the Microsoft stack for quite some time and now my background comes from a, from a more Microsoft side as well so it became second nature at that point and learning and growing with it and having the scripting abilities as well behind the scenes to fill some of the holes that we needed to at times and it's met our needs kind of just in time as features have come up through the stack. All right, of course Microsoft had been in the center of virtualization for a long time even if I'm a VMware environment, it's usually Microsoft applications that are sitting in the guest. You've been doing it a long time now, can you give us some of that journey? What was your early experiences? What's different now compared to, you know, what were the early days of Hyper-V? Definitely, there used to be, we talk about some of the environments that we, the Virtual Server 2005 environments are very static and very small and very, but met the needs of some of the easy medical applications. Now the growth in the number of CPUs you could have, the growth in the number of the RAM you could have, the speed of the disks, and the flexibility of the environment, the clustering this came, live migration wasn't there early on. Live migration is there, it has been there for quite some time, it's made it much easier. And as it's gone along, even those features that seem second nature now have been improved and sped up. The amount of memory, the amount of disk space, the performance, the QOS behind the scenes has really grown and really matured to a product that has even differentiators compared to VMware. So Rob, you said you've got a little bit of VMware, how do you guys decide internally, is there special corner cases that need VMware, or how do you balance that out? You talk about compliance in the medical industry and that's largely where our VMware environment comes from. The FDA approvals that happen for certain applications where they've certified on this stuff, anything that touches a patient certifies on a stack that is, has this type of software, this type of hardware behind the scenes and that particular vendor may have only certified on VMware at this point. We're talking with the Microsoft folks to really get that pushed through and we can do that. We'd rather do a larger stack on Hyper-V, but sometimes we have to go that route and we do. Yeah, it's kind of ironic. We think about it from just a technology standpoint. If it can be certified on bare metal Microsoft, it should work, it's going to work on Hyper-V, so shouldn't it be able to be certified? It's the funny thing, I remember back the early days of VMware, we had some of the same discussions because it only worked on a Microsoft server and we'd like, no, no, we're not changing the kernel of the operating system and you don't even know, and if it's a Microsoft certified server and it's VMware, so we kind of bit-flipped from Microsoft being the certified solution and now VMware being, and now Microsoft, they're catching up, though, on that environment. Definitely, the number of vendors that support Microsoft, the number of vendors that will now ship us a VHD file for the whole server has grown. But we still run into that and there's certain, it's more of a political than a technical. We know that it'll run Windows, we know it'll run on that. It is a support and a caret for them to say, this is what we, you know, they've got support objectives, they have to meet you as well, so. There is a need for an environment, but we look at the whole stack. We can fit it on Hyper-V as our main hardware platform, then we do because of the savings and we know that we've been working for long enough that we can get the performance out of it that we need. Yeah, you got to be pragmatic, you need to do what you need to do for your line of business. Many great things we'd like to do that have business implications that have put it down, so. All right, so Rob, I want to talk about the rest of the stack. One of the biggest challenges with virtualization is it tended to have a ripple effect on the network, on the storage. Can you talk about, you know, how Hyper-V's impacted the rest of what you do? Definitely, we looked at, so we've looked at the front end for Hyper-V and how to maximize cost and performance on that end. It's taken a while for management and the district to get away from the old three stack type of scenario where you have your traditional sand storage and your traditional networking and then your compute level. So we are starting to break down those molds a little bit. We still have the big iron, the big sands, the three parts in our environment for big databases and things like that. We're really trying to change the mode in our environment to look at, okay, especially with the influx of flash in the industry and SSD storage, it's really bringing the ability to have smaller converged components either on board or near the compute stack as well. All right, so you set me up with the convergence discussion. I know you saw the panel that I hosted this morning on hyper-convergence and the leading solution for Hyper-V is GridStore. Have you taken a look at those guys? Definitely, I've worked with the GridStore folks a little bit and I'm actually on their technical advisory council with a number of other MVPs to kind of see where the industry's going and we're trying to help them out as well as gain some knowledge from them of where the industry's going as well. Okay, that's great, so they reached out to some of the early Hyper-V guys and they're the really dedicated ones. Are you using the technology? Have you played with it some? Oh, we've looked at it and played with it. We haven't, we don't use it at this point, but it's one of those where it's, if you look at the structure of how a certain, the three-tier stack where you have this huge sand and now you're looking at a 2U or a device that can provide a lot of the same power and a lot of the same IOPS. Storage IOPS has been a big issue with virtualization and the CPUs have gone through the roof. The memory has come down. One of the major bottlenecks is your storage infrastructure and it can really put a bad taste in your virtualization environment and have some bad impressions if you can't keep up with that. I'm curious, how much do you get to talk to other people that are trying out Hyper-V or that they want to know about it? Do they come to you regularly for a resource? I do, I try to have them come to me and I reach out as an MVP, it's kind of what I've, I enjoy going out and talking in events like this or other events and smaller user group events, but it's something I like to try to deal with. A lot of people are still, they have the concept of Hyper-V still in the 2008 R2 range and we're trying to get them into the range of sale. It's totally different, these are all new features. These are differentiating, even differentiating features with VMware at this point. Yeah, which is something they had, they were playing catch up for a long time and now there's some features that are out there that are actually different and unique. Yeah, so Rob, it's always, you get one chance to make a first impression and of course if you've gone through three different iterations of the product, they're going to remember what they heard years ago and especially, some might have tried it, it wasn't ready, it obviously is matured, they've closed the gap, they've got some differentiating, what are some of the differentiations you see that Microsoft's leading the pack to? Definitely the differentiations are as far as how they're managing the migrations, how they're the storage and how they're migrating the ability to move VMs between the live migration has come a long, long way, whether it's storage migration, the ability to move VMs, the cross version live migration so you don't have to reinstall and move stuff in an offline fashion with Hyper-V anymore. Some of these features that have been standard to VMware for many years are now in Hyper-V and a lot of people don't know that yet, they think it's still kind of a class two hypervisor but it's really come a long way as far as that and even going forward there's some great features in the next version of Hyper-V coming in and especially with clustering and making them more resilient too instead of the clusters just reacting because one little thing went down, they're making it so they can withstand some of these and not have it react so quick, keeping the workloads running and then retrying and getting these things, getting pieces back. So how transparent is Microsoft on the roadmap that they're working on? How much interlocked do they have? Is it special because you're an MVP or in general, what's the relationship with Microsoft? Obviously as an MVP I get to look at a lot of the early bits and a lot of, see a lot of the webcast early on and what's happening but a lot of it's out, the technical previews out now, the betas are out now or the previews are out now and it's really, it's been a great, shaping up to be a good run for even with a system center stack which has been a little shaky in the past but it's really starting to come up as the wraparound of how you manage this in a larger scale. So let's talk a little bit about the management. vCenter is the center of the world for VMware environments, their system center, talk about your experience with the management and how do you manage, you've got both environments, what do you do? Yeah so we do have separate instances and we also have our VMM, system center virtual machine manager that has views into the vCenter environment as well and you can see the whole VMware environment as well. We use that more for the day to day type of access for able to find VMs, consult a VMs for our administration staff. We still are split between vCenter and VMM for deeper level management. We've looked at some third parties but then you got to get into third parties, how they can keep up with both sides as they innovate fast. So we are still split at this point but the management stack of how we monitor through operations manager and how we manage through VMM, there's a whole other side of the group in our mind that runs most of the VMware side and come from VMware side centric so we bought heads every once in a while if who's better but it keeps a good banter in the office and it's fun and we both realize that it's technologies and there's strengths and weaknesses in both of it. You got to have somebody to dilute the Kool-Aid a little bit if you're too deep in one solution. You remember when yours went down two weeks ago? Yeah, speaking about going down, let's talk about cloud for a second. What is your organization? Think about cloud, obviously there's compliance issues but I mean every company uses some cloud so what's your company's role on cloud? Now we're towing the water with cloud as far as test and dev and that's narrow scenario. Even though the compliance is there, the HIPAA compliance, the FISMA compliance are all on paper and in stone. There is still a political and a fear factor that's been out there for a while. And can you share what clouds you're looking at or using? From our standpoint, since we came from a Hyper-V perspective, their cloud story is really kind of a very nice stack for us. With VMware in the mix, we haven't really thought of where that cloud stack would go but thinking of how backup products interact with Azure and how we could move from internal cloud using Windows Azure pack to an external cloud fairly easily, especially with the new products coming out with Vnext here. That's, for us, that seems to be the easiest transition for us from a stacked perspective of what we're familiar with. So I think we're looking more towards Azure just because we've said the same reason why we kind of went with Virtual Server 2005 in the beginning. It kind of meets our skill set and our familiarity and our programming, as our PowerShell goes all the way up to stack into Azure as well. So it makes sense for us in that scenario. Great, so Rob, your first time at the event, I'm not sure what you've gotten to check out. What do you look for when you come to an event like this? What brings you here and what gets you excited? I think just coming to the event really kind of recharges you to think of the way people are doing things. It goes back and you think about new ideas of how to bring to the organization. You're not going to change everything but it gives you a refreshing view of where things are. You see the different hyper-converged people and where that will be in one or two years. I do it for the networking as well. I meet a lot of people down here that I know and it really gets you thinking outside of the box of your day-to-day environment. There's things we do every day in our environments that are just part of the job. But my management, as a senior assistant engineer, they're asking me where we should go as well and how maybe we break away from our current mold. Sometimes they don't like that but that's part of what I do. All right, Rob, the last question I have for you is talk about the role between IT and the business. In general, that can be a kind of charged political environment. I have to, and medical is just going through some drastic changes. I don't want any political statements necessarily but how does the bigger world in the business impact your IT and how has that relationship been changing over the last few years? The relationship is good. I would say that there are lots of things and lots of innovative things we'd like to do as technical. If you're not in technology and you don't like change then you shouldn't be there. So we are all looking forward to what we should do and we have some great ideas of where we think the organization should go. We do get some pushback as far as whether the management thinks it's too early or the upper management is ready to make an investment in that for a technology that may be only three or four years old, where you're talking about maybe a same technology that is structured that's 10 years old of how that works. It's really making a business case and kind of teaching for my standpoint going beyond technology and getting a financial and a technical, bringing that into the financial world as well for them to say, okay, we can go forward to this and especially with virtualization, we can move back easily in case things happen. Everything's kind of containerized so we can move stuff back and forth into newer technologies to try things out and get our toes in the water like different technologies in-house or even in the cloud. So do you find that the technology innovations are allowing you to move forward when you've got all the pressures of, you know, keep the budget down or cut the budget or anything like that or? I think being in the virtualization field has really helped because that's been in, especially server virtualization, that's been an easy win for us to say early on in the days, you know, this is a server that runs one workload. I can run 30 of these on this same type of size. It's getting harder because virtualization for us has become the norm and now we're trying to squeeze even more money out of a lemon that's already squeezed. But management is asking us to do that and they're looking for other than that and they're seeing peers that are doing this as well. So they're coming to us and saying, well, hospital down the road is doing this, so should we be doing it? And we kind of say, well, maybe yes, maybe no and we don't, we may not agree with what they're doing but we need to check things out, we need to get it running. All right, Rob, well, hey, if it's a lemon we're dealing with, we can only turn it to lemonade and if not we can puree it and make some baked goods out of it, much better than trying to get blood from a stone. Really appreciate you joining us for this segment. Appreciate all you do to get back to the community, you know, without the programs like the MVPs and the speakers at this event, it's so much harder for anybody to understand the new technology. So always great, we can get the user experience here at the UC user group and at all the shows we're at. We'll be right back with our next guest after this quick break.