 And now, SiliconANGLE.tv and wikibond.org present a focus on life. Live from Las Vegas at VMworld 2011, post John Thurier and Dave Vellante illuminating VMware integration with support from EMC where cloud meets big data. Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante. We are live, VMworld 2011. I'm with wikibond.org and this is our coverage SiliconANGLE.tv's coverage of VMworld 2011. And I'm here with Rick King of Kindred Healthcare and Rick is an IT practitioner. We're gonna talk Rick about virtualization, your journey. This is the VMware integration spotlight. You know, my first VMworld a few years ago, it was pretty obvious that storage was a real pain point and VMware's announced a bunch of APIs, they put them out there to the community, the storage vendors have been hard at work, trying to integrate it, make storage a little less painful for guys like you, but I wanna talk about that first, why don't you tell us about what you do at Kindred Healthcare and then we'll get into it. All right, Kindred, we have our server environment consists of approximately 1300 servers. Right now we have about 300 of them virtualized in production. We're running a virtual desktop infrastructure of about 450 virtual desktops right now. We have about 300 Dev and QA servers virtualized as well. We're on a mission to virtualize the entire data center. Started virtualizing our production infrastructure this year, continuing on through next year. You said you had 1300 servers? 1300 servers total. And in how many are virtualized? About 370 actually. 370, okay, so you're well in the way, but you've got a ways to go, right? And your goal is to get to all of them. 100% 100% How about the application portfolio? How, what percent of your apps are virtualized? Kind of hard to put a number on the percentage of apps. We have virtualized More than half or less than half? Less than half. Less than half, okay. So yeah, of course, less than half your servers. Right, right, they don't all run one dedicated app. Do you have the same objective for apps? Get to close to 100% Yes, absolutely. Okay. Yeah, I mean, in fact, our current directive is to virtualize everything. Anything new will be virtualized unless there's some compelling reason not to. And that would be obviously some kind of hardware requirement or hardware tie to the application. Yeah, or the ISV is being a pain in the neck about it and jacking prices and threatening your children. No, no. ISVs don't do that? We don't tend to let them do that. You don't let them do that? No. You gotta get them in a room, headlock. It's, they don't, they don't, in my experience, they haven't ever made a valid argument other than they're uncomfortable with it. Are you not at Oracle Shop? We are not at Oracle Shop. Ah, that, therein lies the answer. Okay. We have had a couple vendors pushback on us for virtualization just because they weren't comfortable with it themselves. Right. And some of our vendors tend to be a little bit behind. So Rick, let's talk a little bit about, how long have you been with Kindred? I've been with Kindred for 10 years. 10 years, okay, so you've seen the whole virtualization phenomenon, you know, take the world by storm. It's really, it's really been a change agent. It's had to have changed your IT life, your professional life. How so? Well, to a large degree, it's made it easier. We've, we've realized a lot of stability since we've virtualized. We're able to lay down consistent configurations of our server infrastructure. We're able to move machines around as needed to make adjustments to our physical infrastructure. We've picked up performance. We've gained, made a lot of gains at performance. But when we virtualize the machines, our virtual infrastructure is, is the latest, latest, greatest hardware. So at any time we virtualize the machine, we tend to pick up, pick those machines up off of older hardware onto the newer virtualization landscape. And then in the process, we gain a lot of performance. So let's talk about storage a little bit. Storage is a challenge, as I said. I mean, you know that better than I. First of all, why, why is it such a challenge in a virtualized environment? No, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of machines contending for the same IO, or IO on the same disks. We use EMC, Clarion storage primarily in our, on our virtualization landscape. We're in the process of transitioning to VMAX storage. Really? So are you 100% EMC shop? We're 100% EMC. Okay. Have you always been 100% EMC shop or? We've been EMC since I've been with Kendrick. Okay. And you, you're going from Clarion to VMAX. Yeah, we're running on a Clarion CX4 with fast VP right now. We have the VMAX storage. I believe we do have some physical database servers running on VMAX right now, but we're going to start transitioning some of our tier one apps over to that storage. It's, they're actually in process, in process of doing that right now. How's fast VP working for you? Has that lived up to your expectations? From my perspective, it does. Yeah. What's it do for you? How has it, how has that affected your business? Well, we're running our SAP BW systems virtualized on ESX with the Clarion, with that storage as the backend, the fast VP. And we actually picked up a 300% performance increase when we moved to that, to that environment from our legacy hardware. So is SAP, you know, one of your primary? SAP is our primary financial application. We also run Meditech as a hospital building system. Yeah, I'm familiar with it. And we have gold standard in that business, right? It is. Well, it's, yes, I guess. It's widely used. Yeah, it's widely used. Yeah, I mean, we, we, It's a lot of stuff in Meditech these days. Yeah, yeah, there is. There is. It's been around for a while. Our, we have over 150 Meditech servers and they are all virtualized. So we virtualized the entire environment. Actually, we virtualized that environment this year. So how, how much of you as a practitioner paid attention to all the activity that's been going on between say VMware and its storage suppliers or storage partners with regard to integration, APIs, VAI, backup, VADP, things of that nature. Have you, do you as an IT practitioner follow that stuff or do you just pretty much leave that to the, to the vendors to sort of out? We do follow it. We're at a little bit of a disadvantage right now internally because we have not been able to take advantage of VSXI to this point. And that's just, just because we haven't been able to get to it this year. This year and last year, we focused primarily on upgrading our infrastructure to support virtualization. Next year, we're going to focus on some backup solutions obviously to back up the virtual, the virtual machines themselves as images. We're still using our legacy backup software. So that's kind of our, that's kind of our stumbling block right now is with the lack of the service console, we have to find a new way to handle the VMDK backups. So we are paying attention to that because we're trying to, we're trying to make sure that everything we use as bolt-on tools can hook into those APIs. And we like the fact that the VMware is integrating with the storage APIs and things like that. Okay, so you're just really starting to get into how that's going to affect your business and how to take advantage of it, right? Yes. Let me ask you the last question I have is, what do you want out of it? What do you want from your, I mean, EMC is your primary supplier. What do you want out of those guys in terms of VMware storage and storage integration? What are you looking for there? Speed. What do you mean by speed? Speed, we need the application performance? Or do you mean speed to deployment? We really don't, at this point, we're not suffering IO performance on the storage infrastructure. What we need to be able to do is move, is a storage VMotion a little bit faster, to kind of move the VMs around from one spot in the storage to the other. Replication. Really, replication, I guess, is a big focus for us, because we're looking for disaster recovery opportunities to be able to replicate machines offsite. Kind of changed the way we look at doing our backups. Right now, we still have a legacy tape backup system that we're trying, we take tapes offsite. I guess what I'd like to see is the ability to just shuffle the machines offsite, get that storage to move faster. Impression, maybe, some dedupe. Okay, good. Having a good time in Vegas? I mean, all work, no play, right? I'm not going to say no play, but a lot of work. All right, Rick King, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your experiences at Kindred Healthcare.