 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Live coverage here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018. This is our three days of exclusive wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets, it's our ninth year covering VMworld. When Dave and I started theCUBE nine years ago, Paul Maris was the CEO and they actually got a reference on stage by Pat Gelsinger. I'm Geoffrey Dave Vellante. Next gets Ray O'Farrell, CTO, Chief Technology Officer at VMware, keynote today on stage with Pat. Great to see you again, thanks for coming on. Great, good to see you guys again. So reaction from the keynote was very positive. Probably from a content standpoint, probably one of the most medius content pieces I've seen, mega news, serious announcement with Amazon, with Andy Jackson coming on stage, releasing the relational database service, RDS, on VMware, on-premises. Monster News, that is like, I don't think the world has yet felt the reverb for this thing yet. And that was only one of the many stories. That was just one, that was just a, and then the cloud health acquisition, and you had tons of demos, pretty intense. Yes, well, summarize what you did in the skin. Summarize all of that, so the key thing that we wanted to achieve with the keynote was obviously to make sure Pat drives the vision that VMware has and a lot of focus on that was focused on multi-cloud. This view of the world that you've now got multiple clouds emerging, and one of our key roles is to make sure that enterprises are able to work across all of those, networking, how we do management, how we work across all of these. And cloud health is a key part of that, making it easier to use cloud in particular multi-cloud. As the CTO, I get the fun part of trying to let our customers know all the cool work that the engineering teams are doing. So one of the things we want to do is make sure we put a lot of good demos in there. The feedback we get from our customers at VMworld over and over again is they want to see demos. They want to know that stuff is real. You can take a look, for instance, at the Hands On Labs. I came in here on Saturday night, walked down there about 6.30 a.m. on Sunday morning, and there was people lining up to go in there and use those labs. So what did we talk through? Broadly speaking, we spoke to how you can use VMC on AWS and the easy way it is to migrate vSphere applications onto vSphere on AWS. We had some new features there around live migration. The next thing we spoke about was around RDS itself and what this project is about. Broadly speaking, at its most basic, it allows you to take the RDS components from Amazon but run them in your data center. With all of the implications of that in terms of how your developers work and they build those applications. We spoke about project dimension, which is also now delivering as a service, a cloud experience, but again, at your infrastructure, whether it's at the edge or whether it's in your data center. And we spoke about what we're doing in blockchain, some open source components that we're doing over there, new features of Workspace One, particularly around the relationship with Dell and how that will now be combined with some of their laptops. And of course what we did with some of the NVIDIA GPUs, demonstrating the ability to be able to run the most sophisticated AI workloads on a vSphere environment. And I suspect I've forgotten something in that list. Yeah, hit the pillow tonight and have a good nap on the crash. Project Magna, which is a very future looking concept around basically where we think AI and ML is going to be used to drive a lot of the automation moving forward. Self-driving data center, right? Self-driving data center, yeah. Pointing a new term there. No, it's great when you can reuse an old term and rebrand it a little bit. Autopilot, put your data center on autopilot. I want to just drill down on the Amazon relationship because that was obviously the high news that I was talking about is the depth of the relationship is deep on the partnership side. I want to, you guys, and you pointed that out, I want to amplify that. I also want to ask you around the RDS demand. I'm talking to some of the Amazon sources, they tell me that the demand for this was very strong over multiple years. So, first on the RDS, the demand, some of the customer feedback, this is not just you guys in a room, well hey, let's just do this, makes sense, but it's a customer driven. Yeah, when you look at what VMC and AWS actually is, it's creating this bridge between the on-prem and the private cloud, sorry, and the public cloud on Amazon. But initially most of that is really an IaaS relationship. Yes, we can move workloads. Yes, we can move VMs. Yes, we can manage networking. But one of the key things you want from a public cloud or from cloud in general is access to services. So, as we went down that first part of saying, we'll give you this basic infrastructure, very quickly customers began to ask for some other, some other aspects of that, and that of course was services. So, after lots of discussions around what are the services, one that are appropriate to be able to put into this new type environment, but which had the demand, RDS certainly rode very quickly to the top of that. In the end, almost everybody has some form of database in their application, and so it's a very likely start for us to make that. So, I remember when customers first started wanting to run to virtualize Oracle, with of course VMware. And Oracle didn't really embrace that early on. If they would say, the sales guys would scare the customers, we're not going to certify it. But then some of the customers said, damn the torpedoes were going to do it, it actually worked great. Now, I don't know if that's because, just that's the inherent nature of VMware, or you guys had to do some work. So, my question is, two-fold, was that just the inherent nature of VMware, and what did you have to do, or will you have to do, to get RDS running the way that customers want it, trust it on AWS, I mean on VMware? Yep, so in the case of the Oracle situation, we didn't have to do a whole lot to make that happen. We are virtualizing in X86, Oracle runs on X86, and so you got that basic pattern in the mix. In the case of RDS, the actual database that you are running on your VMware infrastructure are databases such as MySQL. We run an enormous amount of those databases already. So that core aspect of getting the database running is not something that's fundamentally difficult for us to do. The challenging part is how do you bridge all the management aspects of that? The RDS components, the APIs that a developer wants to use in which they're used to using over with RDS on AWS. So that's where the work is involved. Now by the way, you're implying that maybe this is a future thing, right? A lot of that work has already occurred. In fact, the demo you're seeing is not based on, this is what we could do at some possible time in the future. It is actually tied to some very close future releases. So recovery, that's future release of recovery and all the things, if something goes wrong, I'm going to be comfortable as a customer that you'll give me back. Correct, correct. Some of those things we still need to work through because there's tons of features that you can be into add on to this. Disaster recovery, backup, all of those sort of things. And they're not all going to be there on day one, but you can expect us to continue to have a roll of maps. Correct. Now the other question I got to ask you is about migration. When I hear the term migration, I go, you know, IT practitioners, they tighten up and they, but what I heard on stage today is, we're going to make this really easy, but moving data, help me square that circle Ray because, you know, data, people say data has gravity, speed of light, network bandwidth, proximity. What's the secret sauce that enables you guys to solve those problems? So the core secret sauce there is, if you're virtualized on VMware on premise and you're using VMC on AWS, the basic unit of execution is still that virtual machine. And that virtual machine encapsulates the storage, the networking, everything associated with that box, right? So virtual machines have that very core strength of encapsulating not just the application or some aspect of the, even some aspect of a minimal piece of the operating system. It encapsulates everything which is tied into that box almost at a physical level. So when you say I'm going to move a virtual machine, you're moving the disk, you're moving the storage, you're doing all of those things. So now think of a database running in a virtual machine, it might not even be the applications, just the database, we're able to capture that and represent that and as we move the virtual machine, you're moving all of that as well. Now there's two aspects to that. One of them is moving the underlying storage, the disk, which might well be even a virtual disk on NFS or something like that. That's a slower task, and that's why we leverage vSphere replication for that. And then the final live part, which is in some ways the cool part, but is in fact in this stage, maybe not the most difficult part in what we're describing here, is moving the actual memory contents of a given VM and flipping it over to VMC on AWS. Okay, so the key there is you got the replication piece and then you just unhook the original and then you're up and running. Correct, traditional vMotion relies that both servers access the same disk. So I don't need to move to disk. In this case, I need to actually move to disk and that's what the replication does. Ray, I want to ask you about something that Pat Gelsinger kind of cheesed out on the keynote. You can tell he had so much content he wanted to expand on this one section, but he got a couple of digs in on it, but he did point out that the telco piece was very big and only he had a percentage in 10% or 20% is virtualized when enterprises are like 80. Correct. I've hit the exact number, but his point was huge opportunity in telco. What was he referring to there? So broadly speaking, if you look across most of, where workloads run, you look at your IT infrastructure, you look at most of the public clouds and private clouds, they are virtualized to enormous extent. Now when you go into the telco side of things and you begin to look at what's happening at the edge, what's happening in the large telco infrastructure, both a little bit from a cloud point of view, but also from everything to do from all the services and so on that they run. Much of that is not virtualized. Now we actually made a very distinct focus on that over the last few years. We created a basically a product line and a mini business unit focused on telco and that's where you see products like the virtual network functions, all of those technologies coming from. But actually the key product from that area is actually VIO, VMware Integrated OpenStack. That's because the telco providers to a large degree attempted to leverage OpenStack, had some challenges of getting the reliability, the stability, the need on that. So what we did was merge the hypervisor, the infrastructure of VMware with the OpenStack management APIs, produced VMware integrated OpenStack and the telco providers are very aggressively taking that on. Now, I got to ask you, what do you got against CapEx? See, Pat said you should never spend CapEx for DR again, it was basically. So I mean, I think the key part of that solution is, it is now so, I would use the word easy, the technology behind it is not easy, but it is easy for an end user to be able to say, I can connect my application from a private infrastructure to a public infrastructure in a way which is very highly connected using NSX, which is easily replicated, which is easily moved. Therefore, I now have a ready ability to be able to create DR scenarios leveraging the public cloud. It is easier than it's ever been before. So instead of building another data center to do that, leverage VMC and AWS, leverage those type of technologies to be able to do that. Rick, can you clarify or amplify the VMware cloud foundations? Had its trials and tribulations over the years it's evolved, it's now front and center in the conversation. How has that evolved from the product standpoint tech as an integration layer? How are you guys looking at that? What is the role of VMware cloud foundation and what does it mean for your partners and customers? Yeah, so I think your comments about having a kind of an early mixed reaction or so on is actually partially because a naming challenge that we called, right? VMware cloud foundation is a unified story where we basically take the core elements of the SDDC and we combine a management infrastructure with that, which is actually called SDDC manager. We don't necessarily spelled it out, but it's combined into that. But that's the key aspect of this. And then we build architectures based on that. So VXrack is based on VMware cloud foundation. The infrastructure which runs in Amazon, which we manage as part of the VMC and AWS is built on VMware cloud foundation. So it's an architectural statement as opposed to a product statement. Where the confusion arises, we also have products that people call VMware cloud foundation. One of the ones there which now as an instance of that is for instance VXrack, right? Which is basically a rack of infrastructure. Think of it as a really big VXrail, but it's got all of this management software combined with it as well. And actually, you know, your comment about that having some mixed reaction, some of that is because of our renaming that we've done along the way. But that is actually a growing and quite successful product at this stage. It's getting a lot of good buzz. It's getting a lot of good buzz, yes. And the value is what? It's time to mark it on our solution building or what's the main value. In some way it goes back to the core value of hyperconverge infrastructure. Somebody else is taking care of making sure that the software components all blend together. Somebody else is making sure that there's an easy way to update and manage all of these things together. And in many cases making sure it's well integrated with underlying hardware. So it's all around making it easy to get that basic SDC open running. So I got a question on your architecture. And I honestly don't even know how to ask it, but maybe you can help me as a technologist. You've got, you know, the VMware architecture which was developed, you know, initially decades ago. And now you've got all this microservices and Kubernetes and containers coming into the fore. And you see the quote unquote modern architectures, speed and deployment, you know, software releases much faster, much more cloud like cloud first. How do you go from, you know, the historical architecture to that level? How do you bridge the two worlds? Right. So as with any company, as these transitions have taken place, we've had to be able to make sure we invest in those new techniques and new technologies as well. So you see, for instance, VMC and AWS. You see, for instance, Project Tango, the cloud based VR, VRS product. All of those are cloud based infrastructure using, you know, those more, I guess what I was trying, new or modern ways of developing applications, microservices, containerized, leveraging Kubernetes and so on in the mix. So just like the rest of the industry, we've been doing the same as part of those that broader, sorry, that broader industry momentum. There isn't the conflict that you, I think, might think is there. The bottom line is our primary purpose is to deliver enterprise software which is solid, stable, secure, easily connected to the rest of the infrastructure. And that might sound a little bit boring, but it's the thing that keeps most of the data centers running and safe. VMware's ESX architecture, VMware's VC architecture has been at the very heart of that. And while they have matured over the years, right, they're still at the very heart of that virtualization part of what we do. But all of the other things we do, what we do in terms of cloud monitoring, what we do in terms of wavefront, what we do in terms of VMC and AWS, they are new code, new architectures, broadly expanding that story, leveraging microservices and all the things you would expect in that space. Well, VMware has proven to be the gold standard in that regard. Maybe it is boring, but it's super important. Yeah. So you got some compliments on theCUBE today for the work you guys are doing. Andy Bechelstein was on earlier, arrested a well-documented career he's had. He knows a thing or two about networks. He said, quote, VMware is NSX, this is quote from today. It's the best solution that's available today that I can use for the use case of what a large network has between smooth connection, between on-premise and off-premise public cloud and to the future to Edge and Telco and all other things cloud. Yeah. So I'm not going to argue with that quote. So instant testimonial. Okay, NSX has become really, this impact was giddy about this last year. He's all like, oh, you watch more NSX, more goodness coming. It seems to be the centerpiece to the, a lot of the VMware's connection strategies to cloud and other things, including manageability. What's the big thing about NSX? What should people know about NSX? I think the single biggest thing is software defined networking had a promise and the promise is this highly flexible, easily configured and in many ways, automated or policy driven in some cases, networking infrastructure. So it's all around that flexibility and fluidity of software defined networking. The key strength that NSX does, it delivers on that promise. So it's easy to say software defined networking, it's not easy to build it, right? And that's where I think NSX is proving all of its strength. It is a very strong implementation. I would argue obviously the best implementation of software defined networking. So that testimonial is an echo of that. It's delivering on all the things you expect from a software defined network. What is NSX enabling? In terms of the cloud connectivity story, which you just described a second ago, what it enables is really in some ways, because it is not tied to a specific infrastructure. I am able to run NSX on a public cloud infrastructure and on a private cloud infrastructure or on a hyper-converged infrastructure, but it's essentially the same NSX. It's the same control plane. It's managed in the same way. All of those different instances know how to inter-operate with each other. So what it's enabling is this massive ability to have these networks very quickly brought up, connect to each other, and reliably communicate with each other. I mean, manage in a unified fashion. It's targeting one of the hardest thing people are working on, which is interoperability. Correct, it's also targeting security. I mean, one of the things when we think about networking that you should never forget is this key aspect of security. And NSX is clearly targeting that as well. So some of the things, the features you see around app defense, a combination of app defense and NSX gives you enormous power. Pat's made a good presentation today where he was talking about the adaptive micro-segmentation. You can only do that because you have a great NSX underlying that network. What's interesting about the NSX I just want to get your reaction to is that the people are talking about here on theCUBE and also in the industry is that by having the security at the application portion of it, where NSX plays, takes the pressure off the network teams. Security teams can have comfort in their piece and then you don't intertwine them. Is that true, or is that? So I'm reluctant to say it's true because the bottom line is everybody needs to be paranoid, right? From a segmentation standpoint, from a cohesiveness, not those finger pointings. Correct. It's not in thorny. Because it moves the networking layer up a level and that level is closer to the application. But when I really looked at it, I think the key strength there is because it's software defined, because it's flexible, where you get a lot of the problems is when applications change. Here's a new version of the application or we're now popping up a new many instances of the application. Now because NSX is this software layer beneath that, it is able to react to that. So instead of the finger pointing back to the security or a networking person saying you didn't reconfigure the network to deal with my new application, instead the application and the network are intimately bound together. Actually Pat used some phrase today where he said, I think the app is the network in some way. Something like that. He was talking a little bit differently about that. But broadly speaking, that's what's going on there. It's all around the flexibility and the fluidity that you get from NSX. The application is a network. Correct, that's what he said. That's his word. Which I love, I think. He's right on the money. Complex and some services involved. Service measures are right around the corner. Highly interconnected, you know. Think of any application on your iPhone or your Android device, which doesn't rely on about 20 other applications or databases or cloud services. Well Ray, we have the case you on a whiteboard sometime and you have to do a deeper dive. Love this conversation. Congratulations. Final word I want to ask you. What is this VM world all about on stage? If you can knock down the technical engineering successes that you've had this year. What's it about this year? What's the theme from your perspective? So I think one of the key things is we've had a lot of products, a lot of technologies under development for the last few years. A lot of them are now starting to see fruition and the light of day. You know, you spoke about NSX. NSX is now reaching a real strength, right? But that's where we've had to start two and three and four years ago. So to me, that's probably the strongest thing here. Products, ideas, research that we've done over the years, development we've done over the years is now becoming real. It is getting out and making available to customers. And in the end, you know, that's what we're about. Trying to get those technologies behind the customers. And we're going to do our job to share that and we're going to be tracking the successes. And also thank you for inviting us to your radio event where you had your top scientist. Oh yeah, it was great. Very good to see you guys there. Great to see the energy and the engineering prowess of VMware continuing. Strong technical team, community, and customer base is theCUBE, bringing you hardcore tech coverage here at VMworld 2018. Three days, we're on day one. Stay with us for more after this short break. Herschavek. People obviously know you from Shark Tank, but the Herschavek...