 Welcome back, everyone, to the live CUBE coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explorer 22. I'm John Furrier, my host, Dave Vellante. Three days of wall-to-wall live coverage. Two sets here at theCUBE, here on the ground floor in Moscow, and we've got VMware and HPE back on theCUBE. Paul Turner, VP of products at vSphere and cloud infrastructure at VMware. Great to see you, and Mark Nickerson, director. I'll go to Mark for compute solutions at Ula Packard Enterprise. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you for having us. So we are seeing a lot of traction with GreenLake. Congratulations over there at HPE. The customer's changing their business model consumption. You're starting to see that accelerate. You guys have the deep partnership we've had you guys on earlier. Yesterday, talking about the technology partnership. Now on the business side, where's the action at with the HPE and you guys with the customer? Because now as they go cloud native, third phase of the inflection point, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud steady state, where's the action at? So I think the action comes in a couple of places. One, we see increased scrutiny around kind of not only the cost model and the reasons for moving to GreenLake that we've all talked about there, but it's really the operational efficiencies as well. And this is an area where the long-term partnership with VMware has really been a huge benefit. We've actually done a lot of joint engineering over the years, continuing to do that co-development as we bring products like Project Monterey, our next generations of VCF solutions to live in a GreenLake environment. That's an area where customers not only see the benefits of GreenLake from a business standpoint on a consumption model, but also around the efficiency operationally as well. Paul, I want to bring up something that we always talk about on theCUBE, which is experience in the enterprise. Usually it's around technology strategy, making the right product market fit. But HPE and VMware have exceptional depth and experience in the enterprise. You guys have a huge customer base. Doesn't turn much steady state there. You've got vSphere, killer product with a new release coming out, HPE unprecedented and great Salesforce. Everyone knows that. You guys had great experience serving customers. And it seems like now that the fog is clearing. We're seeing clear line of sight into value proposition, what it's worth, how do you make money with it, how do partners make money. So it seems like the puzzle's coming together right now with consumption, self-service, developer focus. It just seems to be clicking. What's your take on all this? Because you've got that engine there with the VMware. Yeah, I think what customers are looking for. Customers want that cloud kind of experience, but they want it on their terms. So the work that we're actually doing with the GreenLake offerings that we've done, we've released, of course, our subscription offerings that go along with that. But so customers can now get cloud on their terms. They can get systems, services. They know that they've got the confidence that we have integrated those services really well. We look at something like vSphere 8. We just released it, right? Immediately, day zero, we come out. We've got trusted integrated servers from HPE, Mark and his team have done a phenomenal job. We make sure that it's not just the vSphere releases, but vSAN, and we get vSAN ready nodes available. So the customers get that trusted side of things. And you just think about it. We've 200,000 joint customers. Yeah, that's a lot. We've 100,000 kind of enable partners out there. We've an enormous kind of install base of customers, but also those customers want us to modernize. And the fact that we can do that with GreenLake, and then, of course, with our new features and our new releases. Yeah, and it's nice that the product market fits going well on both sides. But can you guys share, both of you share, the cadence of the relationship? I mean, we're talking about vSphere. Every two years, a major release. Now, since vSphere 6, you guys are doing three-month releases, which is amazing. So you guys got your act together there doing great. But you guys, so many joint customers. What's the cadence? As stuff comes out, how do you guys put that together? How tightly integrated? Can you share a quick insight into that dynamic? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, Mark, and I'll add to this too, but the teams actually work very closely where it's every release that we do is jointly qualified. So that's a really, really important thing. But it's more interesting is the innovation side of things, right? If you just think about it, because it's no use to just qualify. That's not that interesting. But like I said, we've released with vSphere 8, the new enhanced storage architecture, the new next generation of vSAN. We've got that immediately qualified ready on HPE equipment. We built out new AI servers, actually, with NVIDIA and with HPE, and we're able to actually push the extremes of AI and intelligence on system. So that's kind of work. And then, of course, our project Monterey work. Project Monterey, Distributed Services Engine, that's something we're really excited about because we're not just building a new server anymore. We're actually going to change the way servers are built. Monterey gives us a new platform to build from that we're actually jointly working. So double-click on that and then to explain how HPE is taking advantage of it. I mean, obviously, you have more diversity of XPUs. You've got isolation. You've got now, but better security and confidential computing, all that stuff. Explain that in some detail and how does HPE take advantage of that? Yeah, definitely. So if you think about vSphere 8, vSphere 8, I can now virtualize anything. I can virtualize your CPUs, your GPUs, and now what we call GPUs or data processing units. And at data processing units, think of it as we're running, actually, effectively another version of ESX sitting down on this processor. But that gives us an ability to run applications and some of the virtualization services actually down on that DPU. And it's separated away from where you run your applications. So all your applications get to consume all your CPU. It's all available to you. Your DPU is used for that virtualization and virtualization services. And that's what we've done. We've been working with HPE and HPE and Pensando. Maybe you can talk some of the new systems that we built around this too. Yeah, so I mean, that's one of the, you talked about the cadence and that, back to the cadence question real briefly. Paul hit on it, yeah, there's a certain element of, let's make sure that we're certified, we're qualified where they're day zero. But that cadence goes a lot beyond it. And I think Project Monterey is a great example of where that cadence expands into really understanding the solutioning that goes into what the customer's expecting from us. So to Paul's point, yeah, we could have just qualified the ESX version to go run on a DPU and put that in the market and said, okay, great customers, we know that it works. We've actually worked very tightly with VMware to really understand the use case, what the customer needs out of that operating environment and then provide, in the first instantiation, three very discreet product solutions aimed at different use cases. Whether that's a more robust use case for customers who are looking at data intensive, analytic intensive environments. Other customers might be looking at VDI or even edge applications. And so we've worked really closely with VMware to engineer solutions specific to those use cases, not just to a qualification of an operating environment, not just a qualification of a certain software stack, but really into an understanding of the use case, the customer solution and how we take that to market with a very distinct point of view alongside our partner. And you can configure the processors based on that workload, is that right? And match the workload characteristics with the infrastructure, is that what that brings you? Well, you've got the same flexibility that we've actually built in why you love virtualization, why people love it, right? You've got the ability to kind of bring harness hardware towards your application needs in a very dynamic way, right? So if you even think about what we built in vSphere 8 from an AI point of view, we're able to scale, we built the ability to actually take network device cards and GPU cards, you're actually able to build those into a kind of composed device. And you're able to provision those as you're provisioning out VMs. And the cool thing about that is you want to be able to get extreme IO performance when you're doing deep learning applications. And you can now do that, you can do it very dynamically as part of the provisioning. So that's the kind of stuff that you've got to really think like what's the use case, what's the applications, how do we build it? And for the DPU side of things, yes, we've looked at how do we take some of our security services, some of our networking services, and we push those services down onto the SmartNIC. It frees up processors. I think the most interesting thing that you probably saw on the keynote was we did benchmarks with Redis databases. We were seeing 20 plus, I'm not sure the exact number, I think it was 27%, I have to get exact number, but 27% latency improvement. To me, I came from the database background, latency's everything, latency's king. It's not just that. It's the number one conversation when you talk about multicloud and as you start getting into hybrid latency, data movement, efficiency. I mean, this is all in the workload mindset that the workhorses that you guys have been working at HPE with the compute, vSphere. This is the heart center of the discussion. I mean, it is under the hood. We're talking about the engine here, right? People care about this stuff, Mark. This is like, Kubernetes only helps this better with containers, all kind of coming together. Where's that developer piece? Because remember, infrastructure is code. What everybody wants, that's the reality. Right. Well, I think if you take a look at where the genesis of the desire to have this capability came from, it came directly out of the fact that you take a look at the big cloud providers and sure, the ability to have part of that operating environment separated out of the CPU, free up as much processing as you possibly can. But it was all in this very lockdown proprietary, can't touch it, can't develop on it. The big cloud guys owned it. VMware's come along and said, okay, we're going to democratize that. We're going to make this available for the masses. We're opening this up so that developers can optimize workloads, can optimize applications to run in this kind of environment. So really, it's about bringing that cloud experience that demand that customers have for that simplicity, that flexibility, that efficiency, and then marrying it with the agility and security of having your on-premises or hybrid cloud environment. And VMware is kind of helping with that too. And that's resonating with customers, I can imagine. What's the feedback you're hearing? What's the, when you talk to customers about that, they're like, wait a minute, we'd have to like, how long is that going to take? Because that sounds like a one-off. Yeah, I'll tell you what- Everything is a one-off now. You can do a one-off. It scales. What I hear is, give me more. We love where we're going in the first instantiation of what we can do with the distributed services engine. We love what we're seeing. How do we do more? How do we drive more workloads in here? How do we get more efficiency? How can we take more of the overhead out of the CPU, free up more cores? And so it's a tremendously positive response. And then it's a response that's resonating with, love it, give me more. Give me more. I love that word because it means democratization, but someone's being democratized. Who's, what's, something, that means good things are happening which means someone's not going to be winning out. Who's that, what's- It's not necessarily that someone's not winning out. What you read, it comes down to, democratizing means you've got to look at it making it widely available. It's available to all. And these things- No silos, no gatekeepers, kind of that kind of thing. It's operationally difficult to use. You've got, think about the DPU market. It was a divergent market with different vendors going into that market with different kind of operating systems. That doesn't work, right? You've got to actually go and virtualize those DPUs so that then we can actually bring application innovation onto those DPUs. We can actually start using them in smart ways. We did the same thing with GPUs. We made them incredibly easy to use. We virtualized those GPUs. We're able to, you know, you can provision them in a very simple way. And we did the same thing with Kubernetes. You mentioned about, you know, container-based applications and modern apps. In the one platform now, you can just set a cluster and you can just say, hey, I want that as a modern apps-enabled cluster and boom, it's done. And all of the configurations set up, Kubernetes, it's done for you. And the thing that's just a green light too, the democratization aspect of how that changed the business model unleashes efficiency and just simplicity. Oh yeah, absolutely. But the other thing was the 20% savings on the Redis benchmark, with no change required at the application level, correct? No change at the application level. In the vCenter, you have to set a little flag. Okay, you got to tick a box. You got to tick a little box. So I can live with that. But the point I'm making is that traditionally, we have an increasing amount of waste to do offloads, and now you're doing them much more efficiently. Instead of using the traditional x86 way of doing stuff, you're now doing purpose-built, you know, applying that to be much more efficient. Totally agreed. And I think it's going to become even more important. Look, our run times for our applications, we've got to move to a world where we're building completely confidential applications at all time. And that means that they are secured, encrypted. All traffic is encrypted, whether it's storage traffic, whether it's IO traffic, we've got to make sure we've got complete root of trust of the applications. And so to do all of that is actually a compute intensive. It just is. And so I think as we move forward and people build much more complete, confidential compute secured environments, you're going to be encrypting all traffic all the time. You're going to be doing microzoning and firewalling down at the VM level so that you've got the protection. You can take a VM. You can move it up to the cloud. It will inherit all of its policies. We'll move with it. All of that will take compute capacity. The great thing is that the DPUs give us this ability to offload and to use some of that spare commitment. And isolate for the application chance because you can't just tunnel in and get access to that. You guys got so much going on. You could have your own cube show just on the updating what's going on between the two companies and the innovation. We got one minute left. Just quickly, what's the goal and the partnership? What's next? Are you guys going to be in the field together doing joint customer work? Is there bigger plans? Is there events out there? What are some of your plans together in the marketplace? Yep, so I think Paul kind of alluded to it and talked about the fact that you've got 100,000 partners in common. The Venn diagram of looking at the HPE channel and the VMware channel. Clearly, there's an opportunity there to continue to drive a joint go-to-market message through both of our sales organizations and through our shared channel. We have a 25,000 strong solution architect force that we can leverage. So as we get these exciting things to talk about, I mean you talk about Project Monterey, the distributed services engine. That's big news. There's big news around vSphere 8. So having those great things to go talk about with that strong sales team, with that strong channel organization, I think you're going to see a lot stronger partnership between VMware and HPE as we continue to do this joint development and joint selling. Lots to get enthused about pretty much there. Oh yeah. I would just add in that we're actually a very interesting point as well where Intel's just coming out with kind of next-level systems. We're building the next gen of these systems. I think this is a great time for customers to look at that aging infrastructure that they have in place. Now is the time we can look at upgrading it, but when they're moving it, they can move it also to a cloud subscription-based model. You can modernize not just what you have in terms of the capabilities and densify and get much better efficiency, but you can also modernize the way you buy from us and actually move to- Real positive change to the transformation, checks the boxes there, and put some position for cloud-native development. Absolutely. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate you coming out of that busy schedule and coming on and give us the update again. We could do a whole show. We have some all the moving parts and innovation going on with you guys. So thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Okay, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more live coverage. Day two, two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. This is theCUBE at VMware Explorer. We'll be right back.