 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, I'm here with John Troyer and you're watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's live production of VMworld 2017. We're in Las Vegas, happy to have back to the program Alistair Cook, who is the chief video officer of VBrownBag. Al, great to see you, thanks so much. It is, of course, not only great to see you, but great to see VBrownBag here at VMworld, which was for, I think, what, 24 or 48 hours actually in question. It was probably the most stressful 48 hours of my life when it looked like we might not be as welcome on the floor here at VMworld as we have been for the last five years prior. Yeah, you know, Pat Gelsinger last year said, I couldn't imagine VMworld without theCUBE. I think most of the community couldn't imagine the show without VBrownBag. So, we don't need to hash through all of it. Luckily, everybody in IT knows that sometimes you get those stressful periods and you look back and say we went through that the outcome worked. The outcome was awesome. So, for those who have not come across what we do, VBrownBag is a community podcast. I mean, you guys have followed the rise. John's been instrumental in part of the rise. We're a podcast that's about education for the practitioner of IT, the person working in data centers or designing solutions to go into data centers. We focus on education. So, we're a video podcast, I was looking at our stats. There's a couple of thousand videos sitting in our YouTube channel that we produced over the last six, seven years. And the last six years at VMworld, we've had an open stage. We sort of sit a little bit in parallel to the rise of theCUBE at VMworld, the massive estate that you have here now. We also have grown over the years, not nearly as massive, but we have an open stage for those same IT practitioners, the hands-on engineering people to come and share the things they've learned with the rest of the community. Yeah, and can you speak a little, the breadth and depth of the offering that you'll do during this week here? And I mean, one of the differences here, we get people, a lot of people come take photos, they'll come watch for a few minutes. You guys have audience coming through the entire time participating and the like. Well, this year we have a big upswing in our audience because all of our sessions are listed in the schedule builder. So, it's normal attendees at the show are seeing our content and saying, that's interesting, I want to hear about it. And that's always been, previously our issue was discoverability, nobody knew that there were these really awesome speakers who were presenting at VMworld. Now, they're in the schedule builder and so we have a space for 50 people. We've had a few talks where pretty much every seat's been full and then the walkway past our stage has been filled with another 30 people wanting to see and to just consume the content that we produce. That's super nice, how many videos over the course of the week? We have 77 booked in for this week. So, we are... I think you'll have more than us then. Yeah, yeah, so we're already at 16. We do a much lower production standard than you do here on theCUBE, but we do a really high velocity. So, as I walked away from my stage to come to yours, I'd already uploaded the previous presenters' videos up onto YouTube. So, as I walked away, 16 presentations were complete, 16 videos were on YouTube. My awesome crew are still manning the stage while I'm away and while I've been here, I think we're now onto the second video that's being produced as I've been watching you guys talking with your previous guest. Yeah, yeah, come on, video's all instant. As long as the internet's solid, we get them up pretty fast too. Oh, yeah, but the key thing for us is that we do it with next to nothing. We do it on a shoestring compared to what... Your renting people bill here is probably larger than my equipment bill. Well, that's, hey, that's the beautiful thing about tech, right? I started filming stuff at VMworld years ago, right? And you just buy a consumer camera and just go and you can stream and you built it up from there. It's a prosumer sort of, affordable tech that anybody can do. And even, you know, you use common web, go to meeting and things like that on your weekly podcast, right? This is super, you don't need a lot of money to kind of reach a global audience. What are some of the kind of themes that you're going to seeing this year at VMworld in terms of the tech talks? So it's a little challenging to try and work out a theme out of the 77 kind of, because there isn't so much coherence to what we get. We don't have streams or anything like that. I, on the stage we accept everything that comes in and my acceptance criteria is chronology. The order in which you submit your session is the priority in which it's scheduled, rather than doing a lot of review. I've seen quite a bit of container stuff in there. There's a lot of interest in AWS and vSphere on AWS. There's quite a lot of interest in free tools. So we've had two sessions today on free tools for vSphere administrators. So things that can get you going in your job without having to go asking cap and hand for money to buy a new tool. Which is nice, right? Because these are some things that might not be in a session, official session at VMworld with 800 people in it, but free tools very relevant to the technical community. And that's the thing. Our audience is all about that engineer who's going to be hands on the keyboard, building things, it quite possibly is still going to be racking and stacking hardware and configuring the products that have been bought that have been chosen by somebody further up the management chain. I know some of the more popular sessions are when you touch on certification type issues. Do those happen here or is that different pieces and maybe speak a little bit to the broader charter of eBrownbag. So the broader objective is that the virtualization community and the data center infrastructure community can teach one another. We all feel like we know a little tiny amount of this vast amount that everyone around us knows. The reality is that each of us has our own little island. And if I share my island of knowledge with you and you share your island of knowledge with me, then we all learn more. And the internet and the use of podcasts and the rise of iTunes has given us the ability to do that at massive scale. We only need a very small number of people who are prepared to share their circle of knowledge to be able to educate a vast number of people. But what I also think is interesting, right? You started with VMware certs, right? That was a brown bag to learn, study for our certifications together. And now, over the years, it's brought into open stack, it's brought into AWS, containers. I mean, can you talk about some of the, all the different topics that you're dealing with? So we absolutely cover, as far as I'm aware, every released VMware certification we've got some content for and have done since ESX3, those kinds of days. And that's how long the podcast has been running. We've always been helping community members to study for their VMware certifications. And then we found that VMware didn't release certifications as fast as we could produce training for them. And so we started looking broader and started looking at, well, you work in virtualization, you need to know storage, you need to know networking. And so we started covering some elements in those and then, well, there's certifications in these things. And that's good for career advancement for the engineer. And so we started covering some of the Cisco certifications and we did have the foray into open stack because Cody Bunch, the guy who started the podcast, who I refer to as the Podfather, his work took him from building a product based on vSphere for a large hosting provider to a product based on OpenStack. And so he was very much keen on OpenStack and unfortunately our audience weren't so keen. So the OpenStack series went for a little while and didn't get a huge traction. But we started doing AWS last year. We covered the solution architect associate certification early last year, huge interest in the community. Really popular content. And other popular certification content is NSX. One of the top videos for a long time was Frank Bachel doing an introduction to VMware's NSX as we're covering the VCP NV certification. That's really interesting. What kind of people attend a V Brown bag? What are the characteristics, right? Obviously there are people who, some are cert driven. They want to expand their horizons. They want to advance their careers. Any comments on that? So a lot of our ICS split between those of us who produce the content who are very much forward looking and are getting excited about the next thing. And so now we're doing Kubernetes and we're just starting a series on APIs. And every Christmas we do a thing called Commit Miss where we cover source code management and Git with Git Commits. So we've got this whole heap of forward thinking telling the infrastructure people these are the skills you're going to need to be relevant in the future. If the cloud is eating your lunch in your data center here's a whole set of skills that you're going to need in order to still be able to earn. What we see is there's a huge middle audience who are just starting virtualization. So crazy as it seems there are customers who are just starting to virtualize now. And they're not all in Southeast Asia. Laggards. But the people who are coming into the industry also younger people coming into the industry who don't have 20 years of virtualization or 200 years of virtualization in their back pockets. Using the V Brown bags is a way of getting some education and getting education that they don't have to get a purchase order for. This is all free, right? Everything you do is free. Everything we do is free to consume. That's one of our core principles is all the content we produce is free to consume. And we do produce, in a typical month we'll produce six hours of video training content and stake that up over a few years. All right, so we put your consultant hat on. All right. What so far? I mean, we're only day one here but what's your take on what VMware's saying? Pac-Elster gave kind of his morning keynote. Applause for Andy Jassy coming out. We've spent a lot of time talking about VMware and AWS but kind of across the board, what's your take so far? What are you liking? What aren't you liking? Well, I'm liking that the video production on the V Brown bag stage has been really smooth so far and that I have an awesome team of volunteers there. To be honest, that's been the biggest thing because that's what I'm here for. The keynote, to an engineer, the keynote's not hugely interesting because the keynote is a business focus message and I want to know when I am deploying a vSphere on AWS environment, what does it look like? So there's some quiet briefings going on that you can book in for if you get the invitation to see how it's actually going to work. That's the stuff that is, if I was still doing regular day to day working for a company, that's the stuff I'd be wanting to get while I was here at VMworld. The, yes, we've got Andy Jassy here. Well, that's great. There's a serious commitment from AWS to the conference. Pivoting back a little bit to, I mean, new technology, right? Video is really democratizing at some level, like the affordability of the equipment and the ability to do from anywhere. V Brown Bag to support itself, does have sponsors, you have some sponsors here so the webinar's all free and mostly very educational. You're here on site, you do also do several tech events during throughout the year, all around the world. And you've actually started a new exercise where you go and you work with a vendor or something, but as a technologist and you stream, basically it's build day where you build something with your hands, some system, some rack of something and stream the whole thing live. Can you talk a little, I think, again, fascinating from like a production and technology point of view, but can you talk a little bit about, again, what you're trying to bring as a trainer and an educator and a community member with that kind of an offering? Sure, so V Brown Bag's content is all free to consume but it's not free to produce and so we have wonderful sponsors that help us to be here, make sure that I can bring crew of people here to VMware to make those 77 videos and I haven't done the count of how many we're doing in Barcelona but I'm doing an outrageous number of miles in a month because I'm going home to New Zealand in between the two VM worlds. I've got to pick up my wife and take her to Barcelona. So awesome sponsors for that and we go to other events, we've been, this is I think the second event in Vegas where we've been making tech talks this year, but returning to John, you were talking about the wonderful new thing we started doing this year of the V Brown Bag Build Days and the objective is really to show day one experience of implementing a piece of technology and it's the engineers day one experience so we're very used to seeing keynote demonstrations and I'll show you this wonderful new technology and it is awesome piece of technology, it's just that A, you're not going to get it for two years time and B, when you do get it, it's going to be possibly very difficult to deploy or possibly really easy. A lot of vendors say our technology is really easy and so we put them to the test on that so we work with a vendor, they bring us in to usually to their site the two that we've done, we go to their site, I bring in a customer's vSphere environment so I have a Palikin case full of servers and we turn up with that and then on top of that vSphere environment we deploy whatever the technology is, be it a hyperconverged platform, a storage platform, management platform and we live stream that process so the requirement for them is we need to start with as it arrives to the customer from the factory and we need to go through the actual deployment process we need to hit the fish oaks that real customers are going to have because I've been the engineer who turns up on site thinking he's going to deploy product A when the salesman said he was going to be deploying product A and in fact he's deploying product cucumber and that's what he's got to go and push out and that terror of I've got to not make this go wrong, I've got to look good deploying this and give my customer a good experience when I've not really had any preparation now it wouldn't help me if it was the day that I arrived but often it's a new piece of technology the first time we deploy it and we were rather concerned and we don't believe what's in the marketing we don't necessarily believe that there's steps in the installation guide are correct so VBrown Bag's objective is to go through that process and take an educational approach to showing you how that first day goes and as you mentioned John my background is as a trainer I taught VMWiz public schedule training courses for years and so I very much like to go through this process as training and you can see that reflected out in what we do with VBrown Bag it's all about education that's part of what attracted me Yeah, last question I have for you is VBrown Bag's been doing this for many years and any major shifts, changes, you know of course the scope is broadened quite a bit you talk about things like NSX and everything like that anything else in kind of the community and educating and what people look for from your organization that you could share So there's sort of different angles on that we definitely have seen that move from being I really need to get my VCP or my VCAP certifications and then my career will be complete which of course we know is a little naive we've seen a diversification that the additional skills required the other thing that we're seeing is that although VMWord is home base for this community it's not the only place this community is and so as I go to other conferences I'm often surprised by the proportion of the people there that are actually my friends from the virtualization you know the VMWord community are at other things and I suspect if I was to go to AWS re-invent I would find a fair few of my friends there Absolutely lots of them especially I'd say last year was where I saw a significant uptick are we going to see it reinvent this year? I've not had any interest from AWS to bring me there and I can't afford to come out to these conferences on my own dime until I sell a few more build days Well hey I really appreciate you everything that VBrownBag's been doing here at the community it's always a pleasure to catch up with you here on theCUBE we always love to support the community and many of those organizations we will be at AWS re-invent you know definitely lots of need for education there lots of growth in what's happening there and here so for John Troyer I'm Stu Miniman we'll be back with lots more coverage here at VMworld 2017 you're watching theCUBE