 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. At the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. Oh, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to theCUBE. SiliconANGLE Media's live video program go out to all the big enterprise IT shows, help extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman, senior analyst with Wikibon here at the Virtualization Technology User Group, Winter Warmer 2015. It's the ninth year that this event has been at Gillette Stadium. It's the second year we've had theCUBE here. We've got really, it's a great user group to talk about what's going on in virtualization. Cloud, SDN, hyperconvergence, a lot of the big trends. It helped give some of the good educational training, what's going on, good thought leaders here, lots of vendors saying the latest in their wear. And it's a new year and we're happy to be here. And joining me for this introductory segment is Chris Harney. Chris Harney is the founder of the VTUG and the leader of this long time group that we've loved to do work with. Chris, thanks for joining us and congrats on all the success here at VTUG. Stu, thanks. You know, the success is really the users. They drive the attendance, they drive the content. So it's nice to have a user group that's run by users. Yeah, and Chris, it's a great venue and it's great content. I love, we've got Teddy Bruski right behind us here, full tilt, full time for the show. The Patriots are going to be going to the AFC Championship this weekend against the Colts. We were talking a little bit about the game planning and you never know what's going to happen on Sunday. We'll of course be rooting for the Patriots here because we're homers. Absolutely. But let's talk about the conference, Chris. We've had you on a couple times before. What are some of the highlights from you? Give us some of the stats. How many people are here at the VTUG event? So we just have just over a thousand people here this year. We are talking lots of different things. You know, we heard Joe Onasek talk about software-defined networking, but policy-driven IT. We had a hyper-converged panel that was really interesting. We had, in the morning we had Dan Stolz talking about why you need to learn cloud. Chris Kalati talking about why certifications still matter. And Hans is saying, listen guys, virtual networking is here. You need to learn this NSX because it's going to be here whether you want it or not. Yeah, and Chris, one of the things we really like about this, this is an independent event. So it is not driven by, you know, A agenda. There's, you know, the VMUGs are very much a VMware-centric environment. VTUG covers much more than that. So you want to hear about cloud. You're going to get, you know, last year you had Amazon doing a keynote on cloud. This year Microsoft did a keynote on cloud. And of course VMware's here in the mix. But it's, you get a good, fair and balanced, you know, representation. Absolutely. You know, the one thing we try to be is agnostic. We don't want to skew the message. We want to make our users educated so they can make better decisions for next year and the year after. And put themselves in a spot to be successful. Yeah, so Chris, we were talking a little bit before. It's, some of it is education, some of it is training. Because, you know, there's dramatic change going on in the industry today. You know, talked with Joe Anasic with the networking side and the panel that I moderated on hyperconvergence. Many of you as administrators, what you're doing today, if you think that's the job you're going to have three years from now, you're probably going to be out of a job. I've had this discussion with so many people, it's not even funny. You know, if you look at your data center six or seven years ago, and you had stacks of servers, well, try to think of what it's going to look like in another five or six years. You have no idea. We had no idea how much virtualization was going to take over our data center. We have no idea how much hyperconvergence and cloud are going to take over. But you know what? If you be on the forefront, you know, be a beta customer, learn that technology and have some say on what's going to happen in the industry. Yeah, it's real interesting times here because users are often holding on to what they have a little bit longer. I mean, the challenge you have is you buy something and you feel like it's what I have to do. When I build a data center, that's data center I'm going to have for 30 years. When I buy a storage array, is it three, four or seven years before I'm really going to pull that out? When I buy servers, it might be a slightly shorter timeframe, but what I'd love to be talking about in the hyperconvergence panel, it's moving from kind of those upgrade cycles, which are discrete, painful occurrences where I have to migrate and retrain to really more, Dell uses the term fluid architectures more. Hyperconvergence talks about creating a pool of resources or what VMware calls the software defined data center. It's really about making an environment that is going to be able to grow with me over time. I can add changes in, but not have to be as manual. And therefore that is going to be a big change to what IT practitioners are doing on a day-to-day basis. You know, we talked, you're right, we talked about this and I think what the hyperconvergence does by bringing all of those technologies together, it gets you off the hamster wheel. You know, you're not doing storage this year, servers the next, backup switches, storage servers, backup switches. You now can add business value. You bring in a hyperconverged solution. The technology changes some. You're now really changing the data center. Virtualization makes sense. And now you can add policy-driven IT. You can now stop doing right-click deploy, stop addressing VLANs. You know, it really makes a big difference in your infrastructure. Yeah, so from an attendee standpoint, is it still, I'm curious what you see trend-wise, is it used to be, you know, it was storage administrator gave way for the virtualization administrator. You know, cloud architect shows up more. What's the makeup of the attendant to you? You said there's over a thousand. Is that users that are here? There's over a thousand users here. That's great. It hits the gamut. You know, I would love to see more networking people showing up to have a voice in this. I think they're still holding on to that last hold. And they don't think that networking virtualization is going to be true. I'm telling you, we didn't think virtualization was going to affect our worlds as much. But if you get on the forefront, you'll see what's really happening up there. Yeah, Chris, you bring up a great point. What's going to be true? So, you know, you go to, you talk to the vendors and it's all, you know, pie in the sky. This is why it's going to be great. But tell me kind of what mindset, you know, you talk to a lot of users, you consult with them, you do various things with them. How do they understand, you know, what's real and what's hype? That's a great question. I don't think you can predict it out, predict out more than three years. You know, we used to have a five-year plan or a 10-year plan. Technology changes so much and you have to be willing to swing with that. So let's plan for three years and know that in a year that might change, that information may change. I don't think cloud's going away, whether it's a hybrid cloud, but planning policies and procedures in place to protect your data, that's important. Whether it's on-premise or off-premise. And knowing where that data's going to sit, I don't think it's going to matter in five years. You know, Docker's making a big splash. So we'll see what happens in 12 months. Yeah, it's interesting. Joe Anasic mentioned Linux containers in Docker this morning. And I think there were, you know, two or three of us in the room that weren't from the vendor community that had even heard of it. What's, you know, what do you see as the hot buttons? What are the users asking to hear from the events that you put on? The users are still asking for training. You know, they want to say, I've got this stuff, this equipment, these software pieces, and I don't know how to use it to my best ability. A lot of them haven't looked out three years. They're just trying to know how to take better advantage of what's in their data center. Yeah, better utilization of what I've got today. Great point. Chris, talk to us a little bit about VTUG in general. You've had chapters in other parts of the country. Give us the update on that. Yeah, so it looks like VTUG is still growing. We did Chicago. We did Indianapolis, San Jose, Virginia, and Florida may be coming on this year. Again, it's not a vendor-driven community. It's a user-driven community, and they just want to have more say in what's heard and talked about in their meetings. Yeah, it's a tough thing. I mean, I look at it, you know, we know a lot of the V-Mug leaders, and those are people that gave of their own time, gave of their own, you know, will. It's the user-generated content and user participation is so huge. I spent a lot of time looking at the open source environment, and more and more people are not just using open source, but contributing to open source. So a survey last year said that within, I think it was two years, half of enterprises will be not just using, but contributing to open source. So always love those ways that people can get involved. How do people get involved more in the community, Chris? I would just go to www.vtug.com, sign up to be a member. We will send you out more information. We've got a lot of changes coming up with the website this year. We want to put an events board, a job board, and there's forums coming up, and then just go to a meeting. You know, if you want to start a chapter, let us know, and just start meeting on a basis, and that will help you out. Okay, Chris, it's always great to catch up with you. We've got a bunch of the keynote people here. You're pulling in some of the users for us, so we put the users back in the user group, which I always love. Thanks again for all of what you do through the community and appreciate you bringing theCUBE again to help us there and, you know, go Patriots. Absolutely. What's your prediction for the score, Stu? Oh boy, let's see, we put this down. What I always say with the Patriots and the playoffs is if the Patriots can score at least 21 points, it's the type of game that we can win. So I'm going to go, you know, 24 to 17. I think it'll be close enough that, you know, one score could still swing it, but I see the Patriots going to Arizona and, you know, hopefully, you know, the Patriots can bring back, you know, another ring for the team. So we will be here all day at the VTUG at Let Stadium. So stay tuned for our next guest. We'll be right back after this quick break.