 Welcome everybody to this episode of CUBE Conversations coming to you live from Wikibon World Headquarters in Mamber, Massachusetts. VMworld wrapped up just last week, so we're going to talk today with my colleagues, Stu Miniman, about some of the announcements made there. Specifically, VMware announced their own flavor of OpenStack. Stu, tell us a little bit about that announcement and then maybe we can get into some of the analysis about what it means for the market. Yeah, Jeff, thanks so much. And of course, VMworld, so many announcements, such a big ecosystem. One that did really tease apart and unpack this announcement, which they called it, it's VMware Integrated OpenStack, or VIO, which as you mentioned is really VMware's distribution of OpenStack, which they've announced really in beta. And everybody's trying to say, is this an offensive move? Is it a defensive move? What does it mean to the existing players? So, you know, let's get into it. Well, so talk about, yeah, the ecosystem. I mean, where does this fit in? What are the competitors in this market doing? And how does this kind of sync with what we're else we're seeing in the market? Yeah, so it's always a little bit nuanced when we talk about VMware, because it's all about co-opetition these days. And there are some people that VMware's partnering very closely with and others that they're actively at war in these days. So, first of all, let's step back and remember that OpenStack, of course, is not like a product and it's not a company. It's really, it is an open source initiative in their software that goes along with this. So there's many projects that fit under OpenStack and together it builds, of course, a stack that you can build solutions with and you can build public clouds or you can build private clouds with those. So, you know, big companies like IBM and HP have put a lot of money into this and say we're going to stand up public clouds using OpenStack as our components. There are distributions out there that are allowing customers to create their own private infrastructure using OpenStack. And, of course, VMware is partnering with a number of players. They're not just going to do it on their own. So, in the announcement for VMware's integrated OpenStack, they are working with Canonical and Mirantis, who Mirantis is, you know, from all numbers I've heard, probably the number one distribution out there in, at least in 2013, sales numbers for people that bought that distribution and deployed. But there are many, many other distributions out there. Red Hat, of course, is a big player in this space. I mentioned HP before and there was even VMware who made an announcement with HP on how they can build the software-defined data center. And in some ways, they're trying to have a more forceful position as other companies like Cisco are more and more engaged in what's going on in OpenStack. So, what is VMware's motivation here? So, when I think of VMware, I mean, I think of them as the virtualization company that helped you deploy, essentially, private clouds. Yes. So, now we've got OpenStack, which to me, from my outsider perspective, would think that's a bit of a competition there. Why would they invest in this? What's their motivation? Yeah, great question, Jess. So, first of all, of course, VMware is pivoted to Hybrid Cloud because we know not everything's going to live on site. And what was originally called VCloud Hybrid Service was rebranded as VCloud Air from VMware and there's a renewed effort to really work closely with service providers and other channel partners to build that out. And so, for the OpenStack specific question, first of all, VMware actually was heavily involved early on in some of OpenStack, specifically from the networking standpoint. NYSERA, who VMware bought for $1.2 billion, helped create the networking stack, which was Neutron, for OpenStack. So, they helped create that. And one of the things I took away from OpenStack Summit in Atlanta was that VMware's no longer really in the driver's seat there. There's a whole bunch of people involved. There's a lot of challenges in the networking space. And while there are VMware people involved in it, there's more that needs to be done there. And so, lots of people are getting involved in it. So, VMware, first of all, I'd say the defensive place of what they're doing is, if you talk to CIOs and say, I want to build a private cloud and how do I do this? The number one thing that they're probably hearing the most about is OpenStack. So, if a CIO comes to VMware and says, hey, I want to do OpenStack, VMware wants to say, of course, we can do that for you. And of course, the best OpenStack you should buy is VMware's OpenStack. So, there's that. And also, if you look at the entire ecosystem for OpenStack, it's not huge revenue dollars. I mean, I have not seen a report that says exact numbers, but if there's a $100 million worth of distributed software sold for that, that's probably about where it is as opposed to VMware's five to $6 billion company. So, it's early enough that VMware can get involved in some ways to suck the air out of the room in what's going in OpenStack and help insert what they're doing in many places. So, to kind of shape the direction to hopefully benefit, of course, customers, but also VMware themselves. So, talk about the offering itself. You mentioned, it's essentially OpenStack is an open source framework set of software that you can kind of mold into various flavors. So, VMware's got their flavor. It kind of reminds me, or similar to what we're seeing in the new market, Hadoop being an open source framework and then we've got a number of vendors that kind of have their own flavor. So, from VMware's perspective, is this a, are they hewing to the open source premise here or are they injecting some of their proprietary IP and what's been the market reaction? Yeah, great question, Jeff. So, first of all, the real open source, bigots, if you will, the people that love open source of course, are throwing mud at VMware and saying, this is proprietary and what are they doing? So, here's the challenge that we have today. There are dozens of distributions for OpenStack and interoperability between those stacks really aren't there today. So, everybody takes the open source version of it and then they do what they need to do to make an enterprise ready and add whatever functionality is on top of it. So, it still needs time to mature. I mean, we're still only a few years into the development of OpenStack. So, there's a lot of work that's going to be done. I'm actually going to pull up a slide just to show you how VMware fits into all of OpenStack. So, if we look at this, there are many different projects that VMware's going to be a part of and this shows the touch points. It really is both at the driver level, things like storage need to work well together. VMware's making sure that products like their vSAN for software defined storage and NSX which their network virtualization are going to plug straight into OpenStack. But they've got, I think there's about a dozen projects that VMware's saying we're putting people on it and we're going to be involved in it. So, there's that piece of it. They are contributing back to these communities. So, they're not saying we're going to just build our thing on the side. And so, I would not say that it's quite fair to say that VMware is nothing but proprietary but on the same, on the other hand, they are not looking to become the red hat of OpenStack. Red hat of course is trying to be the red hat of OpenStack with the leading distribution out there. VMware is trying to keep their customers from abandoning them and customers that are looking at a hybrid cloud environment. Of course, VMware is the leader in on-premise with their hypervisor and they don't want to lose that lead any more than what's been chipping away from the likes of Microsoft and the KVM, the free versions. You have two quick notes on that. One is Microsoft is absent when you talk about OpenStack. Azure, they have their own play. They're doing things like Office 365 and pulling it. And the other piece is if you talk to the people that will be fast to throw stones at VMware, for the last two years when I talked to most vendors in the OpenStack community, the number one thing that they say is this is a great way for you to save money by getting rid of your VMware licenses. And of course it's not that cut and dry, but VMware has a lot of power in the data center and therefore they have a lot of licenses. And if I can save money by not spending those licenses, there's money for other things. The real savings, of course, needs to be that this is simpler to do and on the operation side of things because that's still where the vast majority of dollars are spent. So let's step back even further, get more of a bird's eye view and put this in context of the larger cloud discussion. When people think cloud and they think public cloud, they think AWS, increasingly they're starting to think a little bit about Google. Where does not just VMware's play here but OpenStack generally fit in this whole private versus public cloud, where are we in that conversation at this point? Right, so as I said earlier in the discussion, you can use OpenStack to build a public cloud and companies like IBM and HP are doing that and Red Hat is partnering with Dell and others to be able to take their distribution and make a public cloud. But most companies that are taking OpenStack are doing it for private deployments. I think the number I heard was roughly 70% of all OpenStack deployments are going to be kind of on premise in that private cloud environment. So that's where it lives. So absolutely that's going to go head to head with things like Azure, what Rackspace is doing. Of course Rackspace was one of the, if it wasn't for Rackspace, we wouldn't have OpenStack. So they worked on that code, brought it forward and allowed the community to take it over. So I would say that it's a little bit different than the public cloud and it's really hitting a different part of the market than say AWS is today. They are targeting the developers. It is very much a developer conference if you go to any of the OpenStack shows, but they are trying to hit also eventually the mainstream applications. So there's potential to be competition between the various OpenStack offerings in AWS. And of course if we're talking VMware, VMware probably sees Amazon as enemy number one. So I understand there was also an announcement at the show about Docker. Now Docker's been giving a lot of coverage. We're not talking about the pants, we're talking about something very different. Tell us a little bit about Docker. I'm curious to learn more about it and what were some of the announcements that came out last week? So Jeff along with OpenStack and VMware is also going to be supporting some efforts in OpenCompute and with Docker. For those that don't know, Docker is related to containerization technology. So Linux containers, LXC, if you look, they've been around for many years. Companies like Google have been implementing them in very large amounts. So it is not really a virtualization technology. It is a way to separate my application management from my infrastructure management, which of course reminds me a little bit of what VMware did for compute. It really allowed me with base virtualization over 10 years ago, rather than managing things at the server level, I could manage things at the virtual machine level, which meant that I just took my operating system and my application and had those at a one to one ratio. Docker allows me to just focus on the application and two things. First of all is I can have multiple applications running on a single operating system and I can also have applications that are going to span across multiple servers. So, Jeff, in your space, you're looking at all these wonderful analytics applications that are truly scale out architectures. They're a great fit for things like Docker. Docker also allows me to, since I can separate my application from my infrastructure, it will sit on basically bare metal. So if I've got this Linux latest version of, I think it's 3.8 of Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 fully supports Docker as a first class citizen. What VMware announces that they are working to make Docker a first class citizen inside of VM. So whether I've got just basic Linux, whether I've got virtualization, such as with VMware, Microsoft's working on things with Docker, and the cloud, I can do Docker with Amazon, with Google, and once again, Microsoft's working there. So no matter what your infrastructure choice, bare metal, hypervisor or cloud, Docker's going to span across those. Definitely the hottest technology I've seen in many years. We did a great interview with Docker CEO, Ben Golub at VMworld. We caught up with the founder of Docker, Solomon Hikes at Red Hat Summit. So one we're keeping a close eye on in its early days. I mean, storage needs to be fixed for Docker. Security needs to be worked on, but huge potential to really enable the application, which of course is the whole reason that we have infrastructure. Yeah, and it's another example of a technology coming out of the web scale companies and making its way slowly but surely to the enterprise. Absolutely. Great, so final question. When we're going to see you next on theCUBE at events covering these topics? Well, so first of all, if we're talking about OpenStack, our West Coast team out in Palo Alto is going to be covering the OpenStack Silicon Valley. So while the OpenStack Summit is held every six months once in the U.S. and once in Europe, a group of companies realize that while a lot of the innovation and activity for OpenStack is happening in the Valley, so they want to hold a regular meeting there and we're excited to bring theCUBE there. Going to have a lot of the thought leaders of the space there. We'll be at Oracle OpenWorld and of course Amazon Reinvents, another big one that we're going to be talking about Cloud. So we're definitely looking for where OpenStack fits and lots of pieces, the ecosystem and the broader discussions of Cloud as theCUBE rolls through with all the four world fall tour. All right, great. Well, we'll keep an eye out for that. Stu, thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching and we'll be back with our next episode of CUBE Conversations.