 Hello everyone, welcome to the Palo Alto Studios of theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. We're here for a special CUBE conversation and special report, big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7. I'm here with Krish Prasad, SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner, VP of vSphere product management. Guys, thanks for coming in and talking about the big news. Thank you for having us. You guys announced some interesting things back in March around containers, Kubernetes and vSphere. Krish, tell us about the hard news. What's being announced? Today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7. John, it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years. We previewed it as project Pacific a few months ago. With this release, we are putting Kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform. What that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on Kubernetes and containers, as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform. And it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers a cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release. This is a key part of our Tanzu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year. And it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications. And the specific news is vSphere 7 is general availability. General availability of vSphere 7. Yes. Okay, so let's on the trend line here. The relevance is what? What's the big trend line that this is riding? Obviously, we saw the announcements at VMworld last year and throughout the year, there's a lot of buzz. Pat Kelsen says, there's a big wave here with Kubernetes. What does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend? Yeah, so what Kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation. They're trying to modernize their IT applications. And the best way to do that is build off your current platform, expand it, and make it an innovative, an agile platform for you to run Kubernetes applications and VM applications together. And not just that, customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment, both on-prem and public cloud together. So they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack, but modernize their infrastructure stack, which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications, Kubernetes, or container-based applications and VMs. What's exciting about this trend, Chris, we were talking about this at VMworld last year and we've had many conversations around cloud native, but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business. I mean, this is really the move to the cloud. If you look at the successful enterprises, even the suppliers, the on-premises piece, if not move to the cloud native marketplace technologies, the on-premises isn't effective. So it's not so much on-premises going away. We know it's not, but it's turning into cloud native. This is the move to the cloud generally. This is a big wave. Yeah, absolutely. John, if you think about it, on-premise, we have significant market share. We have by far the leader in the market. And so what we are trying to do with this is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using, but bring their application, modern application development on top of the same platform. Today, customers tend to set up stacks which are different, right? So you have a Kubernetes stack. You have a stack for the traditional applications. You have operators and administrators who are specialized in Kubernetes on one side, and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side. With this move, what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform. You can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had. And at the same time, offer the developers what they like, which is Kubernetes DialTone, that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications. Yeah, Paul, Pat said Kubernetes is going to be the dial tone of the internet. Most millennials might even know what dial tone is, but what he meant is that's the key fabric that's going to orchestrate. And we've heard over the years, skill gap, skill gap, not a lot of skills out there, but when you look at the reality of skills gap, it's really about skills gaps and shortages. Not enough people. Most CIOs and Chief Information Securities that we talk to say, I don't want to fork my development teams, I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to. I want to have automation, I want an operating model that's not going to be fragmented. This kind of speaks to this whole idea of interoperability and multi-cloud. This seems to be the next big way behind hybrid. I think it is the next big way. The thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model. They like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way. And we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem, to Google Cloud, to Amazon Cloud, to Microsoft Cloud, to any of our VCPP partners. You get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by a Kubernetes-based dial tone. It's effective and available within this platform. So by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for, that's what's key in version seven. Does Pat Gelsinger mean when he says dial tone of the internet Kubernetes, does he mean always on or what does he mean specifically? Just that it's always available. What's the meaning behind that phrase? No, the first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure which is the VMware Cloud Foundation and be able to work with a set of APIs that are Kubernetes APIs. So developers understand that, they're looking for that, they understand that dial tone, right? And you come to our VMware Cloud Foundation that runs across all these clouds, you get the same API set that you can use to deploy their application. Okay, so let's get into the value here of vSphere 7. How does VMware and vSphere 7 specifically help customers? Isn't just bolting on Kubernetes to vSphere, some will say, is it that simple? Or you're running product management, no, it's not that easy. Some people will say, hey, you're just bolting Kubernetes on vSphere. It's not that easy. So one of the things, if anybody's actually tried deploying Kubernetes first, it's highly complicated. So definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt-on, but it's certainly not like that. We are making it incredibly simple. You talked about IT operational shortages. Customers want to be able to deploy Kubernetes environments in a very simple way. The easiest way that you can do that is take your existing environment that are out in 90% of IT and just turn on the Kubernetes dial tone. And it is as simple as that. Now, it's much more than that. In version seven as well, we're bringing in a couple things that are very important. You also have to be able to manage at scale. Just like you would in the cloud, you want to be able to have infrastructure almost self-manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself. And so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large-scale environments, both on-premise and public cloud environments at scale. And then associated with that as well is you must make it secure. So there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security, which is how can we actually build in a truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT? Yeah, I mean, I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here. The way we are addressing that is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with Kubernetes the same way they administered the older releases. So they don't have to learn anything new. They are just working the same way. We are not changing any tools, process, technologies. None of that. So same as it was before. Same as it does before. More capability. And developers can come in and they see new capabilities around Kubernetes. So it's best of both worlds. And what was the pain point that you guys are solving? Obviously the ease of use is critical. Obviously operationally I get that. As you look at the cloud native developer side because infrastructure as code means is app developers on the other side taking advantage of it. What's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7? So I think it's multiple factors. So first is we've talked about agility a few times, right? There is DevOps is a real trend inside in IT organizations. They need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker. They need to be able to respond to the business. And to do that, what they are doing is they need infrastructure that is on demand. So what we're really doing in the core Kubernetes kind of enablement is allowing that on demand fulfillment of infrastructure. So you get that agility that you need. But it's not just tied to modern applications. It's also all of your existing business applications and your modern applications on one platform which means that you've got a very simple and low cost way of managing large scale IT infrastructure. So that's a huge piece as well. And then I do want to emphasize a couple of other things. We're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications, for SAP HANA databases, where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there. And you have all of the capabilities like the GPU awareness and FPGA awareness that we built into the platform so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications. So you've got the ability to run those applications as well as your Kubernetes and container based applications. That's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement, right? That's right, yeah, it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in, basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers, whether that's through containers or through VMs. Chris, I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then the community, but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned. I get the lifestyle improvement, life cycle improvement, I get the application acceleration innovation, but the intrinsic security is interesting. Could you take a minute, explain what that is? Yeah, so there's a few different aspects. One is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment? And that means that you need to have a way that the key management, that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom, as we would call it. You want to have a controlled environment that some of the worst security challenges inside in some of the companies has been your internal IT staff. So you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment independent. We've got vSphere trust authority that we released in version seven, that actually gives you a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom, effectively your certificates. So you've got this continuous runtime. Now, not only that, we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform so that you've got native security of even your application ecosystem. Yeah, that's been coming up a lot in conversations about carbon black and the security piece. Krish, obviously vSphere everywhere, having that operating model makes a lot of sense, but you have a lot of touch points. You've got cloud, hyperscalers, you've got the edge, you've got partners. So we are the dominant market share and private cloud. We are on Amazon, as you well know, Azure, Google, IBM cloud, Oracle cloud. So all the major clouds, there is a vSphere stack running. So it allows customers, if you think about it, right? It allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective of where their workload is residing. They can set policies, compliance, security. They set it once, it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud. And it's all supported by our VMware cloud foundation, which is powered by vSphere 7. Yeah, I think having that, the cloud is API based, having connection points and having that reliable, easy to use is critical operating model. All right guys, so let's summarize the announcement. What do you guys take, their takeaway from this vSphere 7? What is the bottom line? What's it really mean? I think what we're, if we look at it for developers, we are democratizing Kubernetes. We already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere. We are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators, they can now manage Kubernetes environments. You can manage it by simply upgrading your environment. That's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage. So I think that is one of the key things that's in here. The other thing though is there is, I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere, that can run in your data center, in Google's, in Amazon's, in Microsoft's, in thousands of VCPP partners, you have one hybrid platform that you can run with and that's got operational benefits, that's got efficiency benefits, that's got agility benefits. Krish, yeah, I would just add to that and say that, look we want to meet customers where they are in their journey and we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way. And I think the announcement that we made today with vSphere 7 is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey without making trade-offs on people, process and technology. And there is more to come. Look, we are laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi-cloud. And so you'll see more capabilities coming in the future, State Union. Well, one final question on this news announcement, which is awesome, vSphere core product for you guys. If I'm the customer, tell me why it's going to be important five years from now. Because of what I just said, it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds, right? Which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds. So think about it, if you go to Amazon native and then you have a workload in Azure, you're going to have different tools, different processes, different people trained to work with those clouds. But when you come to VMware and you use our cloud foundation, you have one operating model across all these environments. And that's going to be game-changing. Great stuff, great stuff. Thanks for unpacking that for us. Congratulations on the announcement. Thank you very much. vSphere seven news special report here inside theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.