 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2017. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to the VTUG Winter Warmer. You're watching theCUBE, which is SiliconANGLE Media's live broadcast with a worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. At a user conference, there is no better people to talk to than the users themselves. Really thrilled when I can have a practitioner that we can talk to, and the VTUG people are happy to bring me over. Dan Valentine, who's an IT specialist with Danone Foods, which I wasn't familiar with, is the parent company of Danon. Joke I made is Danon has got all those things. We're going to have a culture discussion about IT and everything more. Dan, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what you do at Danone. So, as an IT specialist, my focus is VMware, the virtual environment within the company. Prior to working for Danone, I had the good opportunity of working for two other international manufacturing companies and a local branch of the government. So, never really a small environment, which I think is kind of a good perspective to have to understand how large environments are done in different realms. Dan, can you scope out for us a little bit, your responsibilities, the breadth, depth, how many people, how many sites, how many countries? Yeah, okay. Like I said, my focus is the VMware environment, the virtualization of our data centers, consolidating our footprint. We have three major data centers in the Western Hemisphere. Each one of those data centers has a fairly large VMware environment. We also have smaller ones in the manufacturing plants and other offices that warrant having that environment there. But my focus really has been consolidating the footprint, getting everything virtualized, implementing the VMware environment, keeping it modernized, any innovation that needs to be done, and then just other small projects that are related for the company. Awesome. So, have they been using VMware since as long as you've been on board? Since before, I've been on board. One of the usual things is, how much of your environment is virtualized in any statute you can give us on order of magnitude, tens, hundreds of thousands of servers? Yeah, that's a constant topic of conversation within our company as it stands right now. P2Ving everything that can be P2Ved is the desire. If I had to put a number on it, I would say 95% or better is virtualized. Great. Someone may be watching this, it'll tell me right after we're done, is there a mainframe sitting in the back somewhere that's not virtualized or what have been those tough things that kind of the last hangers on that aren't virtualized? So, another conversation that we have with this is the one for one scenario. If I virtualized this machine, does it take up so much in resources that it's going to sit on one host and be the only VM that can really reside or consume the resources of that host within your cluster? Yep. So, there is the school of thought of virtualized everything but there's also the school of thought. If it's that big, if it's that powerful, if it just needs that much hardware for it to run properly, databases and what have you, then maybe it makes more sense for it to stay physical and off the virtual cluster. Yeah, I mean, when VMware came out with what they call the monster VM, it's like I should be able to take any application but there's always that, do I virtualize if it doesn't make sense? Well, I could put it under the shared management and things like that. How about the rest of the stack? Are you, do you have a standardized infrastructure that you put things on and how about kind of the management and orchestration above it? So, we try to go with one rack solutions. I have your storage and four, five servers, however many is necessary for the cluster and we've been implementing those one rack solutions. Occasionally you have a larger sand through a fiber that's a rack by itself if we need a lot of data but that's kind of rare. I say we've been implementing those one rack solutions anywhere that it makes sense. So, that's kind of what we go for as far as infrastructure, keep it simple, keep it manageable but still scalable. Okay, how about things like refresh cycle? How often are you revving what that rack looks like and your VMware environment? What versions are you on today? How long does it take you guys to get to a new version? From a hardware standpoint, changing what's physically in that rack, you want to shoot for three years, I would think. Once you get over three years, things can be out of support. Replacing parts if it's not in support can be a challenge financially. As far as the version of VMware and OS versions, anything like that, what I've found not just the company I work for but in large companies in general, the school of thought, which may soon be changing, is stay one revision behind. You see a lot of companies still solidly on 2008, maybe even some 2003 out there even though it shouldn't be. Just now moving to 2012 as their platform, 2016 in Windows is right around the corner and no one's even fully on 2012 yet. Same thing in VMware, 65 is up and running. It's the one we've learned about quite a bit here today and some people are still talking about, well, how do I get to six? Yeah. So with those conversations, the challenge is always your ROI, your return on investment. You have to go to the business and say, what is it going to cost me to go with the latest and greatest? If it costs more, can you justify it to them? If it doesn't cost more, then you have to prove to them that they're still getting their solidarity, their consistency for a cheaper product. Yeah. Could you speak a little bit about the applications that sit on your virtual environment? I mean, do you have hundreds, thousands of applications? Or how do new business requirements come in, transition to your environments? I personally don't deal very much with the application platform. So any information I give is very ballpark. But on that, I think the school of thought that everyone is going to now is consolidate your support portfolio. A few years ago in the environments that I'd been in, it was find the cheapest application that will do what we want. Now it's okay, how can this application be scaled out to the entire environment? And you find a lot of people now that I think are doing that in reverse. They're taking their portfolio of 150 applications. Can we get it to this core 75 and get rid of the other ones or standardized? Being a large global company, the application portfolio that we have, I would have to say, is fairly significant. And we have the mantra, which a lot of people do is a one for one, one application or valid zone, one server. So if you've got an environment of thousands of VMs, and you're potentially talking thousands of applications, some applications take more than one server to run properly, but you kind of get the idea. So I understand kind of there's people that handle kind of above the stack, what you're doing in the application. How about the server networking compute underneath of that? When I think about rolling out applications, how much does your team handle it? How much do you then need to interact with pieces underneath? How does that whole kind of organizational aspect work? I mean, there's a project intake process. If something new wants to be brought into the environment that is not a current standard, or if something that is a standard needs to be upgraded, the project intake process is okay, what is the, for me personally, what does the underlying infrastructure need to be in order for that to be successful on a daily basis and easily accessed by the end user that needs it? So you have the conversation of can it be virtualized? Can it not be virtualized mostly? Can, how many VMs is it gonna take? Is there enough resources in the cluster to handle what needs to be built? And then you have the conversation of storage. How much storage is it gonna need on the sand? Do we have enough storage and backup for that? And what does need to be backed up? So really anything that involves infrastructure is what I deal with primarily. And that's a hot topic today also. How much longer is infrastructure gonna be something that the many of us that do it are still gonna have access to do it, because it's a changing environment. Yeah, how's your company look at things like cloud? Cloud is very loosely, if almost not existent, in the company that I currently work for. There are times when it makes sense and it's done, but nothing at a mass scale. So we're always looking at what the best solution is of putting something in the cloud makes more sense than having it in house, then that's what we'll do. And I think that on the horizon, as we continue to move forward more and more, it will make sense to put things on the cloud instead of having it in house. But I can only speak for the large companies that I've worked for. And of course a lot of things have changed over the last 10, 15 years, but relinquishing the control of an in-house data center is something I don't think a lot of the larger manufacturing companies have the comfortability with doing. Us in IT, we always want the new toy. We always want the cutting edge, but convincing the business that that's the best way to go can be a different story. Yeah, so Dan, you're coordinating on the virtualization stuff. Which of the areas that VMware's expanding into are you guys working with today? What are you looking at? Things, you know, vSAN, security, NSX, some of the other options that are out there, are you guys just using the base virtualization, or are there some of the added things that make sense for your environment? No, I think for us, it's for me personally, I won't speak for the entire company, or even my entire department. For me personally, it's the keep it simple stupid model, right? There's always a lot of bells and whistles out there, but does it add complexity to the environment that adds more administrative duty and it may not be necessary. So you kind of have to weigh that out with every shiny option that VMware has. So right now, I think we use a fairly base model. The whole of what VMware can do, I would say that we are not using, I mean, we're not even on the current version, which I'm sure a lot of people aren't using 6.5 yet, so that's nothing new. But as we move forward, I think we just have to approach everything from that aspect. But it sounds like you're your company yourself, happy with VMware, like what you're offering, it meets what you need. Yeah, yeah, I would say so. Is there anything you would look out there and ask for? I mean, of course everybody would like it a little bit cheaper, but what did you look out of the industry? What would help you and your company work better, do more if you had a magic wallet? Well, something that I try to focus on is the monitoring of our environment. Knowing that it happened before the end user told you that it happened. And there are so many different flavors of monitoring out there that can interface with VMware. Trying to find which one fits our needs, not just from IT standpoint, but from a scalability standpoint for the entire company. Is it something that the other technicians can use that may not be very specialized with VMware? You know, if they see a problem that's on it, well, they know how to address it based off of the monitoring software. That's a big one for me, and I think it's a big topic of conversation for a lot of companies right now because finding a monitoring solution that could be scalable globally, I think can be kind of a challenge. Dan, last question I have for you. How many times have you been to the VTUG and what brings you to an event specifically to the VTUG events? So this is my fourth VTUG, and I've gone to all of the ones that were in 2016 except the first one, so this makes four for me. Honestly, what brought me to VTUG specifically is word of mouth. I happened to know some of the people on the VTUG committee, and they were kind of surprised that myself and another one of my colleagues hadn't been to one yet, and once we came to one, we were hooked. All the key players are here, and it's interesting to learn about how their portfolios are constantly changing, offering more than what you knew they offered. And if there's an area that you specialize in, like VMware for me, it's very easy for me to sit down with someone at a breakout session or a keynote and learn something that I didn't know, or learn more about something that I was vague on. And if I want to branch out and learn something that I've never even been introduced to, you can very easily be introduced to it here, so it's a great opportunity. Yeah, did you happen to go to any of the keynotes this morning, any key findings? I did, so I went to a keynote about VMware 6.5 security, which I found very, very interesting. There's a lot of features in 6.5 that are not in 5.5 or 6, so they're making it very enticing. Another keynote that I went to was one from Dell, and they basically, they focused more on the environment as a whole, how things are changing, how we as IT professionals need to change to keep up, and they focused very little on their offering themselves, I think it was more of a, this is what we can help you do, but we're not going to talk about us, kind of presentation, which was really nice. Excellent. Well, Dan Valentine with Dan Own Foods, really appreciate you joining. We'll be back with more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2017. You're watching theCUBE.