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>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston,
connecting with thought leaders all around the world,
this is theCUBE conversation.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman.
And we're digging in with VMware with the latest update
of the VMware cloud,
on AWS definitely technology solution set
that the ecosystem has been very interesting into.
And to help us do that deep dive
happy to welcome back to the program, Kit Colbert.
He is the Vice President and CTO
of the cloud platform business unit with VMware.
Kit, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thanks for having me Stu.
>> All right, so you brought along some slides said
if people want to watch we've done an executive interview
to give kind of the general business update,
but when it comes to the technology, you know
I guess we start with VMware, Amazon partnership
is a deep integration we've heard both from Andy Jassy
and for Pat Gelsinger, on how much engineering work
and how critically important it is.
Anybody from the technical side understand
that one of the interesting things in cloud
is that Amazon created bare metal instances
to support this solution.
So one of the items here is that
there is a new bare metal instance.
So why don't you bring us inside, you know
What the updates are and what this means to the user base?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah so the bare metal support is something
that we worked very closely with AWS on
when we were first launching VMware cloud on AWS.
And the idea there was that bare metal support
is that it very similarly models,
EC2 virtual machines, in the sense of each of these Vms
VM types or instance types, as they say,
are various kinds of T short sizes, right?
And so they have a lot of these different instance types.
And so similarly speaking, on the bare metal side,
we're also seeing a lot of different instance types there.
So we started out with an eye three metal instance,
and we added an r5.metal instance
and now we're really excited
to add what we're we're calling i3en.metal.
And so lets bring about slide
to talk more about all the new capabilities there
with i3en.
You know, we have found when we talk to customers
is that they love the simplicity
of the hyper converged model that i3 brings.
What they said was, hey, we've got a lot of workloads
that are storage capacity battle.
And so that meant that,
you know they had the issue there is workloads,
they use some amount usually a good amount of CPU memory,
but they have a lot of storage capacity requirements.
What that meant with i3,
is they had to get a lot of these i3 hosts
to get enough storage capacity to support those workloads.
And obviously,
they have some extra compute capacity lying around.
And so you know what we've done here with i3en,
is dramatically increase the amount of storage capacity.
So we can see here,
what is it about 45 terabytes or so so much, much larger
than what you can get about four x larger
than we can get on i3en. metal today.
So this is again, very targeted
to those very large workloads
that needed beefy underlying server
and, just trying to better align the customer needs
and workload needs
with the underlying physical capabilities.
And so this is just going to be one of many
that we'll bring out.
We've got, a whole pipeline of these actually.
And, you know, again,
you can imagine all the different types
of VM instance types, right?
There's GPU ones, there's FPGA based ones, you know,
so there's all sorts of different shapes and sizes.
And, you know as we get
more and more feedback from customers,
as they're running more and more applications,
we'll get more and more of these instance types
out there as well.
>> Yeah, it's really interesting Kit
it give, it gives me flashbacks.
I'm thinking back to your 10 or even 15 years ago,
when you talked in the early days of,
did I just deploy VMware on the servers I had?
Or did I buy servers that had the configuration,
so I could optimize and take advantage
of the feature functionality that's needed?
All right, when I heard some of the things you talked
about there, about the, you know,
being able to use certain workloads
and the like,
one of the feedbacks I've gotten from users is,
you know, the overall price of this,
let's just say it's not the least expensive solution
to start with.
So, so, what, what are,
what are some of the new entry level options
that you have with the VMC on AWS?
How does this update help?
>> Yeah, yeah, first of all on the price side
what we have found is that this is actually extremely
price efficient price competitive.
if you're able to utilize all the underlying physical
and variable capacity.
But you know, as you just mentioned, Stu,
you know, the default configuration is three nodes
of those i3 hosts,
and that those three hosts aren't small either, right?
They're pretty beefy and if you just want to get started,
just try something small.
Well, today, we do have actually a OneNote instance.
But that OneNote instance,
is just a temporary is kind of a testbed,
if you will a proof of concept type of environment.
It's not a long term, long running a production environment.
And so customers kind of have this OneNote on the one hand
or three notes on other and,
you know, obviously they're saying,
"Hey, why can't we just start with two nodes,
"make it super simple,
"reduce that price point again
"for a very small footprint deployment,
"and then allow us to scale up."
So we bring up the next slide,
what you can see is that that's exactly
what we've done here as well, supporting two nodes now.
And the idea here is this is a full production environment.
You get all the great VMware technology,
you can do motion stuff, HA,
you get availability, and so forth, stores policies,
as you see here.
So again, this is meant to be a long lived,
fully supported production environment
that can also scale up if need be, right?
You might start out with two nodes,
but then find,
"Hey, I want to add three or four or more."
And you can certainly fully do that and fully support that.
So again, this is just giving customers more optionality,
more flexibility for where they want to to come in.
What we've been doing thus far is talking
with a lot of customers that had,
you know, pretty large footprints and saying,
"Hey, I want to move a good chunk of my data center,
"or I've got a lot of workloads I want to burst."
And of those cases, three or more nodes made a lot of sense.
What we're finding now is
that a lot of customers do want that flexibility
to start smaller, just with two nodes really simple,
kind of put their toe in the water, if you will
and get a feel for the service and then expand from there.
>> Yeah, okay, Kit,
one, one quick follow up on this,
you mentioned that if customers are maximizing,
you know, leveraging the full environment they I have there,
it's very cost competitive.
You know, how are we hearing from data
from from customers?
What is their, their growth pattern?
Are they getting good utilization?
Do, do they have a good feel for, how to manage
that economics in the AWS space,
a lot of talk about things like FinOps these days,
and how to make sure that the technical group
and the Financial Group are working close together.
>> Yeah, such a great question, actually.
And the whole notion of the economics
around this is a huge focus area for us.
We have a whole Cloud Economics group, as a matter of fact,
that we frequently bring in to talk with customers
to help them think through all these different things.
There's, there's a number of different considerations there.
You know, a lot of look from, going from on-prem
into the Cloud to the VMC on AWS.
And, you know, with VMC on AWS,
our prices are just public cloud in general,
it's very easy to understand the price
'cause it's right up front, you're getting charged, right?
On Premise a bit more difficult to understand that
you've got a lot of capital expenses,
you got a lot of other sort of operational expenses,
you know, power electricity, people,
and how do you, how do you make
all the right computations there?
So we have whole teams to help people think through that.
But usually, what we have found
is that price is not the main thing, right?
Price is kind of a secondary
or tertiary type of consideration.
The main thing is always one of our primary use cases,
it's like, man, I need to get out of my data centers,
or my data center is that capacity,
I want to keep it but I really need
to be able to burst to the cloud,
maybe some sort of test dev* like test in the cloud
and production on pram or vice versa.
Those are the key use cases that bring customers in,
and then it's really a question of, okay,
now that you know, you want to do this,
how do we do this as effectively, efficiently
from a cost perspective as well as possible, right?
And that's where that sort of economic discussion starts
to happen.
And then you get into more of the details like, okay,
which kind of instance type do I want?
What are the cost metrics of that?
Can I actually fill it to capacity?
That's where we start getting
into those more specific situations for each customer.
>> Excellent, we have that.
That really tees up for me kit,
when, when I think about the, you know early customers
that I've talked to that are using VMC on AWS,
they tend to be your enterprise customers,
they're big VMware customers,
they've enterprise license agreements, and the like.
VMware has got a strong history working across the board.
And you talk about Cloud in previous solutions.
You've had close partnerships with the,
with the managed service providers.
>> Yeah.
>> So my understanding is you're actually looking
to help connect between what you've done
with a managed service project in the past
and this VMware on AWS solution.
So bring us inside, you know this,
this, this option >> Sure.
Yeah, let me let me break it down for you
'cause we do work with a lot of partners.
You know, obviously from VMware,
its inception partners have been, you know,
core to our strategy and core to our success, right?
What we've actually been doing,
actually somewhat kind of quietly
over the past 15 years anyway,
isn't really building out,
what we call our VMware Cloud Provider Partner Program,
and the VCPP program.
And, you know, the idea there
is that we do have a lot of these managed service providers
that can take our software and run it
on behalf of their customers,
essentially, delivering our software as a service
to their customers.
And that's been great.
We've seen a lot of success stories there.
And we have about 4200 of these folks now,
like a tremendous amount spread all around the world,
all sorts of different geographies,
and also all sorts of different industry verticals.
And so you see a lot of these folks getting really specific,
you know, let's say to the finance, vertical,
you know, in and around Wall Street,
running all sorts of great services
for the financial services firms.
Well, these folks are looking to evolve as well
and what they're saying
and seeing is like, hey, you know, just this basic idea
of running infrastructure.
Well, I can do that.
But it doesn't necessarily differentiate me right?
I need to move up the stack
and start offering more services,
and really trying to be a very,
you know, sort of boutique
and targeted solution for their customers.
And so a lot of these customers,
you know, obviously want to run on VMC on AWS.
And so what we've been doing is enabling these partners
to, you know, sell through essentially VMC on AWS
that to sell these servers to their customers.
But one of the challenges there is that they're only able
to sell the full sort of bare-metal server,
they weren't able to break that up
or split that across customers as they can do today
within their own environments.
In fact, today, within their environments,
they use something called VMware Cloud Director.
And this is software that we give them.
And you know, it's really nice
that you can take a vSphere environment,
software-defined data center and break it apart
or kind of carve it up, if you will,
into multiple smaller tenants,
then, the, you know, each of these customers
can, can take part of.
And so but we didn't have that functionality
for VMware Cloud on AWS.
And so that's for the announcements all about,
so let's pull up the slide to talk about that.
The basic idea here is we can now enable
the same software defined data centers that are running
inside of AWS as part of VMware Cloud on AWS
to be accessed by VMware vcloud director.
And so what we've done is actually made, we call it VCD,
for short made VCD, a service that we now operate,
and it runs there alongside VMC on AWS.
And so now these managed service providers can leverage
the VCD as a service to rule out access
and, and carve up these SDDC that they get.
And, you know, the takeaway here
is that we're just giving these partners
much greater flexibility
and optionality in terms of how they consume,
the underlying bare-metal infrastructure on VMC on AWS,
and then give that out to their own customers again,
giving greater customer choice and options, those customers.
>> All right kit,
so the other big thing
that we've covered this year with VMware, of course,
is the launch of vSphere 7.
What that means the cloud native-space,
the whole Tanzu portfolio line.
So help us understand how all the application
modernization Kubernetes
and like ties into now the solution
that we're talking about.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
It's about a huge focus for us, as you know.
Yeah, we launched Tanzu last year at Vmworld.
And have, then launched the product set earlier this year,
it's finally ready to GA.
It's in great customer interest
and has customer traction there.
And obviously, one of the big questions people had was like,
"Hey, how can I get this for VMC on AWS?"
And so the specific product they were looking at there
was called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.
And so the idea with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
is that it enables a customer to provision
and manage Kubernetes clusters across any cloud, right?
And you can do this on AWS, you can do this on-prem,
on vSphere, or other clouds and so forth.
And, so obviously,
this technology needed to come to BMC.
You know, the thing we talked about with customers,
when it comes to VMC on AWS is this notion
of migrate the modernize,
that we can migrate you off of your on-prem infrastructure
to this modernized cloud infrastructure that is VMC on AWS.
And once you have that modernized infrastructure,
it makes it much easier to modernize your applications,
you've got all sorts of great AWS services sitting there.
So now the application itself can start taking advantage
of all these things,
as well as these new type of capabilities.
So let's pull up the slide for this one.
So what we're announcing here is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid plus
on VMC on AWS.
And what this gives you is all that great functionality,
the ability to get Kubernetes seamlessly running
on top of your VMC environment
right next to all of your existing apps.
So it's not one of those situations where you need,
you know, separate clusters or different environments.
You can have a single environment,
they can have both your traditional applications
and your more modern ones.
And Tanzu Kubernetes Grid takes care
of all the management of that Kubernetes environment.
It ensures that it's up to date, properly lifecycle manage,
manage local security,
you get a Container Registry there,
can elastically scale based on demand.
And of course, you get all that great consistency as well.
And we do a lot of customers that are multicloud
that, that are doing things across different environments.
And so TKG can replicate itself
and give you that consistent management
across any of those environments on-prem and the cloud
between clouds.
So that's really what the power of this is.
And again, it's really taking VMC from just being a platform
from migrating your existing workloads
to really being a platform for modernizing
those workloads as well.
>> Yeah, it's interesting Kit, you know if
when I think about traditionally, VMware, it was,
you know, let me take my app
and I'm going to shove it into the end
and I'll never think about it again.
So what's the change in mindset?
How do you make sure that it's not just,
you know, stick it in there and forget about it,
but, you know, can move in change
which is, you know, really the, the call for today
is that I need to be more agile,
I need to be able to respond to change?
>> That's a great question.
And we actually spend a lot of time talking
about this with customers.
So if we take a step back,
you know, it's important to understand
the traditional journey most customers are looking at
when they're moving to the cloud.
I talked about this notion of migrating then modernizing.
Oftentimes, you know, before the advent of VMC on AWS,
you didn't have the ability to take those two apart,
you had to migrate and modernize simultaneously.
In order to move to the cloud,
you actually had to do a bunch of refactoring and retooling
and so forth to your application.
And obviously, that created a lot of challenges
because it slowed how quickly customers can move up
to the cloud.
And so what we've done,
which I think is really, really powerful is kind of broken
those two apart.
To say, you know what, you may have a business imperative
to get out of the data center, we can help you do that,
we can move, you know, some customers moved hundreds
of workloads a week, up to VMC on AWS.
And then once you've done that,
you're now a little bit more breathing room, right?
You've gotten out of your immediate business problem,
and let's say in this case, closed-ended data center.
And now you can sort of focus on okay, how do I think
about modernizing these applications?
How do I think about the interior points to opening them up
and actually getting inside of them?
And so I think, you know, the most valuable aspect
of the approach that we've taken here
is that ability to, to separate out those two
to get the quick business wins that you need.
And then to take the time to think about,
okay, how do I actually modernize this?
How do I want to?
What sort of technologies do I want to use?
How should I do this right,
rather than just need to do this quickly?
And so I think that's a really, really powerful aspect
of our approach,
and that we can give customers more optionality
in terms of how they approach their modernization efforts.
>> Yeah, so, so Kit, the final question I have for you,
the VMware AWS partnership
has been around for a couple years now.
>> Yeah.
>> What would you say is the biggest change technically,
from when the solution was first announced,
just to where we are today with all the new updates
that you've talked about?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
Look, it's hard to pick one, right?
I think the biggest thing in general,
is just the increasing maturity of this offering.
And that goes really across the board, technical maturity,
operational maturity, compliance,
certification maturity, right?
Getting more and more of those under our belt,
global reach maturity, right?
We started off in one region,
but now we're all over the world, pretty much every region
that AWS has.
You see more and more features,
you know, we're constantly releasing new features,
new hardware types.
And so I think that's really the biggest thing.
It's not been like one singular thing,
what has been is just a lot of work
by the team across 1000 different areas,
and moving all those in parallel.
And that's really been the heavy lift
that we've had to do with the past few years.
You know, as we talked about,
it was a lot of work just to get this thing out
in the first place, right?
We had to do a lot of technical work with AWS
to enable this bare metal-capability.
And so we got that one out,
we got it out
and had that initial service.
There have been a lot of limitations, right?
We just had one instance type,
only one region,
you know, didn't have as many compliance certifications.
So obviously that limited the number of customers
initially, right?
Just because there are some restrictions around that.
So our goal has really been
to open this up to as many customers,
in fact, every customer,
all of our 500,000 odd vSphere customers
to be able to move to VMS on AWS.
And so we're slow, you know, slowly but surely,
every month knocking down more
and more barricades to that, right?
And so what you're seeing is just a tremendous explosion
of innovation and effort across the entire team.
And so it's really it's kudos to the team
for their continued effort day in day out
of these past three years or so,
to get VMC on AWS to where it is today.
>> Excellent, well, thank you so much, Kit.
Great to talk to you.
Congratulation to the VMware and AWS team.
And of course, looking forward
to talking to more of the customers down the road,
as they take advantage of this, hopefully at Vmworld,
and some of the Amazon shows too.
Thanks so much for joining us Kit.
>> Thank yous Stu.
>> All right, stay with us for lots more coverage,
of course VMware Cloud on AWS really exciting
and interesting topic we've been covering since day one.
I'm Stu Miniman
and thank you for watching theCUBE.
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