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In this episode, AJ Kuftic, Field CTO at Expedient, and Doug Theis, Sales Director of National Strategy, break down the key takeaways from VMware Explore 2023. As Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware reshapes the virtualization landscape, many organizations are reevaluating their cloud strategies and infrastructure choices.
Join us as we dive into exclusive data from the event, where 45% of respondents are considering alternative hypervisors, while 41% plan to stay with VMware. AJ and Doug discuss the growing frustration over VMware’s new licensing model, the emergence of alternatives like Nutanix, and the future of VMware’s Cloud Foundation platform.
Whether you're a VMware user looking to optimize your current environment or exploring new solutions, this episode offers expert analysis, real-world customer stories, and practical advice on navigating these pivotal industry shifts.
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding VMware’s new direction and the impact of Broadcom’s acquisition.
- Insights from VMware Explore attendees on workload migration and cloud strategies.
- Expert analysis on the future of VMware, alternate hypervisors, and the risks of transition.
- How Expedient is helping organizations optimize workloads and make informed decisions about their cloud futures.
Creators & Guests
Host
AJ Kuftic
AJ Kuftic is Principal Product Strategist for Expedient. AJ has over 15 years of experience as a customer and partner helping end users build solutions that are sustainable and easy to manage. Having knowledge across various silos of IT infrastructure gives AJ a unique perspective of the pain points and what customers are looking to improve. When AJ isn’t thinking about the next big thing, he spends his time with his wife and 2 children trying to bake the perfect loaf of bread.
What is Expedient: The Podcast?
"Expedient: The Podcast" is your gateway to the inner workings of technology and innovation, presented with unparalleled clarity and expertise. Each episode is an invitation to join the luminaries of Expedient along with special guests from the forefront of the tech industry. We delve into the latest advancements in cloud computing, the evolution of data centers, cybersecurity trends, and groundbreaking developments in AI and machine learning. This podcast strips away the complexity of the technology landscape, offering listeners an exclusive look at the real stories of challenge and triumph, innovation and leadership, that are driving our digital future.
But we don't just stop at presenting groundbreaking ideas; "Expedient: The Podcast" is about building a community. It's for the IT professionals charting their course through the ever-changing cloud environment, and for the tech aficionados keen on decoding the future of digital infrastructure. Our episodes provide the essential insights and perspectives to keep you at the forefront of a world in constant transformation.
Tune in to "Expedient: The Podcast" for a deep dive into the technologies and ideas propelling us towards tomorrow. Experience the journey through the eyes and voices of those shaping our technological landscape, all presented with the authenticity, insight, and forward-thinking Expedient is celebrated for. This is not just a podcast; it's your insider's look into the technologies transforming our lives.
00:00:01:24 - 00:00:18:08
AJ Kuftic
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's presentation. My name is AJ Kuftic Field CTO here at Expedient and joining me today. Over here to my this way. I got it right the first time is Doug he’s cool. Doug, go ahead and introduce yourself.
00:00:18:15 - 00:00:26:06
Doug Theis
So I am Doug, sales director of national strategy with Expedient. AJ, glad to be here with you and all of our attendees.
00:00:26:08 - 00:00:50:26
AJ Kuftic
Absolutely, Doug, we've we've done these before. It's been a minute since Doug and I have got to do some fun talking on the internet. I'm excited. I love talking to Doug. But first, I want to let everybody know that we, we went on a little trip. We went out to Las Vegas. We went to VMware explore and got to explore everything that VMware, had to offer.
00:00:50:26 - 00:00:57:13
AJ Kuftic
And we had a booth and Doug kind of, you know, what what we were there to do, kind of what was the vibe going on at explore this year?
00:00:57:16 - 00:01:38:17
Doug Theis
Well, we attended this year, specifically because of the Broadcom change, and we saw some changes from previous years. Attendance was lower as most would imagine. The numbers we heard were 5200, all in which was about half of what the previous year was and nowhere near the pre-COVID numbers of up to 20,000. I saw a lot of people comment about the number of booths in the show portion being way fewer than it had been in past years, and people noticed when the food lines form that there are a lot less people.
00:01:38:20 - 00:02:12:27
Doug Theis
In terms of who was there, we saw a lot of fed local and state and utilities folks, probably more as a percentage of the entire crowd than usual, probably fewer commercial and fewer enterprises attending. And there was, a clear thread that ran through most people's comments, especially the first or second, comment. And I'm sure you heard of two AJ many were unhappy with the new licensing model and with the new pricing.
00:02:12:29 - 00:02:33:20
AJ Kuftic
Yeah. And I think that's that was definitely something that we, we saw a lot of in, in the booth and we heard a lot from people was, you know, well you know because things are changing over and over again. I will say that there were definitely, a much, much lower number of booths, but at least one of the booths was better because we were there.
00:02:33:22 - 00:03:01:24
AJ Kuftic
And I think it was it was interesting to kind of see what people were gaining from each booth. They were coming around, they were talking to each other. The booths were talking to each other, too. Which was very, very interesting because we're all kind of comparing notes at the same time. And, Doug, I think one of the big things, though, that they did, at the conference was they specifically talked to, about the future of what they were doing and what they've been building.
00:03:01:24 - 00:03:26:00
AJ Kuftic
Right. We've been talking for months now about vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation and bundles and all sorts of things. And I think the biggest piece of this is that they finally told people where they're going, right? They didn't talk about it in terms of just like a set of series of individual components. They talked about it in terms of an overall platform.
00:03:26:00 - 00:03:56:06
AJ Kuftic
Right. So Cloud Foundation is vSphere, vSAN, NSX and the Aria suite. And to VMware now it is just because it is just cloud Foundation. Aria operations is kind of now inside of there as cloud foundation operations. And this is an automation is in there is cloud cloud foundation automation. And they're trying to bring all of this together into a single platform that they're calling BCF nine.
00:03:56:08 - 00:04:28:13
AJ Kuftic
And they mentioned in their keynote, they mentioned a little bit of edge and they mentioned a little bit of AI. But the big story was here is our new platform. Here is what we're doing. I will say, though, the presenters seemed just just a smidge uncomfortable, like they knew that there they knew there was a very, very large elephant in the middle of that audience that they kind of sort of had to address, kind of, you know, they note, we know you're mad, but here's what we're doing.
00:04:28:15 - 00:04:42:07
AJ Kuftic
This is why we made these changes. This is why we because we see this as the actual platform of the future, and not just a bunch of components that you need to then go deploy and manage and maintain.
00:04:42:09 - 00:04:54:13
Doug Theis
Yeah. And I think you've captured I think you've captured the keynote pretty well. You know, we heard from in the booth that some people said that they felt like it was backwards. The keynote. Do you want to address that?
00:04:54:16 - 00:05:27:17
AJ Kuftic
Yeah, I think it was. And, well, not even just the keynote was backwards, but the way they've gone about the changes was backwards that, hey, you raised my rates, you created these new bundles, you created this new pricing, but it just looked at me like you were raising my prices. Now, when we were actually watching the keynote, we're seeing what that value, what that what the price change and the and the, you know, uplift in amount of, you know, things that you're getting out of the solution where it's really going.
00:05:27:19 - 00:06:01:12
AJ Kuftic
And it actually makes a lot more sense now. But it seemed but you have so many people who are currently mad about money and not thinking about where that value actually goes. If you're a vSphere customer, which 75% of customers have a VMware were just vSphere customers? Yeah, it's a huge cost shift. If you were using multiples of those tools, like you were a vSphere and vSAN, or you were VMware or vSphere and NSX or vSphere in the suite, you likely saw a less overall increase, if not a savings here.
00:06:01:15 - 00:06:21:29
AJ Kuftic
And it was interesting to see the customers who were already in the multiple product set. When they came back. They were like VCs, not as amazing. This is definitely what I want to see. This is definitely where we see VMware going. Others who were vSphere only or like, yeah, I see where they're going. And yeah, that looks really cool.
00:06:21:29 - 00:06:44:08
AJ Kuftic
But that's still a big number now. And so it is on, I think VMware overall to kind of help people expand more into those into that product set. And that's kind of where we as a cloud provider came in. But Doug, we did actually do one very cool thing in our booth, Doug, what we do.
00:06:44:11 - 00:07:06:16
Doug Theis
You know, we were one of a small handful of providers, pinnacle providers who were at VMware explore, and we really wanted to bring value to the crowd and to find out what they were thinking at the same time. So we crafted a survey, and I'll give credit to our team, Nick Lees and Nick Lansbury for putting this together.
00:07:06:18 - 00:07:34:16
Doug Theis
We asked a simple question. Where will your VMware workloads live in the future? We had a small monitor up front, and there were three answers that they could, respond with. One was public cloud, one was VMware. They continue on and the third was an alternate hypervisor. So the results were interesting. We had 208 respondents over the course of the show.
00:07:34:18 - 00:08:03:02
Doug Theis
And, these are the results. 41% said they were going to stick with VMware. Either in a DIY model or in a VMware style cloud. 45% said that they were deeply considering an alternate hypervisor. And surprisingly to me at least, the hyperscale cloud choice was the smallest by far, at only 14%.
00:08:03:04 - 00:08:29:19
AJ Kuftic
And I think one of the the most interesting things to me, at least, as you know, we I was also walking around saying, hey, what do you think? You know, answer, you know, would you like to take a poll? The answers didn't come quickly. No one was immediately tapping a ultimate hypervisor or a VMware cloud. It was always a, what about this?
00:08:29:21 - 00:08:48:25
AJ Kuftic
Yeah. That one. And I think there's still a lot of uncertainty in the field, but a lot more people right now are saying that they're they want to leave. And by the way, these are again, these are paying attendees of this conference. These are not this is not on the street. This is not our LinkedIn page. This is not on our website.
00:08:49:02 - 00:09:05:27
AJ Kuftic
These are people who paid to go to VMware's conference. So it was very interesting to see these numbers pan out. And one of the other things that we did and Doug, I think this was the most interesting part to me was like, you know, alternate hypervisor, there's a lot there's not just one. Right?
00:09:06:00 - 00:09:06:08
Doug Theis
Right.
00:09:06:08 - 00:09:34:01
AJ Kuftic
So we kind of asked a baby pull inside of that of what does that alternate hypervisor break down to? And it breaks down to 41% saying Nutanix 8,524% KVM, the pure open source hypervisor, 18% on Red hat OpenShift, which is owned by IBM, and 18% to Hyper-V. And I think these numbers are fascinating.
00:09:34:04 - 00:09:39:23
Doug Theis
I agree wholeheartedly, I why do you think edge V is so high?
00:09:39:26 - 00:10:12:21
AJ Kuftic
I think HVS is really high because it is. It's been the one platform that has very distinctly tried to go feature for feature with VMware software defined networking. They were the ones who created the software defined storage craze. VSAN came out after Nutanix rolled out and people were really paying attention. There. But I think it's the one that is the most sort of analogous in in the space to VMware.
00:10:12:21 - 00:10:33:22
AJ Kuftic
And what VMware has done overall. And honestly, what VCs nine is, is what the Nutanix platform has been for the last, I'd say 3 or 4 years now in terms of what Nutanix has been building into their stack, even to the point of Nutanix, which is a subscription model too. So it's it's kind of interesting to see them kind of, you know, even out there.
00:10:33:25 - 00:10:55:17
AJ Kuftic
I also think AGV has the most, the most integrated ecosystem outside of VMware. This is something that a lot of people forget where you run the VM is the easy part, right? I can pick a different hypervisor and just move things over. That's not the hard part. It's everything around it and how you manage those things that becomes the challenge.
00:10:55:17 - 00:11:00:27
AJ Kuftic
So I'm not surprised to see a few that I was surprised to see KVM that hired me too.
00:11:01:05 - 00:11:25:24
Doug Theis
Me too. I was surprised, you know, where we were the only provider. They're advertising Nutanix Cloud as a cloud provider, and a lot of people were surprised that we were saying it out loud at VMware explorer. But it generated a number of conversations just to loop back on Nutanix for a moment. I think that I think the maturity of the platform is meaningful to a lot.
00:11:25:29 - 00:11:52:05
Doug Theis
We've been using it on the back end for many years, and started with Dr. First for Nutanix clients and now are offering a production model on this. But I think maturity plays a big part. KVM is surprising. You know, HP is a fork an age old fork of KVM, right. It's it's based on KVM. Many of the other hardware solutions or KVM based.
00:11:52:07 - 00:12:15:13
Doug Theis
Yeah, but but your point in that, what about the other tools associated with it? How does your backup work? How does your Docker work, and how do all your utility tools that, you use to provide data protection and security and all the other things that you do monitoring, how do they work with these other hypervisors? It's a huge question.
00:12:15:16 - 00:12:26:06
AJ Kuftic
Yeah. And Doug, I think the other one that kind of stuck out and you kind of mentioned it was hyperscale cloud being at 14%. What why do you think it was so low in your opinion?
00:12:26:08 - 00:13:01:02
Doug Theis
I think people have tried it. And they found that many of their old code applications don't run well in it, honestly. I mean, 2007 is when AWS hit the market, some argued 2008. Many, many people have tried to move their entire set of workloads into those environments. Some workloads work perfectly. Other workloads are expensive and slow. They're expensive because the apps are chatty, because they were never written with a cloud in mind.
00:13:01:05 - 00:13:26:05
Doug Theis
That's especially true for line of business applications like EMR cars and ERP applications, and many of those application still run in the data center, whether it be on premises or in co-location. So I think that's the big reason most people realize that the reason they still have a data center is because some some of their applications won't fit.
00:13:26:07 - 00:13:42:18
Doug Theis
And I think it's why they've kept VMware and why the public cloud number or the hyperscale cloud number here is so low. What about OpenShift AG? Do you think it's just do you think it's the Linux crowd who's considering it?
00:13:42:20 - 00:14:01:09
AJ Kuftic
I would I would imagine that that has that plays into it. And I think Hyper-V is and in sort of the same boat just from the Microsoft side, it's these are the platforms of the vendors, of the operating systems that people have built apps on top of. Right. If you're a Red hat customer, you've used OpenShift before.
00:14:01:09 - 00:14:30:07
AJ Kuftic
Red hat has been pushing the crap out of OpenShift for the last like five plus years. They started with it was started as a Kubernetes platform, and then they added in, VMs because they had a VM platform, they had a Kubernetes platform. They just kind of smushed them together. I think on the Hyper-V side, it's it's interesting because Microsoft also has Azure Stack and Azure Stack and Hyper-V can run VMs on prem.
00:14:30:09 - 00:15:05:06
AJ Kuftic
Microsoft has not made a delineation to where they think they want to put their efforts. I've, I'm and I'm also very surprised by that fact because of the big push and what Azure does branding wise for them. And the fact that we run into Azure a lot in the field. We don't really run in AWS, funny enough, that they haven't leaned on Azure Stack to replace Hyper-V as that platform and, you know, the System Center VM plus Hyper-V combination, Azure stack kind of does all that together.
00:15:05:06 - 00:15:31:27
AJ Kuftic
You can use arc with it like it's it's a neat platform, but you are going into the Azure ecosystem around that. And so it can also be a bit of a challenge there. There's apparently some changes coming with Hyper-V 2025, which is they've announced a lot of the changes already to try to bring it up to snuff with something like easy or HP in terms of being a pure hypervisor.
00:15:32:00 - 00:15:42:19
AJ Kuftic
But I think there's a lot of people who tried Hyper-V a long, long time ago, and VMware is just that much better of a platform that they said, you know, I, I'm not going to go back.
00:15:42:21 - 00:16:04:22
Doug Theis
I think that's a good point that clients that we see making that move right this minute are almost all very small. The ones who are in that medium range, you know, 100 VMs or more, let's call it just we'll call that medium for now. Oftentimes need more hosts in order to replicate what they're doing in VMware today.
00:16:04:24 - 00:16:23:24
Doug Theis
And the management is quite different. So it's, it's quite different, frankly. Now we didn't we don't have proxmox in here. We don't have OpenStack. No. What are your what are your thoughts on that? I mean, are those those are pretty engineering intensive platforms, right?
00:16:23:27 - 00:16:47:21
AJ Kuftic
Yeah. I if we did get one person who specifically said we're going to proxmox to me at the conference, I'll have to him and I hope his flight back to, Europe, because he was he definitely said he was from the European company. I hope his flight back was safe. He a lot of the proxmox stuff has come from the system admin side.
00:16:47:23 - 00:17:12:28
AJ Kuftic
And even OpenStack has come from the engineering side of the world. And there are providers out there who do OpenStack, and it's the challenge of OpenStack, especially if you're going to run it yourself, is that you are really taking on a lot more of the load. It is not a product that you go buy and deploy. It is something that you build from the ground up.
00:17:13:00 - 00:17:32:12
AJ Kuftic
Yeah, and you got to have some real smart engineers to be able to do that on the back end. And that's why we don't hear a lot about it. Unless you start to really move up into that enterprise space where you're a Walmart and the value proposition of building that platform from the ground up and not being tied to a vendor actually has a business impact.
00:17:32:19 - 00:17:52:11
AJ Kuftic
If you have 150 VMs, it very much does not. You're it I like to call it valuing your money more than your time, and you end up spending a lot more of your time and not a lot of your money to try and build out this platform where you run into a bunch of, headaches trying to maintain support going forward.
00:17:52:14 - 00:18:27:06
AJ Kuftic
On the Proxmox side, they're gaining support from the ecosystem. I've seen a couple of backup vendors come out and say that they'll they'll backup Proxmox, but it's very much a early product, and it's very much built around its own set of tools. I'm, I would honestly liken it to not necessarily in quality, but in, in mindset to what Nutanix was in, like the 2014 2015 timeframe, where they were trying to do everything themselves because they wanted it to be this like all in a box, all one platform.
00:18:27:06 - 00:18:48:07
AJ Kuftic
I don't need to worry about integration points. And the problem is, is that that only that gets you. So far, and then you hit your head room on environments where they have more than just that platform. So I would not be surprised to see Proxmox take some market share here, but I think a lot of times it's just going to be one of those things where it's like, oh, that doesn't fit with what we do.
00:18:48:09 - 00:19:01:25
AJ Kuftic
It's so interesting. And Doug, I think, you know, where do you see a lot of these organizations in the next three years? Not just where they live, but like, what do you see their next three years look like?
00:19:01:27 - 00:19:32:12
Doug Theis
Well, everybody wants change, but nobody wants to change, right? It's a CIO friend of mine's saying, yeah. I think the idea of selecting and changing a hypervisor is, is all well, and good. I think as we zoom out a little bit, the smaller platforms as a whole have a more difficult time integrating and do existing environments, especially if you're well-established with your data protection and your VR and your monitoring tools.
00:19:32:14 - 00:19:53:17
Doug Theis
And, in order to get support from some of your key line of business applications, some of those providers still say no if you're on a hypervisor that they're not familiar with. So those are the business drivers, I think, that affect people. Do you think that the idea of selecting and changing hypervisors in three years is practical?
00:19:53:20 - 00:20:17:27
AJ Kuftic
I do, I think it comes down to I think some people have been looking for a lever. This is 100% a lever, right? I want, we've been wanting to switch, but cost to do so or getting business to say yes to is a higher number or a higher a, you know, a higher lift than we've been willing to take on.
00:20:18:00 - 00:20:47:26
AJ Kuftic
Yeah. I think it's absolutely practical to do it. I think you can absolutely say we want to go from VMware to any of these alternates in a short enough timeframe, but as we've mentioned before, what does that do from a project list? Right. You only have but so much time and you're doing all of this work to end up exactly where you are right now, which is running your VMs on a platform.
00:20:47:26 - 00:20:49:18
Doug Theis
Right? Right.
00:20:49:20 - 00:20:52:00
AJ Kuftic
Yeah. The police are coming together.
00:20:52:02 - 00:20:52:27
Doug Theis
Sorry. Yeah.
00:20:52:27 - 00:21:19:22
AJ Kuftic
They're not they're not coming to get me. I think they're coming to get done. But when we. This is how live this is everybody. There's there's background noise. So when we, when we actually sit down and kind of talk through like, what is this move really doing for you? I think a lot of organizations are potentially using this as a lever to optimize what they're doing to modernize their platforms and maybe make a shift to another platform that they've liked for a long time.
00:21:19:22 - 00:21:38:22
AJ Kuftic
They haven't had the ability to get their or their doubling down on what VMware is doing and saying, okay, well, I've wanted to get this automation platform for the last like three years and I could never justify the budget. Now I have to right? I it's in the budget now because it's going to be part of me paying to run my VMs.
00:21:38:24 - 00:22:01:12
AJ Kuftic
We actually did have one person and this is something interesting. Between the VRF DCFs side of things. One person who came into the booth and I found this super fascinating. They renewed back in like the January February timeframe where it was like, you get vSphere Foundation or Cloud Foundation go. And they were new to vSphere Foundation, and they were like, we don't have enough time to move it.
00:22:01:14 - 00:22:22:07
AJ Kuftic
Like moving inside of three years is practical, moving inside of three months less so. But when they needed to renew, they they went with beefier foundation because they said, well, you know, we just want these here. We don't need all the other stuff. This is fine. And he said, I was sitting in the keynote and I was watching what they were presenting and what was coming next in their roadmap and so on and so forth.
00:22:22:07 - 00:22:44:15
AJ Kuftic
And I realized I wasn't going to get any of that. And that was the first time I had heard anybody express a sort of regret about not going to vSphere, not going to Cloud Foundation. And it was very, very interesting to me because there's not really a good upgrade path there. There's not like a, oh, you're on VCF, you can buy these and upgrade to VCs.
00:22:44:15 - 00:23:15:16
AJ Kuftic
That doesn't exist. And so it becomes this sort of like, oh, you renewed for three years, you're stuck there for three years. So there are some things there, that are super interesting. But, I would not be surprised to see a lot of people fight for a one year renewal, on the VRF to say, like, okay, let me let me get some breathing room here and figure out what I want to do and then potentially go to VCs in the next year, or that's the year that they take to figure out, do I want to move to an alternate hypervisor?
00:23:15:18 - 00:23:30:27
AJ Kuftic
The other side of this is that doing that move requires you to kind of keep this is you got to swap the engine. All the while the car's driving right. So you're going to run both at some point. The cost of doing both is where this is really going to hit the road. And we obviously, as expedient, have options to help you along that path.
00:23:30:29 - 00:23:34:20
AJ Kuftic
But it's super interesting to kind of think about that that change there.
00:23:34:23 - 00:24:01:29
Doug Theis
Yeah. It's driven it's driven a ton of interest and expedience. VMware Cloud Services and our Nutanix cloud services just some of the audience may not realize, expedient has been delivering VMware cloud environments since 2008. Really very early on. We're one of the oldest and now one of the largest. And that's why we're a pinnacle partner is because we run 100,000 VMs.
00:24:02:06 - 00:24:06:06
AJ Kuftic
Having that environment. I'm sorry. New number is 130,001.
00:24:06:06 - 00:24:22:09
Doug Theis
Hundred and 30,000. Yeah, that's super cool. And what that means is they can run VMware. They can continue to run VMware without necessarily paying what one gentleman referred to as the blood money to, Broadcom, which.
00:24:22:09 - 00:24:22:24
AJ Kuftic
Must have missed.
00:24:22:24 - 00:24:43:14
Doug Theis
That one. A little harsh, but the ability and know our pricing went up a few percent. On this the cloud service provider model is a little bit more friendly. And with our scale we've got some more leverage. But they don't have to throw away their skill sets. They don't have to throw away their staff. They can take advantage of our cloud platform.
00:24:43:14 - 00:24:56:03
Doug Theis
Most are in a cloud platform already. They're just making that move, or at least considering making that move from DIY or co-location into a VMware based cloud or a Nutanix based cloud.
00:24:56:05 - 00:25:09:27
AJ Kuftic
And Doug, I think kind of wrapping up here, we're going to get to some Q&A here in a moment. Yeah. You know, kind of what what are the, you know, do you have any other conclusions that we can take away from, from this, from this survey that we did?
00:25:09:29 - 00:25:34:24
Doug Theis
I think there's a few we can take away. There's still significant value with VMware to the clients. They know it. Many don't want to leave. They're being forced to they're familiar with it. They know it's reliable software. And as you said after the keynote, a lot of people came back excited that some of the integration that VMware had been promising pre Broadcom is actually well on the way.
00:25:34:26 - 00:26:04:02
Doug Theis
Again, the staffing matters, the skill sets matter. They know how to run VMware and their line of business applications. It's the only hypervisor that those line of business applications will support. One other conclusion most of the companies that we've talked to this year, apart from VMware explorer, have been a little bit paralyzed on what to do now. You know, VMware has been slow and Broadcom has been slow to provide renewal pricing in many situations.
00:26:04:05 - 00:26:21:19
Doug Theis
But a lot have been frozen or they've kick the can down the road one year as you said they've they may have renewed but they've only renewed for a year. So they can at least give themselves enough headroom to make it more meaningful. Just decision. I mean, what do you think? What did you hear? What conclusions can you draw?
00:26:21:21 - 00:26:41:24
AJ Kuftic
Yeah, I think it's it's we've asked this question a few times of like, okay let's go back in time. Two years. Broadcom hasn't announced anything. Yeah. And I asked you hey would you want to switch hypervisors. And the answer would almost certainly be no. A lot of people would say like I mean I'm fine. This is VMware. It's whatever.
00:26:41:26 - 00:26:53:01
AJ Kuftic
I think a lot of people now are looking at it in terms of that money change. Right. Like, the price went up. It back then it was, it was the pricing. It was what it was.
00:26:53:03 - 00:26:53:13
Doug Theis
00:26:53:19 - 00:27:17:13
AJ Kuftic
I was only paying for support. Everything was great. I think that shift now has caused some people to make a rash sort of feeling versus what they would actually do if given the opportunity. We've asked this again, we have a number of customers who are in our VMware platforms. Our shared environment saw an on average, a 4% increase in their total bill.
00:27:17:15 - 00:27:36:20
AJ Kuftic
Most people just went okay and moved on, right. Same thing in our shared and our private environments with 17%. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the, you're taking on more of the overhead in a private environment. And so there's a higher cost there. But it was 17% overall, their total bill. And most of them went okay.
00:27:36:20 - 00:27:57:24
AJ Kuftic
Sure. It's not 300, 500, 600% like we've seen from the licensing standpoint. It's a much lower number. And so this is a I think a lot of organizations are looking at and going, okay, what do I really want to do here? And the effect that it has to a business down the line. Right. We've even cloud service providers like us.
00:27:57:24 - 00:28:33:00
AJ Kuftic
Right? We've just talked about how they raised how our rates went up, and we didn't exactly have the ability to say like, okay, we're going to flip everybody and we're just going to renew for a little bit. It was we run our business off of this. So we've had a lot of plans this year that we had to put on hold, because we had to spend so much time optimizing our platforms for our workloads to make sure that our number of cores that we were spending was the correct amount for what we are running, so that we could make sure that we weren't passing on huge costs, huge cost increases to our customers and clients
00:28:33:02 - 00:28:57:18
AJ Kuftic
based on us not having an optimized environment. I want to give a massive shout out to all of our engineers, on our delivery and our support teams and our PR teams on optimizing the workloads in the very quick fashion that we've done that. It's been, a huge team effort, and our clients deeply appreciate it just from when they look at their bill and they're not freaking out at that.
00:28:57:20 - 00:29:16:09
AJ Kuftic
So thank you guys so much for that. I think the other part of this is what you will do is interesting, right? That's what this this surveys there. How you do it, I think is more interesting. I think a lot of people who are looking at age of if you're in a three tier environment, there's a capital expenditure to get there.
00:29:16:11 - 00:29:33:14
AJ Kuftic
There's ways that we can do it with RDR, with our Nutanix platforms, where we can eliminate a lot of that capital to make that shift. I think that's what a lot of people that I've talked to about making a switch, and they want to look at the Nutanix and they go, yeah, but I got to buy new house and I got to buy new licensing and so on.
00:29:33:14 - 00:29:52:17
AJ Kuftic
And they're like, that's a huge cost to the business. And then I have to go build all of it. There's ways for us to simplify that down and get people to where they really want to be. But Doug, you you know, when we're talking through hypervisors, it's not just, okay, I'm going to I'm going to move from this hypervisor, this one, like there are some other things that go along there.
00:29:52:19 - 00:30:24:24
Doug Theis
We there are. And just to circle back on sticking with VMware, our workload optimization effort to make, the VMware cloud remain affordable is, like you said, it's a hidden project. It's hard to see every client who plans to stay in VMware has to do that same work. And that's a huge lift the way that cause or license now, has got a huge impact for many, many people who are sticking with DIY or sticking with a co-location model.
00:30:24:27 - 00:30:48:02
Doug Theis
So, you know what? What are you going to do if you make them if you stay put? A VMware cloud is a pretty attractive alternative because there's not much of a lift. If you change, you have got three projects on your hands. You've got hypervisor selection, you've got validation with the rest of your tooling like backup and Dr..
00:30:48:02 - 00:31:10:01
Doug Theis
And monitoring and every other utility that you use in your environment. And you've got the migration project itself, which is the most worrisome frankly of all three is making the move from one to the other. You know, that's where most of the risk lies. So it's it's big. It's a huge lift, no doubt.
00:31:10:04 - 00:31:30:10
AJ Kuftic
And I think that's the I think that's the key thing here, is that a lot of people are interested in changing. A lot of people want a change. We've heard from a number of people who are at the conference and really gotten to hear a lot of their stories, and why they were looking at one versus another. Obviously, you know, Doug, at the top of this mentioned you had a lot of federal state utilities.
00:31:30:12 - 00:31:55:25
AJ Kuftic
These are organizations that can't change anything quickly. They are in those environments. They are certified in those environments. They're heavily regulated. And so from an application standpoint, these are certified to run on VMware. These are certified to be secure on VMware. So making a switch is not something they can do as easily as essentially you in the private sector where we're making these changes and our applications don't really care.
00:31:56:00 - 00:32:23:15
AJ Kuftic
So that's also a super interesting thing to kind of walk through and think about. I would say that our VMware and Nutanix cloud alternatives that we provide as a service are more attractive than ever because we can help clients get to where they want to be to get to that true outcome of we wanted to switch and save money, or we wanted to make things easier for ourselves, or we think that this is actually a better platform for us.
00:32:23:17 - 00:32:41:11
AJ Kuftic
We can help get there faster and eliminate a lot of the overhead. And we've already done, as Doug mentioned, there is a selection and validation. We've already done that. We've already figured out that HP is the best one. We already have Nutanix in the environment. We already know how to backup off of it. We already know how to deal with it.
00:32:41:11 - 00:33:01:19
AJ Kuftic
We already know how to monitor it. So all of those pieces that would go around that have already been taken care of, so you can skip to just the migration part. And that's where our folks come in that are on our delivery team. That dude migrations literally every single day, who spend a lot of their time finding all these nooks and crannies because they've seen all of them before.
00:33:01:20 - 00:33:21:24
AJ Kuftic
Most people get to do a migration once every, you know, five years or maybe when they switch jobs, they have to do a migration from platform to platform. But we do it all the time. It is something that we're good at. We got a lot of reps on it. And so that's something that I think we can take forward to help people get to where they want to be and walk through all of that hypervisor shift.
00:33:21:27 - 00:33:40:01
AJ Kuftic
And if you have any sort of questions about that, we have a QR code that's going to be down here, I think somewhere, where you can ask your questions. Now, we did get some questions in the registration. We always appreciate those because it helps a lot to make sure that we're talking about the right things.
00:33:40:04 - 00:33:59:28
AJ Kuftic
So we're going to go to a couple of those first, and if you have anything live, go ahead and put it into the QR code, which is actually that way, top left corner of your screen there. The first question here is what positive outcome would Broadcom create with their steep price increases and breaking ties with other organizations such as AWS?
00:34:00:00 - 00:34:27:26
AJ Kuftic
I think the basic one is they want to move towards a full platform. The sum of the components is not the same as the single platform. And being able to put it all together in a single interface as a single platform is something they've been working on for like six years now, probably longer than that. I had Cloud Foundation in one of its early stages at a previous employer.
00:34:27:28 - 00:34:47:24
AJ Kuftic
I had at 1.1 of the largest deployments in the world. What it is then and what it is now are very different. It was previously. This is a way to manage multiple environments. This is a way to deploy workload domains. This is a way to simplify the patching process with a known good bill of materials. And all of these versions have been tested together.
00:34:47:27 - 00:35:17:02
AJ Kuftic
The new model is this is one unit, and you can carve it up and do things inside of it as you'd like, but it is one unit and they would like people to get the maximum value out of that unit. And that doesn't work when you have a bunch of individual components. And so being able to have everybody on to one thing, it eliminates a lot of goofy interoperability questions because you don't have well, this customer has vSphere and vSAN, but this one is vSphere in NSX.
00:35:17:02 - 00:35:40:22
AJ Kuftic
And this one has vSphere and NSX and Aria. And how did those three interoperate together? Because they're all together. They can all be tested together, which means you have a better overall platform going forward. So I think that's the value. And the positive outcome is that you get a true on prem or in our case, a service provider, lead cloud platform for you as an organization.
00:35:40:24 - 00:35:56:25
AJ Kuftic
I think that's a huge thing that VMware has been trying to get to for years, but they were never able to really say and stand on, this is our platform and everybody's going to get it. And I think Broadcom was really that's the one thing that Broadcom came in to do was to say let's take this vision all the way forward.
00:35:56:28 - 00:36:00:21
AJ Kuftic
And they just accelerated it a lot faster than most people were expecting them to.
00:36:00:23 - 00:36:25:02
Doug Theis
Yeah. But you know part of it the reason is selfish right. Broadcom wants less products to support. So they can do better work on all those prod products. Part of it is valuable to the end user clients. They've got a more effective experience and a broader set of features that they can take advantage of them. Some of them don't want it, but many of them once they get them, will take advantage of them.
00:36:25:05 - 00:37:09:22
AJ Kuftic
Yep. We can go to the next question. What are other organizations doing to mitigate the Broadcom changes? A lot of it is eliminating as many overhead calls as possible. I can at least speak to what we've done is finding all of the any overhead that we had in the environment. This was an old cluster that we hadn't really taken the time to clean out and shut down, get this old cluster out, making sure that you're simplifying the environment down cluster wise to this is the minimum amount that I need to run these platforms, making sure that your cores match the new model.
00:37:09:22 - 00:37:33:17
AJ Kuftic
They have a 16 core minimum on a host, which means that if you have 16 cores per socket, which means that if you have a, you know, dual ten core host, you need to go buy an additional, with that 12 cores on that platform. That's a big deal. That's a huge cost that goes into nothing. It's literally just licensing to hit minimums.
00:37:33:19 - 00:37:49:20
AJ Kuftic
Right. So making sure that your hosts are established there. We've seen people who have been replacing their hosts with, you know, going from ten and 12 core host to 16 core host, just to make sure that they have their licensing and their physical resources actually matching. Doug, what have you heard from the field?
00:37:49:23 - 00:38:16:00
Doug Theis
Yeah, I think I think just turning off zombie servers and things they should have done years ago, frankly, as part of that work and also, many are taking advantage of an interesting licensing model as they consider a VMware cloud like expedient offers. Many of them are considering an interesting licensing model that Pinnacle Partners like expedient offer that.
00:38:16:02 - 00:38:40:22
Doug Theis
It's called bridge licensing, and it allows them to retain their current licensing status, a form of their current licensing, for a few months while they make a decision and consider whether they're going to renew or change hypervisors or move to a VMware cloud like, so we've got some interesting leverage as their top tier partner that many of the others don't.
00:38:40:22 - 00:39:08:18
Doug Theis
Many of the other partners don't. So there's a few different options. These are worth a discussion. And it's dependent on your applications and on how much effort you want to throw at this. We'd love to chat with you. If if this is something that you're considering, there's a new question here, AJ, I'll read it off to you if you want to answer it will expedient continue to utilize VMware for expedient edge, which is our edge product.
00:39:08:21 - 00:39:21:04
Doug Theis
Kind of a data center in a box that can be dropped into remote locations where the workloads may not be as optimized or use all of the other components in the platform.
00:39:21:07 - 00:39:46:19
AJ Kuftic
Yes. The short answer is yes. We will continue to support VMware on our existing edge platform because it's the workloads that are out at those locations. A lot of them are like we mentioned earlier, they are certified to run on VMware. They're not certified to run on other platforms. So that's a big reason why we're continuing to support VMware at the edge.
00:39:46:22 - 00:40:08:07
AJ Kuftic
I will say we are working with VMware on trying to figure out the best way to optimize those, because in a lot of these environments, they're not running, you know, three, four hosts worth of stuff. They're running like ten VMs, right? So we're trying to figure out ways to help optimize that. It's also why we brought Nutanix in from a hypervisor standpoint to run on edge.
00:40:08:07 - 00:40:31:05
AJ Kuftic
So we can do HP on edge and be much more granular in that space. Where we can go down into smaller VM counts and optimize the licensing that way. But yes, we will continue to support and utilize VMware and edge for those workloads that really require it from just literally a support compliance standpoint or from a application standpoint, because that's the right thing to do.
00:40:31:07 - 00:40:34:06
AJ Kuftic
But yes, there's definitely some some work being done there.
00:40:34:08 - 00:41:01:07
Doug Theis
And just to broaden out a little bit, we offer multi-tenant cloud in our VMware cloud, we offer private cloud in our VMware cloud, we offer private cloud in Nutanix Cloud, and we offer edge computing or equipment on site that we manage and remote locations in both VMware Private Cloud and Nutanix Private cloud. So those are the different flavors.
00:41:01:12 - 00:41:26:20
Doug Theis
And if you include our Dr. offerings, those are available in both Nutanix and VMware as well. So there's lots of options that are available to you. And all of these let you either stay with a familiar platform or move to another platform besides VMware, but still not have the management burden to get away from that management burden that most of us have carried for all these decades now.
00:41:26:22 - 00:41:44:28
AJ Kuftic
Yeah, and I think that that that big that the big thing there is choice and the optionality that we have and can offer and can meet people where they are not necessarily make them fit into what we have. I think we could take one more question or two more questions. I think, what time does the pizza arrive at my door?
00:41:45:00 - 00:42:05:09
AJ Kuftic
Turn around. It's right behind you. It's actually not behind you. I'm really sorry. To to give you, the surprise like that. This is, I just saw this question coming, and I thought it was funny. Is that we do not offer any pizza. I'm real sorry if you hope that there was pizza. But, yeah, we're definitely, are interested in talking further.
00:42:05:12 - 00:42:24:23
AJ Kuftic
You can scan the QR code. That'll be available here in a moment. To schedule time to talk with us. We've talked with a huge number of people, around workloads and what to do with them. How do I move my VMware environment, or how do I optimize my workloads or optimize my licensing in the best way possible?
00:42:24:23 - 00:42:50:15
AJ Kuftic
One of the key things that we didn't even talk about today was our Docker licensing, and that was one of the best ways to optimize that licensing is to do. Dr.. With a service like us, where we don't charge for the VMware licensing until you actually do a failover or a test, or you actually use those resources, which means instead of in your secondary site, having a bunch of hosts that are sitting there getting charged every single month for VMware licensing, there's a way to offload that.
00:42:50:15 - 00:43:19:18
AJ Kuftic
That's a huge cost savings. There was one more bonus question here that will answer before we get out of here. What tools did you utilize to do the analysis to reduce the core footprint? A lot of it came down to looking at our environments, just from looking, going into vCenter and looking at, you know, percentages, how much memory was in use in these clusters, how many of these hosts could we take offline?
00:43:19:20 - 00:43:37:23
AJ Kuftic
How much was CPU utilization do we have? We use tools like elastic, which we use as a service to see long term performance data. We use, we realized operations on the back end to pull all of our performance data in to see over time. Do we see significant spikes month to month, or is it fairly straightforward across the board?
00:43:37:23 - 00:43:58:01
AJ Kuftic
So a lot of our tooling and a lot of our knowhow went into this. There wasn't like a report that we spit on and said, okay, you can get rid of these 20 hoes and you'll be good. It's here's how we actually sit down and really squeeze the juice. With really great subject matter experts that we have, and I think that's where we're going to wrap it up.
00:43:58:01 - 00:44:04:08
AJ Kuftic
Doug, I want to thank you so much for your time today. This has been really, really great.
00:44:04:10 - 00:44:05:10
Doug Theis
Thank you.
00:44:05:12 - 00:44:24:14
AJ Kuftic
This is Doug, and I got to hang out in public for a for a week, which was just a delight to, I want to thank also everybody at Experian who came and was supporting the booth. We, I think we had a really great turnout from people in the booth, from the people who were there. I think we had a really, really successful time there.
00:44:24:17 - 00:44:34:00
AJ Kuftic
And if you have any questions, and you want to talk more, go ahead and scan the QR code and we can get in, get you in front of people like Doug to help answer them.
00:44:34:02 - 00:44:41:07
Doug Theis
And with that, and if you if you sent a question and we didn't answer it, we will follow up with you. Oh, by the way. Yep.
00:44:41:10 - 00:44:57:22
AJ Kuftic
And with that, I'm going to wrap up for today. Join us in two weeks, where I will be talking with our good friends at Packet Watch around how we were able to work together on building better incident response and recovery programs. And we will see you then. Thanks.