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Why are we still talking about virtualization? · Technology Now

• AUBREY LOVELL Michael, why are we talking about virtualisation? I thought we had solved all of that over a decade ago? MICHAEL BIRD Well it’s a little bit more complicated than that. AUBREY LOVELL … of course it is. I'm Aubrey Lovell MICHAEL BIRD I’m Michael Bird And welcome to Technology Now from HPE. MICHAEL BIRD So, as I’m sure you’ve realised, today we’re talking all about virtualisation. AUBREY LOVELL I had picked that up, yes. MICHAEL BIRD And as you heard in the intro, virtualisation centers around something called a hypervisor and as you're probably aware, a hypervisor effectively allows you to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware. In simple terms, virtualisation basically creates this separation between the hardware and operating system meaning that to the hardware, the operating system or systems it's running is largely irrelevant and we’ve linked to a diagram showing this in the show notes. AUBREY LOVELL OK, but as I said before, this isn't 2010, virtualisation has been around, known and basically 'solved' for years. So why are we talking about it now? MICHAEL BIRD Good question, I promise we're not running out of ideas. And we'll be hearing why we're talking about it later in the show from Brad Parks Chief Product & Go To Market Officer at Morpheus Data, which was recently acquired by HPE. But before that, Aubrey - can you give us a bit of a history lesson? AUBREY LOVELL Of course I can, Michael, because it’s once again time ... for Technology Then. AUBREY LOVELL Like so many products and inventions, virtualisation emerged almost a decade before it properly caught on. Computers in the ’60s couldn’t multitask. They did one thing at a time and if you wanted to do multiple tasks, you had to run them in batches. Sounds exhausting right? So imagine the excitement of scientists when in the mid ‘60s, they gained access to a new type of computer hardware – one which could support multiple users at the same time. But it wouldn’t be until the early ‘70s when the first official virtualisation product would be announced which could run on a mainframe and create multiple virtual machines for people to work on. MICHAEL BIRD And these caught on pretty quickly I assume? AUBREY LOVELL They absolutely would. Hypervisors and virtualisation would give much more flexibility to systems because the virtual machines could be run on existing hardware and even scaled up and down in size as needed. By the late two thousands, virtualisation was wrapped up into the deal of the day: converged infrastructure and later on hyperconverged infrastructure. This came pre-packaged, ready-to-run and frankly, was kind of where I thought the story ended, however, Michael, I assume something has changed if we are doing an episode on the topic of vitualisation? MICHAEL BIRD Interesting you should say that because something has absolutely changed, Aubrey, but I’m going to leave that to our guest, Brad, to explain and we started by talking about why virtualisation became so popular back in the day. BRAD PARKS You got a lot of efficiency gains because you're sharing resources. But one of the other big benefits and one of the big early driving factors around the adoption of virtualization was actually resiliency and high availability because you can set up things. For example, if one physical server crashes, something happens, something goes down, you can automatically move all of those workloads to another physical server. So virtualization not only was an efficiency gain, was also a resiliency gain for a lot of customers. MICHAEL BIRD Okay, and then cloud computing appeared. Did virtualisation disappear? BRAD PARKS Um, virtualization is one of the core building blocks of cloud computing, and there's probably 10, 11 years ago, NIST, the government agency came up with this white paper, still very relevant today that described five attributes of cloud computing. Clouds are elastic, meaning they can grow and shrink as resources need. They're meter-based, we're keeping track of what's going on every minute, every second. You only pay for what you use. They're on shared infrastructure. That's where virtualization comes in. You're usually sharing it. It might be multiple customers on the same ultimate compute. And it's accessible over the internet, over the network. The fifth attribute of cloud computing was self-service. And that's one of the real driving factors around the move to the public cloud. The public cloud provider said, hey, we got you covered. We're going to give you a simple portal to log into, swipe a credit card, hit a button, and we'll give you what you need right now on demand. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, and I mean, I remember working in IT when that happened and it was, well, physical hardware is dead. Everything's moving to the cloud. It's faster, it's cheaper. You don't have to worry about the hardware. So what went wrong with that? BRAD PARKS Well, it ended up not being cheaper. Actually, it's very expensive, particularly at scale. But also, there are a lot of applications that have gravity, right? They want to be maintained on premises. And that could be for a lot of reasons. Highly regulated environments, health care, banking, federal government, People want their data close to home. They've got secret stuff in there. They're maybe not wanting to share that up in the public cloud. A lot of the public cloud providers are a lot like the Eagles in Hotel California, right? You can check in, but you can never leave. Like they make it real hard to get your data back out. And that kind of rubs enterprises the wrong way. So there's a lot of reasons people are still maintaining 60, 70, 80 % of their workloads still on premises. MICHAEL BIRD Okay, so cloud computing and virtualization, it's sort of, sort of feels like two sides maybe of the same coin. I don't know. Like, can you just explain how do they relate to each other? BRAD PARKS For sure, and actually, even on the last question, I'll say cloud computing is an operating model that has those five attributes. It's not a place. So you have the public clouds, but you have on-premises private clouds. And that's really where virtualization and cloud oftentimes meet. But virtualization is an enabling technology that lets you run multiple workloads on shared infrastructure. And as we said, that's one of the core tenets of a cloud. But you have to do the other things as well. You have to be able to meter it to expose that virtualized set of interfaces in a way that an end user can very quickly provision, not just a VM, but the actual application that sits on top, right? A database, a web server, that that's really where cloud kind of picks up as opposed to being just an enabling technology. MICHAEL BIRD Brad, it sort of feels like we were recording a podcast from 2015. don't know about you, like these are the sorts of conversations we were having back then, So why are we talking about virtualization 2025? Like what is the state of virtualization 2025 BRAD PARKS It really it all comes down to economics, right, You know, vendor lock-in, right? It's kind of a dirty word, but it could be okay if you're getting requisite value from what you're buying. I have a certain phone provider that is also my tablet provider, that is also my laptop provider, and I get some value from having that fully integrated stack, right? But if all of a sudden my phone cost $5,000, I'd probably be looking for a different vendor. Similarly, in the land of virtualization, people were pretty happy with the dominant virtualization provider, but the economics changed. All of a sudden, that same license they were maybe paying $1 for cost $5. In some cases, it cost $10. And it also came along with a lot of strings attached. So the situation changed and people started reevaluating their life choices. They said, hey, you know, I've got a little elasticity in my finances, but that's a lot. You have surpassed the value equation. And so they started looking at alternatives, but it wasn't just alternatives to their hypervisor, their virtualization provider. So virtualization is just the, I'd say the vine to grab or the match that got lit. Use your analogy. It started IT leaders just thinking about their application infrastructure in a different way. MICHAEL BIRD There's previously only been, one or two big plays in the virtualisation game. What's changed? BRAD PARKS The barriers to entry. We think about market shifts and market moves, there are barriers to entry. Those changed and all of a sudden the barriers were gone. People were actively looking at alternatives and all of a sudden people came out of the woodwork.. Like, I mean, there are virtualization vendors everywhere, but you have to think if you've been running your mission-critical production workloads on a given technology for 15 years, you're not gonna just change that overnight or lightly. it has to be production ready. It has to be mission critical. It has to have all of the capabilities to handle what was running just fine three years ago before the economics changed. So yes, there are lots of different vendors out there all biting for that emerging change, but I think it's important to look at what are the core capabilities that you're moving from and to. So it's important to look at what features are specifically required, and then what's the right place to move those if you're going to move. MICHAEL BIRD So, since the sort of world of virtualization has had a bit of upheaval, why are people also considering containers? And what are the pros and cons? BRAD PARKS When you're designing in a virtualized world, you are encapsulating all of the logic around that application service, as well as all of the dependent packages into a virtual machine. In a container, you're actually able to... They're much more lightweight. you're actually leaving a lot of the shared resources actually down at the operating system level and you're just taking kind of the bare minimum of what you need in that container. So they're lighter weight, smaller. The technology is referenced as being more portable because you can run on a different container platforms easier than you can different virtualization formats. So there's some advantages. And so a lot of people who are kind of facing this change or saying, well, maybe now I should take that big monolithic application that I had written 15, 20, 30 years ago. It's been running fine, but I've been meaning to clean out the cobwebs So it's really about the application workload and what is the right format for that application. And that's really, think, as HPE, where we want to provide options to say, let's let you, the customer, land the right workload on the right format at the right time on demand. MICHAEL BIRD Brad, on Technology Now we don't often talk about stuff that HPE makes but we do make something in this field don't we BRAD PARKS Yeah, so we have a couple things. So HPE did an acquisition of the company I was at in 2024, Morpheus Data. And Morpheus is a cloud orchestration platform. We actually are software that enables companies to get that cloud operating model. We enable self-service and we integrate with all of the different hypervisor vendors, all of the different public cloud vendors. we also have our own built-in KVM-based hypervisor. And so now Morpheus VM Essentials is the entry point to the Morpheus family. It can connect to the dominant hypervisor vendor, but it also has its own built-in KVM hypervisor. So customers can continue to run some workloads They can re-platform some of those options to an HPE's hypervisor, reduce their cost. We're all about choice, but ultimately our goal is to get customers to that cloud operating model. And that's where Morpheus Enterprise fits. So no matter where they want to run their workloads, whatever hypervisor, whatever public cloud, that's where Morpheus and HPE, along with other technologies like OpsRamp and others are about enabling people to get there. MICHAEL BIRD Okay, one more question from me then. When you were younger, what did you want to be when you grew up? BRAD PARKS When I was younger, I wanted to be an American football player, although I played more European football or soccer, but I wanted to be a football player. I'm, you know, 5'8", a buck 50. It just didn't happen for me. But then I wanted to be a writer. And really, that plays into what I do today. I like telling stories. I'm an engineer with low social anxiety. I like to talk, so I kind of found my niche. AUBREY LOVELL Wow, love that he wanted to be a football player but then went back and started tackling technical writing versus people. So that's awesome. MICHAEL BIRD I mean, the answer to the question at the top of the show, why are we talking about it today? I mean, it's really like an economic conversation. is. The landscape was pretty stable for years and years and years. And then almost overnight, that wasn't the same anymore. so organizations out of necessity more than anything else had to start considering, you know, what they were doing from a virtualization perspective, which they probably weren't. Like I said, it was basically solved. AUBREY LOVELL I agree with you, Michael. think it's really interesting to think about. the one theme that I kept coming back to was really the power of choice. We've become such a digital world, both from a business perspective and our personal lives, but there has to be the power of choice. And customers and partners are so busy running their business, wanting to scale their business, focus on innovation, that a lot of times they don't have time to really think about these and all the back end layers that goes into all of this back end infrastructure and virtualization. So when you have the options of being able to do it yourself, you have things on-prem, on-site, or it's co-located, or you work with a cloud provider, there's all these different options and packages that you can have to fit your needs. And I remember, this is going way, back when I first started in sales, and that's all we did was we took the solution forth with HPE. basically, at the time, there was a huge study that came out, and it talked about the great repatriation. And it talked about how everybody was so quick to move to the cloud. But then some issues started happening, right? Like when you move everything, all your stuff to the cloud, sure, there's some benefits, but then you have lock-in, you have cost issues, you have latency issues, right? And so the solve for that was how do we become more of a hybrid cloud model or on-prem private cloud, right, that you can utilize with all these different services? Because the services are actually what's so great. You can work with a company like HPE to get everything that you need and not worry about it. So I just find it fascinating of all the choices. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, I was working at an IT reseller in the UK in 2011 and 2012. And I remember that sort of felt like the cusp of the cloud. And I think, as I said in the interview with Brad, I remember there being this excitement of like, we're not going to sell any hardware anymore. We're just going to sell cloud. And that's all we're going to do. Even then, I remember there were some cracks starting to show with the fact that actually all of these promises of chuck it straight up in the cloud, actually there's, and as Brad said, there's like the gravity, data gravity or application gravity, there was some things that just didn't really work particularly well. But the fact that actually by that point, a lot of virtualization, a lot of the story on virtualization had already happened. I think it did in theory make repatriation easier or least it should have made it easier. That's why we're talking about it today. That is enabling that choice. If the underlying hardware that your operating system is running on is not completely tied to the operating system. You can be super flexible. You can burst when you have higher needs at particular times of the year, or you can bring it back. But again, like this is the conversation that we were having years ago, but it's just the fact that the economics have changed recently. And I think the other thing that's quite exciting that Brad was talking about is like what is available now is sort of the hypervisor is like, yeah, we can do that. But actually there's so much more to it now. As a side, this was an interesting episode to record because of course we don't usually talk about products. We usually to talk about stuff that's bleeding edge or at least you know is coming around the corner or at least is here right now. I don't think we've ever done an episode on something that you and I probably could have recorded a podcast on about 10 years ago. It's just funny how things come around again but go through these cycles. AUBREY LOVELL It does, yeah. And it's kind of nice to see it in practice or in theory, right? Like we talk a lot about the concepts, but to apply it to paper and see like the examples of it, I think, is really cool. And I think with virtualization and the amount of progress we've had, when you think about like controlling your environments and security and how important that is in the AI age, I think that's really interesting to put those all together and think about how that comes together for your company. MICHAEL BIRD So Aubrey, there was one other thing that I asked Brad, which I sort of put my foot in it a little bit. Just play the tape, Harry. MICHAEL BIRD So Brad, let's party like it's 2018. Would that be a single pane of glass? BRAD PARKS you said it. The single pane of glass, the thing that software and hardware vendors have promised forever and never actually delivered. I have a love-hate, more of a hate-hate relationship with that phrase. I'd say Morpheus is as close as most customers will probably get, but I think the difference is a single pane of glass is... replacing all of the user interfaces for all of the products. That's actually not what we're doing. We're giving you a single platform and we're integrating all of the technologies that you already have and we're orchestrating all of the handoffs so that those technologies actually talk to each other. So in a lot of ways it pays off the promise without all the downsides. MICHAEL BIRD I love getting told off by guests. It happens more frequently than you think, yeah, saying things and guests say, no, Michael, that's not right. But there we go. AUBREY LOVELL Well the truth has been said. AUBREY LOVELL Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Brad, And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. MICHAEL BIRD If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com – subject line: Aubrey, please can I have more hypervisors - and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week. Technology Now is hosted by Aubrey Lovell Sunny St Petersburg, Florida and myself, Michael Bird just outside of rainy London London This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Allison Gaito Alissa Mitry and Renee Edwards. Our music was composed by Greg Hooper. Aubrey, how good is the music? AUBREY LOVELL It is so good. love it. Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers!