>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is special On the Ground of theCUBE here at the VTUG Summer Slam 2019. We've had the pleasure of knowing the VTUG team for quite awhile back actually, when it was the New England VMUG was when I started attending. When it switched to the VTUG at Gillette Stadium's when we started doing theCUBE there. And happy to bring back to the program first, Chris Harney, who is the one who created this as a true user event. And joining him is his wife Dawn Harney, who we know is behind the scenes organizing all of this event. So, Dawn and Chris, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing this community and educational process with all of us. >> Thanks Stu, it's been a pleasure. >> All right, so, Chris, we really want this, it's a celebration. Sixteen years; back in 2003 the number one movie of the year was actually Finding Nemo. Of course we waited a long time for there. It goes without saying that all of us were a little bit younger. And boy, in those days, I started working with VMR in 2002, so that journey of virtualization was real early. There was no cloud talking we had kind of the XSP's and some of the earlier things. But so much has changed, and what I have loved is this journey that the users that are attending here. We're actually here in the Expo hall, and if you look, why are there no people in here right now? Because they are all in the break out sessions understanding what are the skill sets that they need today and tomorrow to help them in their journey; virtualization, cloud, DevOps, all of these changes there. Chris, you started this as a user to help share with your peers, so, we've had you on the program many times, bring us back. >> Yeah, so think back to 2003. There was no way to share information. There's no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook groups, Meetups, no Game of Thrones. >> We had to go to books and stuff like that. >> Exactly. >> Read the paper. >> So white papers, those were the big deal. You had the Microsoft books that were two inches thick and glossy. >> Yeah, I wonder how many of our younger audience would know the acronym RTFM? Read The Fine Manual please, is what we're doing. Dawn, this event, as I said, we've been at the winter event at Gillette Stadium, you brought in some of the Patriot players we've had the pleasure of interviewing. This Summer event is epic. I know people that come from very long distances to swim in the community, get the information. There's a little bit of lobster at the end of the day. >> There's a lot of lobster at the end of the day. >> So give us the community that you look to help build and foster, and what this event has meant to you over the years. >> For me it's really a place for everybody in the community to come together and share their knowledge with their peers. Something may work for me maybe it will work for you. Let's get together and talk about it. The best way to learn something is from somebody that may have done it, or done it, messed it up, learned something, like to share it with you. So, it really is about working with your peers, learning something from your sponsors and all these companies that you work with everyday. What's new, what's going on. So this is the place to go to get all that. >> Wait, Dawn, I thought you weren't a tech person. >> I'm not a tech person. >> That answer was spot on because one of the things I loved about the virtualization community, is we were all learning in the early days. And it required a little bit of work. There's this theory known as the IKEA effect. Sometimes if you actually help build it a little bit, you actually like it a little bit more. And this community really epitomizes that in the virtualization community and cloud. We've been talking about cloud now for a decade but it's still relatively early days on how this multi-hybrid cloud fits together, how operations are changing, so, Chris, bring us through a little bit of that arc. >> Well, I'll think about it, back in 2003, there was only VMwire. There was only one virtualization platform, if you didn't use VMwire, you were doing bare metal Windows install or Unix install on physical servers. Well, back when we changed, there was Hyper-V, that was coming out, AWS was just coming out, so that's when we kind of made the jump from just being a VMwire user to a virtual technology. So we could talk about the cloud, we could share those experiences and have that same journey together, and hopefully learn and lead, get smarter together as a group, you can learn faster as a group than you can by yourself. >> Yeah, and as we know, Chris, and we've talked about this, the IT industry is never "Hey, give me a clean "sheet of paper and we'll start everything." We know it is additive and all of these things go together, so cloud did not obviate the need for virtualization, so all of these things go together, and how do I make sure as my job doesn't get completely eliminated or, I was talking to somebody who said "If I've been doing the same thing for 10 years, "will I be out of a job?" They said, "Well hopefully you really really like "what you're doing cause if you think "you can keep doing what you're doing, "that is all you will ever be able to do." And I thought that was a very poignant comment. >> Yeah, Matt Broberg's talk this morning about what's your next job going to be, what skillsets do you need to be relevant in 10 years, and it's the same thing, I mean we said the same thing 10, 15 years ago. You can't be a Windows admin anymore, you can't be a VMwire admin anymore, you can't be a cloud admin anymore in five years. >> Yeah, so Dawn, give our audience a little bit of the scope of this event, as I said, I know people that have flown in from the Carolinas, from Colorado, from all over, from California and the like, 16 years of this event, this community is not just New England, it really has had a broad impact. >> Right, and it's huge, people plan their vacations around this, I've had people come from Europe, they fly over here, stay in the state of Maine, they go to L.L. Bean, they do all those things because they plan their vacation, they know they need to be here for the VTUG event, so it's meant a lot, because you do get so many different variety of people, you have the sponsors, you have the end users, you have media, you have bloggers, you have pretty much just everybody comes together to really be that community, so it's meant a lot to me, it's been a long 16 years but it's meant a lot. >> All right, so the question people are asking, this is the final VTUG, so no more winter event at Gillette, this is the final event tonight at Gritty's, so explain to us how that happened. >> It is the final event, 16 years, we're all getting older, it's bittersweet, but we've just realized that it takes a lot of time to put these together, it takes a lot of sponsors, it takes a lot of users, the users continue to come, but unfortunately the sponsors pay for it, and really don't have that following with the sponsors that we used to have, unfortunately. >> There are a lot more events, there are a lot more ways to find customers, so they're going to the meetups and they're doing their own events. >> Yeah, to your opening point Chris, 16 years ago it was much tougher to find sources. Now the challenge we have is there's too many options out there, there are too many events, trust me, I go to too many events, but this one has always been one that we've always looked forward, so please from the community, want to say thank you so much, it has always been one of our favorite things to kick off the year with when we do the winter one, and the summer one, I've made this trip a couple of times, it is a little warm in here, I think brings back to the roots of this event, remember it was four or five years ago it was 110 degrees out, and then you switched to this facility, so of course the air conditioning decides to go out, because we know in IT, sometimes things break. >> Start in the heat, end in the heat. >> So Chris, want to give you the final word for the final VTUG. >> You know, I'm just very proud and happy with this community, it truly is a community, it wasn't us, it wasn't theCUBE, it wasn't the vendors, it was everyone working together to make a community that helped each other out, so thanks to everyone. >> Chris and Dawn, thank you so much, we're happy to be a small piece of this community, and look forward to staying in touch with you in your future endeavors. Thanks so much, I'm Stu Miniman, we have a full day of coverage here, keynote speaker, some of the users that have traveled around, really focusing on the community here at the VTUG Summer Slam, as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.

from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts it's the cube covering Vita winter warmer 2018 presented by silicon angle hi I'm Stu minimun and we're here at the Vita winter warmer 2018 have with me Chris Harney who's the founder yes and president Vita great to see you Chris great to you so 12th annual one of this event it's gone through a couple of name change it's actually the fifth year we've been doing it I'd been coming for a few years before that but for just for our audience that doesn't know explain kind of the why of the V Tugg you know and what's what's changed you know over the years so so V tug was originally a still founded on the principle that we can get smarter together you know if everyone learns a little piece and teaches everyone because back when it started there was no YouTube there was no Google he had to learn on your own and you know we started out learning how to virtualize machines we learned how the emotion worked well now you're talking serverless applications you're talking crowd or cloud native you talk it's tough going to the cloud is it staying on Prem how do you automate and it's changing I mean Moore's law has gone out the window you know change is happening win weeks rather than years yeah and Chris I always love this it's one of our first events of the year the last few years it's a user group it's good grounding for me to really understand you know the typical people NIT what do they care about what are they struggling you know in what's going on in their world so you know you're going to bring us some of the users that we have on here but from your standpoint you know what are you seeing you know what are you hearing yeah so I'm hearing that users are struggling you know that the old adage 80% of their job is maintaining systems and 20% as upgrades yet 20 of some of the budget is spent on upgrades and 80 so that the dumb numbers are skewed so that having trouble keeping up with technology yeah it you throw out some things you talked about you know server lists type applications you'd key notes this morning we had Microsoft Amazon yet some developer to tracks going on looking at you know orchestration and yet some stalwarts the in the industry you know talking about you know what what's happening from from an IT standpoint where is kind of there is no typical but you know when you look at the range of people that are here um you know are they still I'm doing my virtualization rollout are they you know where are they in the cloud journey have they heard about things like kubernetes and server list yet so this audience may have heard of kubernetes very few people are implementing it I still think you know we matured 10 years ago we haven't kind of made that next leap yet so people are still they've got VMware they've got they're looking at NSX and they're running on what's the next hardware platform hyperconvergence is still a big deal yeah uh and hyper-converged is a big deal I mean we've been watching you for many days as I said this is a good grounding for us because right it's like oh well why is that AWS reinvent I was at cube con and you talk about all this stuff where you know the future is going but you know what what's happening today is super important um I like you you talked about some of the dynamics about like how they spend budget you know we talk a lot today about you know it's got to be a switch from kappa to op X and consumption and you know that that's changing a lot people's roles so training education so super important what are they getting coming to an event like this and what are the resources are you seeing that's and that are important today so at this event I think there's a lot of validation you know we we get inundated with marketing go to the cloud go to cloud and all of these users are coming together hey what are you doing for cloud and they're realizing that everyone is pretty much in the same boat together you know so so that's one thing they get networking they share their problems and what the fixes are and then the vendors they bring their a-game they really do some great training sessions so you know we've got 20 different training sessions going on upstairs and the users will go up there and they'll be able to talk one-on-one with real engineers who are doing this stuff yeah so Chris you know both big Patriots fans we've got you know Tedy Bruschi behind us here the Patriots are actually on the practice field right now getting ready for yet another Super Bowl so yeah it's amazing hopefully bring in ring number six home I think we're good lucky were the cube every time we've done your event the Patriots have still been the hunt so you know we got to keep that going but you know you look at the Patriots you say they've done so well you know other than Belichick and Brady there's been a lot of change you know you're gonna have you know this Patriots alumni is coming and I'm hoping we'll talk to like Logan Mankins and be like you know the game it seen the people change you know the strategies change but you know how do you keep that winning formula and it's a lot of its same an IT I mean so much tech has changed you know in 12 years what's the same and we you know what what's different from your viewpoint so the same you know we all have end users you know we aren't applications delivered without without hesitation or without issues so that's that will always be the same what's changed is how do we deliver that you know we used to put a server in one application and then we had sans you know so we could put the sands in and have smaller servers to virtualization to automation you know people are still looking at clones and making that automation happen faster but I think security is starting to take a 4-4-2 that you know we're seeing what's the Intel some viruses and some weaknesses so I think a lot more people are spending more time remediating possible issues and less time building new stuff yeah great points they are I mean I'm in a first structure guy by background and right you talked we went from server to we went to a VM and even we talk about things like containers and then functions it's that delivery of how do I deliver my application right how do I build modernize applications you know term you know cloud native gets thrown out a lot you know developers you know are involved here and you know it still matters some of those underneath piece even something like serverless eventually somebody is responsible that for for that infrastructure it's just you know we looked at the wiki bond research looked at you know we see a big shift going to platforms whether that be a public cloud or even something like hyper-converged there's less that I need to be worried about building and playing with those geek knobs and more software is going to allow me to handle that as data grows as scale happens I can't have people you know in there having to worry about some of those pieces you know machine learning needs to help you know the the the software itself needs to do it in that that's a shift it's challenging for people to kind of embrace that change understand where they add value and where they need to go and it's events like this that I think help people you know make understand where they need to make those transition points and where they can keep adding value is spot on there and I think people just see a point they need to learn that the more things they can affect the more positive influence they can have on that company and the long longer they'll be there the long they'll want them there if you're just affecting one thing you don't add as much value if you're affecting a thousand things there's a lot more value to you all right well Chris once again it's pleasure having you on the program we really appreciated that we could come you know help share the user activity with our community so thanks so much and you know wishing the past good luck absolutely you up for addiction on the score I hate to do predictions when we're going to be there you know I'm confident the Patriots do well if history has shown us anything it's usually a close game absolutely you know so you know I've seen a couple of Eagles fans here but a lot of Patriots colors so thanks so much and we're gonna be back with lots more coverage here from the V tog winter warmer 2018 I'm stew min Amman and you're watching the cube