>> Live, from Las Vegas! It's theCUBE! Covering the VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're in Las Vegas, and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMworld 2018. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Justin Warren, and happy to welcome to the program for the first time, James Labocki, who's a director of product management with Red Hat. And joining him is CUBE alum, Rob Young, who's the lead manager of virtualization product management strategy, also with Red Hat, wearing the shadow man logo. Rob, James, thank you so much for joining us. >> Great to be here >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, so Rob, we touch base with Red Hat at a number of shows, you know, Red Hat Summit. We spoke with you last year at VMworld. Give us the update, Red Hat's got a nice booth here at the show, A lot of things going on, Red Hat plays in a lot of the multi-cloud environments that I hear VMware talking about, so, talk about your presence here. >> So, Red Hat has done quite a bit of growing over the course of the last year that we talked. We are focused on not only where our customers are today, but also on how our portfolio needs to evolve to where they aspire to be. And by that, I mean, RHEL is still the foundation of our business. We have Red Hat Virtualization, we have OpenStack Platform, we have the OpenShift, as you know, and what we're learning from our customers and the market, is that, on top of RHEL, customers have not only a footprint in the virtualization world, but they have an aspiration to evolve along with the market to more of a containerized world that is managed, orchestrated, delivered via Kubernetes, and we feel that our portfolio is well positioned with the pillars of our business from infrastructure to application middleware all the way through management, to allow them to act on those aspirations, not in the future but right now. So that's where we are. Our strategy is build around that vision and around that level of enablement and market dynamic, right now, so we're excited, would you agree? >> Yeah absolutely. A lot of interest in OpenShifted option, whether that's on the Vmware platform itself, out on the public clouds, and then on KVR, KVM based hypervisors with Red Hat Virtualization OpenStack Platform as well. >> Yeah it's interesting because, I've watched this adoption of containerization in the marketplace. What's the line I hear from Red Hat? It's like, Linux is containers, containers are Linux. >> Hey you got that good. >> Yeah I got the t shirt too. But, you know, here at VMworld, some people are still trying to understand that virtualization versus containers and, "How do I stack things?" "How do I do that?" What do you hear from customers? Where is their head at? Talk to us about, you know, it's pervasive in the product line so how do you think about it internally too? >> Yeah absolutely so, I think containers are absolutely Linux and Linux is fundamental to containers, so I think one of the most interesting paradigms that we're seeing, or one of the interesting trends we're seeing is that as people are beginning to adopt containers, they're also beginning to realize that they're looking to simplify their environments as they do that. And so it's presenting a lot of new opportunities and reinvigoration of other technologies. So things like traditional virtualization that they have in place today, they're looking at, maybe bringing along KVM and starting to orchestrate containers and virtual machines with Kubernetes in a consistent manner across both on-premise and public cloud providers. So, we're really excited to be involved in projects around that. We're helping drive the adoption of that. And with that reinvigoration of KVM as a hypervisor, based on that work, to bring a common orchestration layer we're seeing even reinvigoration of the ecosystem around KVM with partners of ours like Trilio, Maxta, Veeam, and so on and so forth, which have been kind of discussed in... >> Yeah, Sorry. >> Well I was just going to add to what Dave said. What we see also happening is that the Linux market 25 years ago was open-source, contributor laden. Red Hat was fully engaged there, we are seeing that very same dynamic happening in the Kubernetes environment. We actually see that as very much the equivalent of what Linux was 25 years ago, so we are contributing upstream to the Kubernetes project, but our goal really is not only to stabilize and build out Kubernetes, but also to bring the virtualization aspect that we had brought into KVM and to virtualization into the Kubernetes project and community so that we can get rid of an additional layer of complexity around the hypervisor allowing containers to be managed and deployed and to have the same isolation levels that you have with VMs now. So all that is in process now. We've got upstream work going on and we're leading a lot of those contributions in the Kubernetes community, specifically via the Kubert project so anyway... >> Leads nicely into what I wanted to ask about which was, Red Hat has a long history of open-source, and open-source is a really important part of containers in general. What are you seeing for enterprises in their adoption of open-source? I mean clearly you've watched it go from something which was once verboten, to now it's pretty much de facto. So what are you seeing customers using open-source for in this new cloud and container world? >> Yeah so I think, you know, the typical pattern we see is a lot of times previously people would look at open-source as a way to commoditize and reduce cost. That was the beginning of open-sources right, with the UNIX to Linux migrations and things of that nature. Now, open-source and really Linux is at the forefront of a lot of the innovation happening, so customers are using both those, basically, techniques inside of their environments to embrace open-source. So at one point, they're using their Linux skills to commoditize things inside their environment or reduce cost. They're also looking at it as the basis of containers, microservices, machine learning, so on and so forth, so really this common skillset of Linux is kind of on both sides, and it's really rooted in the open-source knowledge and methodologies that our customers need to be able to... >> You hit the nail right on the head when you mentioned that everything that has to do with the new modernization of the data center built on containers is open-source, and Red Hat's participation in the community is we already have credibility in the Linux world and the OpenStack world and the KVM world and the Kubernetes world as well, and what we're seeing on the customer side, specifically enterprise and public sector is, they are embracing open-source. They've actually got strategies that named open-source as part of the criteria for proof of concepts and things like that, and we believe we've been preparing for this moment for the last 25 years, for the market to really see this as an open opportunity, not only for open-source and communities, but also to enable their development staffs to extend and participate in those projects to their advantage, so it's a really good thing, for a Red Hat market. >> Yeah it's certainly encouraging to see it. Having watched it develop, it's been really nice seeing that actually get used with enterprises, and seeing that Red Hat is there, the whole way through that and as a trusted partner I'm sure gives them a lot of confidence. >> One thing I would add is just, it's not just about the ability to deliver open-source and to use it, although delivering that with along lifecycle is something that is a core competency of Red Hat as a company, but also the ability to actually affect change in those communities and get contributions back in is really key. And then, even advising customers on how to do that is something that we're, it's just to say, "Hey we do open-source," but actually providing that lifecycle around it is a whole nother story. >> Red Hat has a lot of experience living in a lot of different environments, just Linux is pervasive in the data center and in the cloud. When you talk about multi-cloud, customers need to figure out how to deal with these multi-could environments and you know, multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor, how does Red Hat help customers through this journey? >> So there's, we have a really good story there and really good enablement. There are basically four footprints that you can deploy an application on, physical, virtual; public, and private cloud, and red hat portfolio deploys nicely there, RHEL, VMs, OpenStack, OpenShift, containers, you name it. So our approach is, not only do we allow the deployment there, but also the management of it as well, and we agree with you wholeheartedly, workloads are portable, they're mobile, people are going to move them between clouds, on site, they're going to burst into clouds, so our solution to that is the management console that we provide with CloudForms, and our management vision going forward for software as a service and some other things that we're doing, is all about that heterogeneous environment. Multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud providers, multiple OSs as well, so, you know, we want people to see Red Hat as a platform to stabilize on, not a solution where they have to go out and cobble together a solution. They should be able to do everything with our product in a portfolio from a single management console, including that heterogeneous environment with multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud. So that's how we approach it and we're building on that concept, not only with CloudForms, but also with the new CoreOS Tectonic Platform that we just, acquired, that'll be part of OpenShift, and then going forward our management business unit is working on software as a service, consumption based model that allows customers to do the same thing from their phone as an example. It's that vision that we've already executed on, but it's only going to get bigger going forward. >> One thing I would add is, one thing that's fundamental to our vision is that we're actually delivering a consistency across all those footprints so, it's not one version of Kubernetes for public cloud, another version for on-premise, a different automation tool here and a different automation tool there, it's consistent right? Ansible automation across bare metal on-premise, virtualization, private, public cloud, OpenShift with the foundation of RHEL, consistent across all those for one version of Kubernetes across all of them. So I think that's a big key differentiator as opposed to some of the other visions where you have one version on public cloud, one version on private, different disparate tools tools for each of those. We really believe in simplifying that from a complexity standpoint. >> Well Rob and James, really appreciate you giving us the update on Red Hat. We'll be back with lots more coverage from VMworld 2018. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.