Transcript
Hey everyone, thanks for joining us here at Verge IO for today's exciting webinar. We have the privilege of having some friends and customers of Verge IOs joining us today and we'll have them do a brief introduction as well, but the topic is very top of mind for many of you, we know, exiting VMware on VxRail without rebuilding the data center. That is a thing. We are here to talk about it today, so we're really grateful. As you know, a lot of folks, they feel like with regards to VxRail, well, you've got to deal with Dell. You have to do maybe the Dell private cloud, perhaps some of you have heard of this. It's now kind of the path that Dell is, I don't know if pushing is the right word, but offering, let's say, but it's not the only path. So what we're going to do today is talk about a different path, one that doesn't require new hardware or new storage or even schedule downtime to get there. So perhaps, could we start with even just a couple of quick introductions from our friends, Darren and Brian, who have joined us today? Sure. I'm Darren Kirby. I'm the CIO for the Banker Group of Companies. You may have heard of Al Banker Insurance Agency if you're in the DFW area. That's our sort of flagship brand that's been around for 50 years, but the larger part of the company is Alinsco Insurance, and we operate here in Texas and have operations in Mexico, which is why Brian's on here. I'll let him introduce himself. My name is Brandon. I'm the Director of IT for Alinsco, and I've been with the company for two years. Awesome. Thank you, Darren. Thank you, Brian. So Darren, if we could kind of go to the beginning of this, can you take us back to when sort of our relationship began? What was happening with your company and VMware Renewal or just in general, their goals to talking? Yeah. Yeah. So we were a VMware shop and we had VxRail, perfectly happy on it, loved it, had no problems with it, and George here reached out to me, and I had to go back and pull up our timeline because it's been a while now. I think it was in March of 2023, he said, hey, I want to talk to you about this Verge I.O. company. So I saw a little presentation about it and I was like blown away. It wasn't but a few more days after visiting, watching some more demos, I was talking to our senior systems engineer saying, man, we need to look into this. It had already been announced that Broadcom was buying VMware, but it still wasn't a big deal yet. So we weren't really concerned. We weren't looking for some solution. We weren't in any kind of pinch because none of that had raised its ugly head yet. So we're just happily going around playing with new technology because we like touching everything that comes out, which is probably why George called me. Here, there's a guy that'll try it. What was that? Give it to Mikey. Yeah. So just doing research and I don't know, I would say by July, I was telling everyone about it, even though we ourselves had not done anything with it, I was just so impressed with it all. And so along comes October of 2023. We are now coming into the era where the Broadcom, VMware, VxRail rules started murmuring. And I told him, hey, we have an opportunity to tip our toe into the Vergio water here. We have a project in Mexico. We had closed an office and we had some equipment that was just sitting there. So, hey, let's test it. So Brian then took it and put it together and I guess he can tell you about what happened from there, unless we want to pause and you have some other question about that timeline. Sure. Well, you know what? Let's jump to Brian for a minute and get your first sort of initial feedback from when you were initially exposed to Verge. Sure. Yeah. Well, actually, when we had like a demo first and then I remember after the meeting, you sent us the link and the trial version, I just went and just plugged all the servers because the servers were unplugged and started unplugging stuff. And then it was just a little project just to test it out. And I think that for the next week I had it already running everything because it was so easy. I mean, I just put the drive, install it on the first server, then put it on the other server, join it to the cluster. And then... And didn't you migrate some of our production stuff in Mexico to the demo server right then? And it was just... It was just... Yeah. But by the next week, by next Friday, I remember that was a Friday, by next Friday we were already running on Verge.io. It was that easy. I mean, our operation here in Mexico was... It's pretty small on the infrastructure side. I mean, it was only like five VMs, but I mean, by next week it was already running and everything was like, oh, it was pretty easy. It remembered me. And one of the things I like is that it was all in one interface. We don't have to be jumping from the vCenter, from the reporting, to all that we have with the competitions. So it was all in one. So it was pretty easy, actually. Awesome. Yeah. So we just did it. So if we can pause there for just a second. Thank you, Brian, for that background. So going back to the beginnings of, maybe let's call it the beginnings of the end with your former platform, how did that sort of come about? Were you just asking for a quote, you get a quote right away, back in the Broadcom VMware early days? Oh, no. So we haven't got to the horror stories yet. We're just playing around with this cool new tech and thinking, man, this could actually replace our production stuff. I didn't know if it could run on a VxRail yet at that point, but we were, you know, it was so simple. And setting that up as a target was, I mean, if you were under the gun, you could literally have something up and going in one day. So I don't know, I'd say it's shortly after Brian got that working, we went ahead and I think we got some backup licenses or something, and we started shipping our VMs from here in Fort Worth to the Mexico one. Am I saying that right, Brian? Just testing one. We were just testing. It was nothing official, it was nothing like that. We were just testing the backup and how it was going to behave with the VPN and all that. So I guess we are coming up into November of 2023. And is that when VMware officially acquired Broadcom? I think that's when it happened. That's when that happened. So that's when all the hell started breaking loose, if I can say it like that. So our Dell rep, at this point, we're a few months out, our renewal was in August of 2024. So we started putting this as a plan B. If things didn't work out with VMware and Broadcom, we had this in our back pocket as sort of a way to get out of that. And so we start talking to our Dell rep all along about, let's get our quotes, and they immediately are not able to get quotes. I don't know if people remember, but during those months, so Broadcom did actually have a 30-day shutdown that was like the following November, I think, where nobody could get a quote at all. But rising up to that, depending on who you were and the day, there was months where nobody could, if you were a reseller or even the Dell reps at this point became resellers because it wasn't their product anymore, they were having terrible problems getting quotes. And my Dell rep was telling me stories of other customers she had, and this is when people started finding out that their VMware side of their VxRail was going 4x or 10x times what they had paid before. So we're begging, we're talking, we have emails, we meet in person, and there is looking more and more slim, like we're not even going to get a quote. And if we do, it's going to be on the last day, which I think, I don't know, I'm speculating. It was probably by design because you wouldn't have a choice. But thankfully, we already had this up and running. We were already shipping our VMs back and forth. And we had built, started building a demo two node cluster here, or stack here in Fort Worth. And I have in my notes here on June 19th, I sent an email to our rep, telling her that we're working on our plan A, B and C, as she still hadn't given us a quote, and it's coming up in August. And we've confirmed we can do VxRail. This is why we were having that as a plan B. And at that point, it became obvious that we had to switch plan, plan B had to become plan A. And if by some miracle, they would have come through, I don't think we would have done it anyway, because even if it was the same price, VergeIO was superior in every way to VMware. So it became a no brainer to just keep going, swapping those around. I guess, if for some reason the VxRail would have crashed and burned and not worked, we could have went back to Dell, but it didn't. It was... Awesome. It was easy. It's almost too good to be true on how simple it is. So with that said, Darren, let me hit pause with you for a second. And George, I just want to ask you, have we ever heard this before? Is this a unique circumstance? No, we hear this pretty consistently, maybe not as well articulated as Darren just did it. Sure. I think we need to make sure the recording, even if it was the same price, we wouldn't have switched back. But make sure that just plays when people get to our website. Thank you for that, Darren. But yeah, we hear it pretty consistently. I mean, it's interesting if you look at our timeline against his timeline, people were mad at us before the acquisition became official that we were fear mongering and that Broadcom wasn't going to mess this up and all this kind of stuff. And we didn't have any... We were just basing that on past Broadcom acquisitions, right? We didn't have any insider information. We would have looked pretty silly if they didn't do anything, I guess. And then we've seen, as you might guess, in the recent two or three months, we've seen an influx of former VxRail customers as, you know, Dell hasn't really said this officially, but they're strongly encouraging customers to replace their VxRail hardware as they try to transition people to the Dell Private Cloud. And that hardware, as Darren will probably tell you here in a little bit, probably has some life left in it, right? And so, yeah, we're hearing that very consistently across the board. Right. And I wonder if it helps. Well, let's just say this. There's a quote that many of you may have read. If you hadn't, I guess you'll hear it here first. But Michael Dell, perhaps you've heard of him, says VxRail is no longer a thing. So, you know that you invested, you have gear. What do you do? Well, so I just thought I'd throw that out there in case anyone thought we were making something else up along the Broadcom debacle that was coming. So, all right. Well, thank you for that, George. So you were looking at alternatives, Darren and Brian. You had us, Verge.io, kind of like in your back pocket, maybe a plan B. Were there any other alternatives you were looking at at that time? We were banking everything on VMware and VxRail. There was no alternatives because VxRail and VMware were one and the same. I mean, we were trying to get Dell to say, hey, just renew us the VxRail and we'll put our own OS on it, VergeOS. And that was up in the air as, well, they're probably not gonna support it. And so we couldn't even take that chance. So we just bypassed all the drama, skipped it all and just didn't even look back because all the other, I don't know, everyone's probably been out there looking at all the different things. I mean, they're all not one single pane of glass. They're not ultra converged. They're not, again, it sounds too simple, but it really is easy and you could literally do it overnight if you wanted to at least get up and going. And I think that there's hope in that because you're not held hostage. You don't have to be held hostage by this situation. And there's a way out. We did it. We just skipped it all and we didn't even have, we never did get a quote. We never got a quote. And then I never had to follow up because we just started looking forward to the future and not what happened before. We just left it. While we got you and we kind of hear, something came in on the chat about third-party maintenance. You guys decided- Oh yeah, that was another huge thing. Yeah. Can I see the chat? Let me pull that up. I want to, sorry, I wasn't paying attention to that. Well, there's a woman that was asking for your phone number. I deleted that one. You just keep on going. So there was, that was another huge thing. So because the hardware wasn't going to be supported, we reached out to Park Place, which is a global company that does, they specialize in doing maintenance and support on hardware that's out of, you know, out of end of life. And we had been using them for even in life stuff because we had offices all around Latin America. And they had been really exceptional for us here in Fort Worth and everywhere. So we reached out to them and they said, oh, absolutely, we can do it. So we just switched our hardware to them. And they have a sister company that sells used hardware. And in that VxRail, it was a five node stack. We actually added memory from them. And I mean, their maintenance is a fraction of what it was costing from Dell. So they have the same sort of things where your stuff calls in. And I might point out another thing we should talk about on VergeIO. If your hardware has sense, Verge will find it. So we had put a bunch of memory in those nodes. And it was shortly after we were live, we started getting an alert from Verge about one of the DIMMs that was in one of the servers. So we thought, oh, it must have been those used ones we put in there. But it turns out, no, it was the original memory that was in the VxRail node. And I think it was probably there the whole entire time. It's just that nobody was aware of it. And it was possibly causing us issues all along, causing VMs to switch back and forth and whatnot. But that's another cool thing. So we had to get memory from another piece from them, or maybe that was still under warranty, I can't remember. But that's another cool thing. It shows you everything about the entire system, from memory to hard drive to processor. It'll tell you everything that's going on. So I'll come back to that. I guess to answer your question, George, we used a third-party maintenance that was way, way cheaper than the original Dell pricing. Yeah, and just to kind of add on to that, or pile on maybe, I tend to see two approaches. One is the exact approach that Elensco took, which is you go to a third-party maintenance organization. We hear ParkPlace a lot, by the way. And similar happiness with them. The other one I hear, I call this treating your servers like cattle instead of pets, is we have, I shouldn't say a lot, a smaller percentage of customers that are just running it out of maintenance. And their plan is to buy new servers, but they're gonna wait until these servers die. And because of all the, and I know we'll get to this later on, but because of all the availability features built into our product, if they lose a server, no big deal. They just, everything stays running. They're fine. Everything keeps working. So it's not a problem for them to do what you might think is a risky scenario. And right now is a good time to wait on buying servers, given RAM and prices, right? So, Darren, another one came in I'd like you or Brian to touch on is, my understanding is that VxRail only allows you to install ESX. How did you get around that? So I'm gonna pause and come back to the ParkPlace thing, cause I wanna make a funny note. Our Dell reps husband worked for ParkPlace previously. So when I was threatening, hey, we're just gonna move to ParkPlace. She was like, oh yeah, that's probably a good idea. My husband worked for them. So the ESX stuff, I don't know, you guys could probably answer that better than us. I mean, Brian, you can tell them what you did. Yeah, I mean, it worked just like a normal, let's say server. I mean, you just plug in the USB and go through the installation. While you have all the equipment. I mean, it's, yeah. The only thing is that the way the VirtualIO works is that it does, it works with a no RAID configuration. So you have to give it the entire access to the drives. That's the only thing that you need to do. I think that's the only thing I did, just remove the RAID and that's it. So are you saying that you just did next, next, next, next and it worked? Yeah, it worked. I mean, if you have used Proxmox, it's almost the same experience. It's pretty easy. I mean, I saw that there was a question about Proxmox. Actually, when I saw it the first time VirtualIO, it remembered me a lot about Proxmox. I used Proxmox like 15 years ago or whenever it went out. Yeah, 12 years ago. And they are coming very popular right now in this because people just don't know. They could, you don't have to do all the manual stuff you have to do with Proxmox. It's not next, next, next. Right, exactly. George, I wanted to ask you just briefly. So this story of testing that Brian was doing, is that something that we're seeing more and more of as far as maybe you might want to call it an on-ramp, let's say? Yeah, I think that most customers are able to install the product with no problem. It is a big product, right? It's infrastructure software. You kind of got to know what you're doing. Where I see people struggle is usually on the networking. I think the networking sometimes can be a little confusing to people because we have core networks and external networks and things like that. But once you get through that lingo, it's pretty powerful. Then as you start to really, the funny thing is once you start to scratch, because a question just came in on NSX, once you start to scratch the surface of the networking capability, there's a lot there. I mean, we can do routing and firewalls and BGP and all the different things for 90% of the stuff that NSX provides, we included for a lot more money, we included no charge. So it's a very powerful capability from that perspective. That was another motivating thing for me too, because I've always wanted to get NSX and never could afford it. And now we get it. For anyone who's not aware in the product, Inverge OS is a complete layer two and layer three networking suite. It just comes with it out of the box one. And that's what Darren and Brian are referring to. Brian. And I would say back to your question that they asked. If you are coming from VMware, then you already know how to do all this. It's not, if you were using VergeIO for the first time and you've never touched any kind of virtualization system, then yeah, maybe you have some learning curves, but there's almost no learning curve to switch from VMware to VergeIO. I'm sorry, Aaron. Yeah, no, thank you. That's a really important point. And we hear that from a lot of our customers actually. So Brian, could you just give us a bit of a sense of, like, what was the migration like? How did that piece, did you have to make some special time to do it? How did that all work for you? Yeah, actually, for example, at the beginning, the first step was, we had this five nodes VxRail. So we needed to somehow move all those VMs out. The issue that we had is that one of the first challenges was that we were using like 80 and 90% of the resource of VxRail. So we couldn't just take one out. If we take one out, that was it. So the first day we got, I mean, we didn't got, we had two servers, like 15 years old servers. I mean, I think those were our SQL servers 10 years ago. I mean, it was pretty old stuff that we had. Then we just filled those. I mean, it had already RAM, so we didn't have to touch the RAM. We just put some SSD on it. And we configure a two node temporary VergeIO. That's how we call it. Which is our lab now. Which is our lab now. So we built this two node VergeOS. And we started transferring from the VxRail VMware using the VMware service that VergeOS has. We just did the backup or the snapshot on the VxRail. And then we just recovered a snapshot on the VergeOS. And then we started recording slowly, of course, because- But that's all real time and unnoticed by any users. So the snapshotting and migrating over to the other platform from a VMware VM to a VergeIO VM, no one ever sees or notices that. No, yeah, it was- We did it. He did this all during the day. Yeah, we were doing during the day. And so that was the first step. Just get some of them, some VMs out. We had around 60 VMs on that time. We move into the, this temporary was, we were only able to move like 50% of the nodes, of the VMs with that one. Only 50% of the VMs on 15-year-old equipment, when we were running 80% of the five nodes. So only, Brian? I see, it's pretty impressive. Yeah. Yeah, so we moved all of them. I did it on JunxOS first. I just tried one because at the end, I mean, we knew how it worked with our Mexico test, but you always have some doubts, right? There's always that fear of what happened if something breaks. I mean, they said that it's work, but- Because these were our real servers. Yeah, these are real servers that were important. So once we record it on the VergeOS two nodes that we had, we just turn it on. I think it took like less than a minute to turn all the VMs once we got it there. First we tried one, then we tried a bunch of 10. I tried a group of 10. They all turned on and started working. We didn't have any issues. Then we had it all working. Once we have, we fill all that temporary, like VergeOS that we had, then we took the five VxRail nodes and started removing nodes. The idea was to start removing one by one. So we removed the, let's say the first one and install the VergeOS and so on. And then we moved some VMs to that one. Then we removed the second node and added to the cluster to the new VxRail with VergeOS installed. And also we moved some VMs there. And then when we were gonna remove the third one, it started failing and like, what's going on? It didn't fail the thing, but it didn't let us take another one because VxRail doesn't allow, it needs at least three nodes to run. So like, oh, what's going on here? And so that's, but that would change that we have- There's another thing. It needs at least three nodes and we could do it with just two, so. Which we never even talked- It runs with one. Well, that's true with one. We never even talked about our store magic replacement. Replacement so in the all of our remote offices, we had a product called store magic, which was sort of the third So in all of our remote offices, we had a product called Store Magic, which was sort of- Witness of the two nodes and I to my knowledge. It's the only thing that could do A two node only besides verge So that was another thing we got to exit and that I think that's why we originally that was our toe tipping That was coming up for renewal and we're like, hey, we don't have to do this Let's just go to verge io because we won't need that anymore But i'm, sorry, go ahead keep yeah, so I so at the end, so, uh, we were able to move 100% of the Of the of the bms to the to no closure with vxrail and a temporary one that we have Did at the beginning? um One of for example for critical One of our critical ones was the web servers we have those web servers on in the windows cluster so we were able to Uh move one. I mean remove remove it from the cluster Uh do the snapshot recover it on vmware. I mean on virtual s uh hide it and then turn it on and Join it back again to the cluster and it was running like nothing was we didn't have any issues That was the most critical one So you had a windows Iis web server running on a vmware vm And the other one clustered to it running in the verge io vm, right on the same cluster on the same windows cluster Yeah yeah, and that's how we did it on the no, that was for the ones that That's web servers are our most important application that we have Back there. So that's how we did it uh, and then just Do the same thing just remove the the one that wasn't vmware and all that and I remember that was was during the end of the of the month it was a September I was august 31st. We were doing all that live like yeah So what he's we didn't do any maintenance window for that Well, what was happening is we remember when we said our our renewal was up in august Well We got to the 31st which we never do anything on the 31st because for us that's end of month and we have A ton of mission critical stuff happening at the end of month On that day on that night And it was a weekend It was saturday. It's saturday. Um, uh, how do you call the the long weekend? I was it was a memorial day or labor day. No, no, no labor day weekend labor day weekend. And yes And brian was off the next day, too, I think Oh, it's just monday, I guess yeah, it was a monday that that was our our fear because it was um, if it broke it wasn't something broke who was gonna call me I'm gonna call vxrail i'm gonna call vmware i'm gonna call Dale i'm gonna go I mean and it was the long weekend. So Nobody was gonna answer and you're like if something broke i'm gonna be all the entire weekend on the phone But it did it so we made the most mission critical servers on the most mission critical night at the most mission critical And nobody knew Yeah and then that's how at the end with uh, Then we just turn off the vxrail and we just added Install the virtualize and add it to the to node Vxrail with virtualize that we already had and that's it and you're free in the comments to say wow, you guys are idiots But that's what we did I'm, sorry It's what you did and it and it worked so there's we kind of didn't have a choice we waited a little too long Yeah Before you do that and make sure you look at the whole detail of darren's office just careful what you say So george, I want to jump in and ask you, uh, is this Is this just a normal experience that everybody's got when it comes to vxrails and maybe the dell private cloud experience? Is it just kind of this is how it works for most people? Well, I think you can see some of that from the questions, right? There's there's a few that were kind of almost disbelief that they were able to run it on vxrail hardware Yes, um, I I think the you know The problem with dell private cloud is a little bit We're fighting a ghost right now because it it's not really a thing It's funny that he said vxrail isn't a thing but the thing he said is the thing isn't really a thing. Yeah, right. So um in my research on dell private cloud, the only thing it officially supports today is vmware which Seems like a problem to me. Um The so you gotta leave your hardware and stay with vmware or you could keep your hardware and go to verge os, you know Um, that's a problem. I I think you know, this gets into a conversation. I have all the time right the That when we start using the I like the word private cloud because I think it's it's the correct way to describe an on-premises Data center under our software the problem is is that you know, some people think private cloud is hey i'm running some vms That's not that's not really that's virtualization, right? And private cloud isn't i've put on this very sophisticated layer of automation around it You know, we love automation as much as the next guy, but that doesn't necessarily qualify you as a private cloud um, and that's really what If you look at the dell private cloud dbc That's really what they're doing, right? They're they're taking They're basically saying you can use any hypervisor or multiple hypervisors and we have this layer of automation That will make it all work and I don't know anybody that's actually seen the automation yet. And the only thing they officially support is vmware So right there's a lot of holes at least at this point in the strategy uh that's You know, it seemed to me to be a bit premature um To kill vx rail when it doesn't seem to me like dbc is, you know, at least well thought out at this point Right, right awesome So speaking of part of that big picture, uh, darren was is is about the hardware investment, right? If i'm not mistaken this dpc we're talking about new servers new storage, uh in most cases, uh, but did I? Understand you correctly You just kept all the same vx rail hardware, right? And was was that your plan, uh all along? uh, yeah, I mean we You mean well we still had um I think there was two still two years left before end of life on that for us and we just didn't do it because we went to park place for the maintenance and So yeah, we were planning on running the vmware on that At least for the next two years before we had to do a hardware refresh But now we don't even have to do the hardware refresh now in all fairness. We did add memory Sure to those nodes so that we could do more. Um, but we didn't have to add any hard drives because they were already ssds Yep How's it performing? Uh comparatively speaking? Well, you heard we took half of the load and put it on These 15 year old servers and it worked and then he had half of the load Running on two nodes from the vx rail Yes, so yeah, I mean we have we can lose two servers and be okay at this point where before we couldn't even We could have barely ran if we would have lost one of those we might have had to shut them down it was And we've had and we did have that happen where we had to take it down for some sort of maintenance and we got alerts like crazy You know from from uh from vmware barking because there was no resources with having one out That's not an issue anymore with virgio again, it's just far superior to VMware But darren I had a fun question come in By the way, great chat everybody keep it coming I'm trying to keep up with it as best I can I did throw a polling question if you wouldn't mind answering that but darren Here's a good one Did you keep the vx rail bezels? I think they are on there Yeah What we gotta do is get you a virgio sticker and stick it Yeah, or or a little But we do we have we have other You guys we have other customers doing the same thing where if you didn't know that they were a virg shop You'd think they were vx rail or nutanix in some cases, you know on their super micro boxes It's a it's a thing. Maybe we need to maybe we need to start making some bezels george I just committed you to having it done by the end of the week No problem No problem. So, all right. Well, thank thank you for that. Uh that explanation that that's really helpful. Um, And george just to make sure we've framed this properly right the when it comes to um When it comes to the vx rail, I I feel like there's some some extra resources that uh Been previously needed that maybe not now with with verge for folks that are thinking about what to do with their vx rail gear Uh, we just don't have that same overhead Need do do we? Right. Yeah, and this goes all the way back to the integration that that brian was talking about right because everything is in a single piece of code There's only one metadata Index slash engine that we're dealing with right and it's all integrated together. So number one, there's no Redundancy with between like, uh metadata, uh tables or types Uh, and then number two, you know, if you look at the size of our code source code Uh, it's about four hundred thousand lines of code if you look at it's actually Less than that and the development guys take it as an insult when I say that but Thousand lines of code the last time I checked the the stack that we're talking about here Uh with vmware vcenter and vsan not nsx nsx Uh, you're looking at about 30 million lines of code. So now If I can give you the same functionality In 400 000 lines of code that takes another company, you know, 25 30 million lines of code It's a math issue at that point, right There's less to traverse by the way. It's easier to debug if we have a bug. I only got to scrape through 400 000 lines of code instead of 25. I mean, I don't know how in 25 Well, I guess I know how but imagine the difficulty of trying to find something went wrong in 25 to 30 million lines of code Not fun well All right. Well, thank you for that george. Um Brian, I want to come back to you and just ask you. All right, you've described this pretty Pretty incredible transition that you made. Uh, some might call it risky some but it worked it was a calculated risk It worked now. What is sort of day-to-day? What what does it look like for you now, uh as you've Transitioned, uh, have you had to do have you have you had the opportunity to do any upgrades? Uh, Did you do any recoveries? What does that kind of all look like? yeah, I mean it's Pretty simple. I mean it doesn't require a lot of maintenance. I mean it's Uh, even there's some things it can be fixed by itself For example, we just got an alert that what's saying oh this vm is using an old um machine Uh, please update it and I just click and there's a button there There's a fix it and I just click fix it and you already updated the machine And then if I wanted to restart you also just give you the option. Oh you want to restart? uh, you wanna restart or you wanna do it manually and I can just click restart and it's gonna restart the vm and It's gonna that happened while we were on the call here Yeah, I have it. I just did it um that was for one of the Appliances like obs that we have from I don't know So yeah, I mean it's pretty easy. We have recovered files even we have uh, recover machines even because we had an An issue there with darren deleted the wrong Folder That's why they call me the hands-on working cio, oh, yeah, yeah, we're just giving them a test right to make sure they're on their toes Yeah Hey, you did an oops too big speaking of learning curves. You accidentally restored the whole entire thing Oh, yeah, so we checked all of our audit boxes on accident. Yeah Yeah that also oh, yeah, I have already restored entire the entire virtual um cloud It was by mistake, but I did it The the good thing was when we were testing it at the beginning so we were just trying to recover a vm and I Tried to do it without reading the manual And and I just click restore and it restored the entire cloud, but it was okay because it was the testing At that time at the end. They're gonna ask us. What would you have done different? Maybe we should have ran the main read the manual Yes, I mean, but it's just so intuitively obvious what to do you don't really need to yeah And even if you mess up you get to check a box on your audit And yes Aaron, I feel like you've lost control of this webinar. I'm, sorry aaron in the best way possible Yeah in the best way possible. So how about support brian? Have you um, have you had any support experience yet? Yes, it's the uh, it's i'm not exaggerating the best support ever I can have ever had I mean that the waiting time for a call the waiting time for a call, the most long one was like one minute I think. So I mean, I call support and I get someone pick up the phone in the first minute. So yeah. And then the escalation, we had to escalate a case once and I didn't have any issues getting a top engineer on it. And we had an issue at the beginning with the, actually with the first one that we did, where we configure, just what Josh was saying, we configure it wrong, the network, and we had to fix it. And yeah, we were able to escalate the case pretty fast. I mean, we got an engineer in the call and he just told me, do you have time right now to work on it? He sent me a link. I joined a Zoom meeting and we started working on it. I mean, I didn't have to schedule anything. It was just in the moment that I was in the call with them. And by the way, all of these errors and problems that he's talking about, none of them are service affecting or that anyone knows. They're just more bothersome and we need to fix them. It doesn't mean that the system is down. It's a super forgiving place to work on. Awesome. Well, we're glad to hear. And by the way, we've heard from many customers how our support experience is, in fact, the best that they've ever had. And so, I never get tired of hearing that. I'm glad that that's been the case for you as well. Thanks for your time. Yeah, Brian. Back in the day, I had to spend an 18-hour service call with VMware. Yeah. 18 hours once. I just remember when we had the issue with the SQLs. I mean, yeah. That's crazy. So, Darren, now I have something for you. We want to not get too specific, but could you give our viewers just sort of an idea? Are there any cost savings involved? Was it specifically licensing? Was there anything beyond licensing? What can you tell us all about that? Wow. Well, first of all, it's cheaper than VMware, obviously, with broadcoms jacking up the prices, but it's by node. So, if we wanted to throw more processors and whatever into the thing, it's still the same price. So, just the system itself is a cost savings, but we can use the built-in backup system, which we have. And so, there's no targets and no backup software. You can use backup software, but why? When I threatened Brian with that, he goes, we already have backups of the backups of the backups. So, you want another backup? Maybe. We didn't have to pay for the store magic anymore. Great. What else? What else, Brian? I mean, it's the maintenance went to a fraction, not a half, but a fraction. So, nice, nice. And you talked earlier about how kind of historically longing for NSX, but the cost was prohibitive, and now you've got that reality. This call is probably not the webinar for it, but we can talk about all of our future dreams and plans to use on this platform with all the new stuff coming out that, I mean, all the stuff we're talking about today are sort of the scratch of the surface. Wait till your dev team gets a hold of it. That's awesome. So, George, if I can just check in with you about this. A lot of folks have historically been conditioned to think, well, if things get bad with VMware, we just need to swap hypervisors. Like that's the solution. That's the answer. Is that really the answer? Well, I mean, yeah, I guess it could be, but not a good one. I think the key thing is, and it's hard because you've got pressure on this one. It's like, you know, my leg hurts. I want to get my leg to stop hurting. I think it's the, and we see this time and time again, and I think a lot of times, and clearly with Darren and Brian, it was the case that the hypervisor was the sort of the thing that was getting most attention. But once you start doing the math around it, because the cost savings, yes, we're going to be less expensive than VMware, but frankly, that's easy now, right? Broadcom made that very easy. It's the total cost that, you know, that old total cost of ownership or TCO, whatever acronym you want to throw at it, that really starts to pay off now because you've got, you know, you're going to save on, over time, you're going to save on, you know, you don't have to buy high-end network switches anymore. We do all that in software. You don't have to buy high-end storage systems anymore. We do all that in software. You can change your mind on hardware vendors tomorrow. You know, right now, you know, might be a good time to have some flexibility on which SSDs you're going to buy, because vendor A versus vendor B might be significantly different depending on supply chain. It might be as simple as you can get them, right? I mean, you know, if you're out of storage, you can't wait six weeks for it to ship. So that kind of flexibility is what I think really matters. And, you know, I always talk to people, look, take an infrastructure-wide approach to this. You know, Darren touched on data protection. You know, we, I'm not saying we eliminate backup. We have customers that have, but we certainly put less pressure on backup because of all the data protection and availability that we have. Right. Right. Thank you. That, yeah, that's, that's all really great. And Darren, as we're winding down here, you mentioned something about future, you know, future discussions, which we are excited about, we are looking forward to and welcoming them. Are there any things just right off the top of your head, as far as sort of the, your infrastructure roadmap that we might be talking about in the future that you're looking at already? So they're probably not infrastructure things, but except for I'm looking forward to the day when we do buy new hardware and I don't have to figure out what storage vendor to add, because that is always a pain and a significant complication to the whole thing, trying to get fiber channel storage or, you know, it's just, we don't have to do any of that. Just load up a server with a bunch of drives. So from an infrastructure future on new equipment, it's significantly easier to figure out what new equipment we need to get. But the things that we're looking at in the future, we're currently in a project where we're taking a single server and have verge IO on it. And it's, it's up and running with all of the, everything we need for an environment where we're moving a portion of our data center off prem into Equinix, sticking it in a rack there. And so that process has already started. And once that one is there, we're going to take another server out, an older server out of commission, put verge IO on it, ship it up there and have a two node. And I foresee us because this is working so well that we have a few more steps to make, to have a full migration to AWS cloud. But as soon as we have it all working there, I see us right away coming right back on prem into the verge IO nodes that will have an Equinix. So maybe not here on prem, but that's another awesome thing. We can take a couple of nodes and put them here and be a target and be the backup to Equinix in our own building. So DR testing is just awesome. I mean, you could just point everything back and forth and I don't think you have to have a maintenance window here. We're doing our DR test. We just do it and do it all the time and often. And, and, and then we showed Brian and I showed our couple of lead devs what was happening with this system. And as we told them that everything's got an API, the screen behind you that, that George has behind him there, that's all API driven. So you guys use your own APIs to build the GUIs. And when they started saying, oh, you mean we can do infrastructure as code on this? Yes. They're really super excited. But the thing that we're, we're fast trying to move to is we just purchased a couple of GPUs and we're going to throw it in our test lab. And we're going to start going down the our own AI hosting within our own building instead of paying for kajillion dollars of tokens from someone else. We'll just be running it here locally. And our dev team is extremely excited about that because they have, they went crazy with what they want to do, having that available to them. So those are sort of the really near-term things we're planning on doing. That's got us all really excited. I mean, once you get past the migration and it kind of just runs like Brian said, you don't, then you get to start doing cool stuff. And you don't have to worry about breaking or overloading it or something like VMware did. It's not, it's not so fragile. Right. Yeah. That's, that's really great. So I really also Darren and Brian in particular, but Hey, if we were to sum things up Darren, if you, if you could give advice to anyone you know, maybe VxRail customers or just someone who's trying to figure out their path forward, how would you sum that up? I was thinking about, you know, you could get stressed out and feel like you're, you got all this pressure, but there is hope in just trying VergeIO. As soon as you do a demo or it can easily become production and it can happen fast. So you're not going to be held hostage by the Dell VxRail VMware, you know, scenario. You don't have to be just do it. It's, it's really a no brainer. And I know it sounds way too good to be true. And there's no way it could be that simple, but it really was. So I think we proved it. That that's great advice. And by the way, you're, you're in good company already. I will tell you one of our, another customer of ours recently shared with a, with a group it, the customers Topgolf some of you may know, may know of them. And, and the gentleman there said, you know, I, I got angry when I started to feel like, well, I wish I had found this sooner. I wish I had found this sooner. That was what he was angry about. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you. And, you know, to everyone who's still here with us I've just put my email. Did I put the right? Yes. I put my email in the chat. If you would like to have a discussion to further talk about, or just kind of get us a bigger picture of the totality of the solution. We didn't talk about every capability and every detail here today, but I'd be thrilled to meet with you and have that discussion. Any, any closing thoughts George, Darren, Brian. Yeah. So just a couple of things. So normally we do a demo, but this conversation was going so good. We just let it run. So hopefully that's okay. Aaron's the guy to get you set up with a demo. You can see the screen behind me here. What, one of the things also is very helpful is we run our entire company on this product. The website is hosted by us on our gear. The hands-on labs that we run, I just checked, we've got somewhere around 40 to 50 active hands-on labs. Those are running on, I think, six-year-old servers. I probably shouldn't have said that out loud. Servers that are, I think it's maybe a four node cluster and they're hosting, you know, somewhere between 40 to 50 virtual data centers or tenants. So when you do a hands-on lab with us, you get something. You didn't even scratch on the tenant thing. Oh my gosh. Guys, there is so much more to this than we talked about. Go ahead. Sorry. That's all right. You got me excited again. So we, you know, in that lab, we've got essentially 50 customers all private to themselves running on essentially four nodes. Now, in fairness, they're not crushing it, right? They're creating VMs and things like that, but it is 50 of them. So that's there and development's all done internal that we actually develop the product on the product, right? So we use it for our development process, everything like that. So the entire company runs on this. So if it's going to break, we're going to know pretty quickly. So that's that. But yeah, I would say the key thing is, you know, whatever your next step is, if it's a demo, a deeper dive on the technology, whatever, Aaron's your guide to get that rolling. Thank you. And also just to be clear, some of the folks that have joined us today, they are customers of Verge.io and we appreciate you. And we appreciate that you continue to show up and just, you know, be with us during these times. By the way, Darren, you reminded me of something we did last year. I think maybe it was even the year before, but a webinar with a customer who decided he was going to use his system to do a to do a little demo, which I know we're not doing that here today. But when he went to log in, and this is to your point, Brian, and George knows exactly what I'm going to say, he was like, oh, wait a minute, trying to remember my password. He really just said it and forget it until he had to specifically log in just to show his system. But so I really appreciate, Brian, how you kind of pointed out. It's pretty hands-off. You don't have to tool switch like what you're used to in the past. A lot of great insights. Thank you very much. Yeah. All right, well, if there's nothing else to add, everyone, thank you so much for joining us. Please send me an email if you want to know more, if you want to have a discussion. There's a link to my calendar directly if you just want to pop something on there. That's great. But we really appreciate each one of you spending time with us today. Thank you very much. Have a great day. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Bye.
