Stu Miniman brought Felipe Payet and Tracy Waller from VMware into theCube at Dell Storage Forum 2012 in Boston, MA to talk about the VMWare-Dell partnership and how that affects the virtualization ecology in the technology sphere. They sat down and spoke about mission-critical virtualization, development, and their role in the partnership and how they’ve welded the two companies together.

In the Americas alone there’s approximately 65 people dedicated to the VMware-Dell partnership; globally that probably almost doubles. So this is a serious infrastructure and training project between the two companies.

Miniman brought up to Payet and Waller that the discussion in the industry right now is that virtualization is not quite at the point of “single pane of glass” or a single management interface that can do everything anywhere—instead we’re looking at an ecology of APIs and connection systems that can be plugged into interfaces for management.

“For customers that are virtualizing on VMware…we are delivering that single pane of glass management interface,” Payet explained, “and we’re expanding on it with things like our vCenter Operations management product…that delivers substantial manageability and analytics and very powerful capabilities.” He added that while it’s a powerful value point, VMware is not putting all their eggs in one basket, “It’s a pretty powerful value product, we’re not saying the vCenter is the single pane of glass management interface that is going to manage everything including other VMs from other hypervisors.”

The public cloud and the VMware-Dell Partnership

Miniman mentioned that VMware has been doing acquisitions into the public cloud and Dell appeared to be pushing into the cloud as visible at previous conferences. VMware looks extremely excited about Dell and VMware both moving into the public cloud because this means that a partnership between VMware and Dell means the possibility of presenting a true hybrid-cloud to customers.

“So customers can now buy their own frame infrastructure from Dell and they can burst out their workloads using our vCloud connector technology to the Dell public cloud,” said Payet. VMware is extremely excited that Dell has gone into the public cloud in a fashion that permits customers to go with Dell hardware and then use VMware to shift between the two technologies.

The hybrid-cloud is an obvious and proper-strategy we’ve seen appearing from VMware in the industry and it’s one of the most agile approaches that much of the enterprise can take. By pushing into the hybrid cloud and opening with the public cloud, VMware is opening up further options to their resellers and their partners (such as Dell.)

Flash and virtualization

Finally, Flash interaction came up with the pair in how VMware might approach it; however, it appears that it’s too early to speak on how they’re going to implement it.

It looks like VMware is no stranger to the increase in Flash-based technology to increase cache speed and speed up transactions; but it’s hard to tell if it’s a focus they’re going to be spending much time on. Already the Flash ecosystem appears to be saturated with companies who are doing a great job so the likelihood is that VMware will seek a partnership than develop in house.

However, as Miniman was told in the interview: it’s still too early to tell.