What EMC’s president of converged platforms and solutions, Chad Sakac, once described as a niche virtual desktop infrastructure solution has traveled a long way. A swelling number of companies are coming to see hyperconverged infrastructure as the linchpin in their hybrid cloud strategy.

“We started with virtualizing compute and storage together on servers, but we’re seeing rapid expansion of that definition,” said Yanbing Li (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of the Storage and Availability Business Unit at VMware Inc.

Li and Christos Karamanolis (pictured, left), fellow and chief technology officer of storage and availability at VMware, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the evolution of  VMware’s virtual data center and HCI’s pivot into multicloud and data management. (* Disclosure below.)

Amazon bonanza and container cred

Customers are acknowledging HCI as full-stack software-defined data center, according to Li. VMware’s partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. and other recent announcements are stretching the potential of HCI.

“We’ve announced beta for vSAN to become the storage platform for Kubernetes [open-source container orchestration platform] in a vSphere environment — so lots of exciting extension around how customers want to see HCI,” Li stated.

The Amazon partnership has enriched VMware’s virtual data center and HCI offerings quite a bit. Amazon’s Elastic Block Store has enabled VMware to build elastic, scalable data services on top of its virtual storage. Amazon’s Relational Database Service on VMware is a fine example of the convenience of a hybrid arrangement.

“We support the full range of features that you get on AWS without having to go over the wire and beat those laws of physics,” Karamanolis said.

VMware is building out various policy-driven data-mobility and data-protection workflows. It is also introducing greater support for containers (a virtualized method for running distributed apps).

“We’re expanding our storage control plane to manage natively container volumes,” Karamanolis concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE