John Furrier and Stu Miniman, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcasted live from Moscone Center in San Francisco, for Day 3 of VMworld 2013. They managed to persuade Martin Casado, Chief Architect of Networking with VMware, to join them for an interview focused on virtualization, storage and trends.

The mission of VMware is building the best Virtual switch out there, but “we’re also working on other areas such as open flow support,” said Casado. “We’re trying to identify standards and APIs.”

The open source community is now the standard’s bodies. Contributing code is a way to get self-ratified. “Why do you think OpenStack has been so successful?” asked Stu Miniman. As a self-proclaimed “huge fan of OpenStack”, Casado thinks that in evaluating the business around open source, “it’s equally important to look at what’s driving the adoption and what’s actually being adopted.”

In general, we want to move the infrastructure from hardware to software and this has to allow a certain mix and match to build your own orchestration. Open stack is the promise of having composable interfaces.

OpenStack is not about FREE (as in “free beer”), how it is sometimes perceived,  but about FREEDOM – the freedom of choice.

There are two inherent components to it:

1. the community – no project exists without community
2. the basic principles around open interfaces

“It’s essential for us to partner with all the networking hardware vendors out there,” explained Casado. As for thriving, Miniman asked if NSX can be successful without Cisco’s help.

See the full interview in its entirety below:

“In managing the virtual layer, absolutely. It is independent of a hardware vendor. VMware has virtual switches and virtual ports, as well as functionality in those, and can be very successful independently of any sort of deep end integration. Customers benefit through tiered integration and NSX can actually work across multiple hypervisors,” said Martin Casado.

VMware NSX is the network virtualization platform that delivers the operational model of a virtual machine for the network to transform data center operations. NSX is a multi-hypervisor, multiple cloud management system product.

“I think there is a real temptation to conflate network and storage virtualization. If we virtualize the network, then we are virtualizing the storage. But it’s the hypervirtualisor’s job to virtualize the storage.

Despite being still early in this adoption, Stu Miniman asked what milestone is going to show that we are really getting more options through the enterprise and maturing the stack as we go forward. “It’s not so much the size, but where they are in the adoption cycle,” says Casado.