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Last year we announced that our education program was evolving (read the full blog here). This next era of Nutanix University is designed to give you options to design your own personal Nutanix education journey based on your career goals. We are delighted to announce January 26th marks the release of:1. The first part of our Datacenter Services Education Track2. Our expanded Expert-Level Certification Offerings Datacenter Services Education Track Our new Nutanix Data Services Administration (NDSA) training course and accompanying Nutanix Certified Professional – Data Services (NCP-DS) beta certification make up the first part of the Data Center Services track. Nutanix Data Services Administration (NDSA) Training Course  Learn the administrative skills needed to install, configure, manage, and upgrade three different Nutanix storage solution products: Nutanix Files, Volumes and Objects, with our NDSA training course.Now available as a self-paced online course with an instructor-led o

This post was written by Jill Liles, Sr Marketing Manager for Nutanix UniversityNutanix University is excited to announce that the Nutanix Certified Advanced Professional (NCAP) 5.15 exam is now open for registration. And, that it has a new name:Introducing Nutanix Certified Master - Multicloud Infrastructure (NCM-MCI) This is still the same certification you know and love, the new name better reflects the technology and skill set of the certification holders! NCP-MCI 5.x certification holders have the demonstrated ability to perform complex administrative tasks on a Nutanix Cluster, as well as optimize both virtualized workloads and infrastructure components in an AOS deployment. For more information on the new exam download the exam blueprint guide or enroll in the Nutanix University learning path for related training, videos, practice exams and more.   Retirement of the 5.10 Exam Version As usual, when we release a new exam version, that also means the older version will soon retire

This post was written by Jill Liles, Sr Marketing Manager for Nutanix UniversityOver the past few months we’ve made several announcements to key Nutanix certification programs, hinting at things to come. Well, the time has finally come: The evolution of Nutanix Education has arrived! (Read the complete press release here.)This next era of Nutanix University training and certification programs are being designed to give you options that let you build a customized learning path that meets your current and future career goals. The new programs will cover our key product areas:  Digital HCI Services Multicloud Infrastructure Data Center Services Data Services, Security & Governance, Business Continuity DevOps Services Multicloud Automation, Database Automation Desktop Services End User Computing At the same time, we’re also making it easier for you to get started with Nutanix certification by releasing a new foundational level: Nutanix Certified Associate (NCA).

This latest release delivers improvements in logging, CSI driver enhancements, and Kubernetes 1.17 support.Following the recent Karbon Clusters 2.1 release, which featured the incorporation of the Calico Networking framework, CSI volume cloning, and expanded APIs, Nutanix is excited to announce the release and general availability of Karbon Clusters 2.2! In version 2.2, the Karbon team delivers support for Kubernetes 1.17, improvements in logging, dynamic storage volume provisioning, and several other key enhancements.Kubernetes 1.17 SupportWhile the level of contribution to Kubernetes from its expansive community is highly beneficial to the cloud native world, it also makes it difficult for users to keep up with the pace at which Kubernetes functionality evolves. Karbon Clusters 2.2 now officially supports Kubernetes 1.17. Logging ImprovementsKarbon Clusters 2.2, gives users the ability to forward Kubernetes cluster and application logs to external servers or endpoints. Previously, on

As an IT administrator, you're already optimizing and streamlining work to achieve the do more with less requirements. Here’s a quick health check. How many hours do you spend checking in on infrastructure resources, including nights and weekends?In the midst of the pandemic, your organization supports remote work, and most likely, you are managing the IT infrastructure remotely. With chronic shortages of IT staff and vendor support, it’s a challenge on top of a challenge. Especially now it is inevitable to minimize manual and repetitive maintenance focused tasks.It’s time to meet the intelligent automation solution from Nutanix. The dynamic infrastructure management console Prism provides a 360-degree view of your hyperconverged infrastructure through a single pane of glass. Its AI Operations (AIOps) tier keeps an eye on your infrastructure so you don’t have to. The AIOps also responds to resource anomalies which will  save you time to do more strategic work. Let’s find out how!Get Un

 2020 has been one of the most challenging, transformative, and “unprecedented” years in recent memory. It’s been a time of change for many in the Nutanix University community, so we wanted to do what we can to make the transition to 2021 a positive one.  So for the next 3 months, we will drop the price of most of our Nutanix Certification exams to just $50! But before you head off to take the exam, we recommend spending a little time with the exam blueprint guide and the related training courses in Nutanix University to make sure that you are as prepared for success as you can be. Once you’re ready to take the exam, just use the discount code GoodbyeHello when you register. Get started at www.nutanix.com/university  Terms and conditions Eligible exams include all NCP, NCM, NCSE, and NCS exams.  The NCA exam is not part of this discount program. You must register by January 31, 2021 to claim this discount, but your exam date can be later. This code can only be used twice per pers

Happy new year everyone, I hope this year will be the best year yet for you and your family. Lets continue to look forward and stay safe.This week on the podcast I chat with regular Kees Baggerman and Aditya Kaul. We chat about a topic that has been very hot in the last year or so end user computing and in particular NVIDIA GPUs and benefits for EUC. Follow us on TwitterKees Baggerman Angelo Luciani Dwayne LessnerIf you enjoy The Nutanix Community podcast, consider providing a rating and review in iTunes or your podcasting platform of choice. It helps people find the show easier and will help me make improvements in the series by seeing what you have to say.Subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, Spotify or Google

Nutanix was founded with a bold vision: to make managing IT infrastructure so simple that it becomes invisible. We made compute, storage, virtualization, and clouds invisible—a technology stack that practically runs itself. Now, we’re making the support needed to operate such a complex stack invisible too.While Nutanix continues to deliver products that are simple and easy to use, underneath, the complexity and availability of ecosystem options for the technology stack has continued to increase.2011: Hyperconverged Infrastructure stack2020: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure stackThe disruptive Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution that Nutanix pioneered a decade ago originally consisted of Nutanix NX nodes, AOS software, the ESXi hypervisor, and Prism management software. Over time additional infrastructure layers have been added, providing an end-to-end environment for hybrid cloud and multicloud solutions.Nutanix has consistently provided world-leading Support with a 90+ Net Promote

This post was authored by Sydney Araya, Customer Marketing Specialist, Education Services at Nutanix.Most of us have included self-improvement or learning a new skill to our list of New Year’s resolutions at some point in our lives but it can be easier said than done. To help you get – and stay – inspired this year, we want to introduce you to Dairlon Alves, System Analyst at TechnipFMC. In his new profile, Transition and Transformation: How Getting Nutanix Certified Enhanced My Career in IT he shares how his choice to be a lifelong learner transformed his career path from gardener to Nutanix Certified Professional.“Professional growth is a journey. IT is constantly evolving, and your growth is your responsibility. Just like a garden, it’s important to nurture your growth and get support from the right mentors and community so that you can reap the rewards that come your way.” We hope you’ll be just as inspired by Alves’ story as we were. Read the full story© 2021 Nutanix, Inc.  All ri

I am delighted to share our growing list of Nutanix Technology Champions (NTC) for 2021. This group of IT professionals are from every cloud, application and technology group. Their diverse backgrounds, experiences, and expertise help their organizations and the virtualization community to challenge the status quo.This has been a challenging year with COVID, families coping with distance learning and the changing dynamics of working from home. But these NTCs continued in the face of unprecedented uncertainty, delivering the applications and services their companies, clients and friends needed.In addition, they continued to mentor and encourage others showcasing what being part of a community is all about.I'm looking forward to another exciting year and learning from many of you. Take the time to get to know one another and congratulate each other on social media, use the hashtag #NutanixNTC and keep the conversation going.One more thing - What can I do if I did not make the list this y

This post was authored by Bhavik Desai, NutanixNutanix has been disrupting enterprise IT infrastructure for over a decade now, evolving from servicing VDI and dev/test workloads to powering the most demanding and performance-intensive workloads for more than 17,000 customers, across industries and around the world. When Nutanix engineers began designing AOS, the software foundation of hyperconverged infrastructure, they made some key architectural decisions that resulted in a very resilient, highly scalable, and performant architecture. Some of them were:Fine-grained metadata, which enables flexible and dynamic data management, which also provides fast recoveries during failure scenarios and migrations. Dynamic data management, enabling AOS to keep active data locally on the same node where the application is residing. Data locality helps in providing optimal performance to applications without having to traverse the network.With newer versions of AOS, Nutanix engineers have made furth

Practice Exams are now available for Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) & Nutanix Certified Advanced Professional (NCAP)!     Nutanix practice exams are yet another way for you to prepare for your imminent certification exam. Our practice exams consist of 25 questions – based on the same objectives and level of cognitive complexity as you will find on the live exam.     These questions are based on the same knowledge objectives and are written at the same level of difficulty as you will find on the live exams. You have an hour to complete the exam, after which you will receive a percentage-based score.   However, the true goal of this exam is to become familiar with the types of questions you will see on the real exam. As a result, we recommend you take the exam as many times as you want and work towards a 100% passing score. If you do answer an item incorrectly, we will provide you with information explaining why the correct answer is right and the other options are not at the

This week on the podcast Dwayne speaks with Steve Carter and Bhavik Desai about our recent release AOS 5.19. This one is full of features and Dwayne highlights some of the more notable items. I’d love to hear from the community about what excites them in this release so be sure to ping @nutanixnation on twitter and let me know. Follow us on TwitterAngelo Luciani Dwayne LessnerIf you enjoy The Nutanix Community podcast, consider providing a rating and review in iTunes or your podcasting platform of choice. It helps people find the show easier and will help me make improvements in the series by seeing what you have to say.Subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, Spotify or Google

This post was authored by Amin Aflatoonian, Enterprise Architect NutanixIn our previous post, we presented an architectural overview of Contrail integration to the AHV cluster. In this post, we describe the deployment of this controller in detail.A detailed description of virtual network and VM creation will be presented in the next post.DeploymentTo explain the deployment of Contrail on AHV, we used a lab environment containing a  three node Nutanix cluster. We present the lab architecture in the following figure.Contrail AHV lab architectureBecause we don’t need to have a Contrail control HA, we deploy only one Contrail controller VM and three vRouter VMs (one vRouter per node).We used Ansible to deploy Contrail. In this lab, we also created an Ansible deployer VM (called Contrail deployer) that manages the deployment lifecycle. For this purpose, we created a provisioning network in the Nutanix cluster and attached all Contrail VMs (controller and vRouters) to this network. The figur

As more organizations turn to a hybrid cloud and multicloud model to serve a diverse user base, Nutanix has taken a lead in providing a platform to serve any workload, anywhere. Data is a core component to this platform and providing flexible storage to enable data anywhere is the mission of Nutanix consolidated storage solutions. In recent weeks we’ve been excited to announce new capabilities that deliver on the promise of data anywhere to support workloads where users need them.Nearly limitless scaleA critical component to a multicloud solution is the ability for a platform to scale to the size required by a workload and cloud location. Sometimes the location is at the edge and the needs are small and other times the workload spans the core datacenter and public cloud, with massive capacity and performance requirements.Nutanix consolidated storage solutions continue to push the boundaries of storage capacity with extremely dense nodes. We now offer 350 TB capacity nodes for both Nuta

During our first ever virtual .NEXT conference that took place in September 2020, we had over 1000 Test Drives taken over the course of the two day event.  If you’re not familiar, Nutanix Test Drive allows you to experience Nutanix products and solutions on-demand directly in your web browser.  These clusters are pre-seeded with interesting services, VMs, and demo applications to make the experience interesting for our end users.Have you ever wondered how we can reliably create 1000s of Nutanix clusters in a short period of time?  And, once created, how we prepare these clusters with interesting VMs, data, and demo applications?  The short answer is that we use Nutanix Calm extensively during this process!  If you’re not familiar, Nutanix Calm provides infrastructure and application automation and orchestration across private clouds and public clouds. For a longer answer, read on!Cluster CreationThe first step is creating a nested Nutanix that can run on a wide variety of infrastructur

This week on the podcast I speak with two well known community members, Aaron Delp and Kees Baggerman. We discuss Citrix on Nutanix clusters. We cover a good deal on this episode from where and why to start, different use cases and we go over some testing results with Domain controllers on-prem and in the cloud. There is a lot of goodness in this episode, site back and enjoy! Follow us on TwitterKees Baggerman Aaron Delp Angelo Luciani Dwayne LessnerResourcesCitrix on NCA: MCS and Windows Desktops Citrix on NCA: MCS and Windows Servers Citrix on NCA: PVS and Windows Desktops Citrix on NCA: PVS and Windows Servers Bursting 2,000 Citrix Desktops to AWS in Under 2 Hours with Nutanix Clusters Citrix Cloud on the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform Delivers Choice, Simplicity and Performance If you enjoy The Nutanix Community podcast, consider providing a rating and review in iTunes or your podcasting platform of choice. It helps people find the show easier and will help me make improvements in t

A few weeks ago we announced a new level for Nutanix certification, the Nutanix Certified Associate (NCA). The beta version of this exam has closed, but starting today you can now register for the live version of the exam, the first available date will be December 8.The NCA program is designed for IT professionals with 6-12 months of experience, or IT managers who are not engaged with Nutanix systems on a day-to-day basis. Earning this certification proves that you have the skills needed to navigate a Nutanix Cluster and to assist in operating and managing a Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.If this program sounds right for you, you can go ahead register for your exam date now - it costs just USD $99. While you’re waiting, we suggest using this time to prepare: Download the exam blueprint to review the knowledge objectives Complete the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Fundamentals training course (available online or as instructor-led training) Take the practice exam  These 3 steps will help ensure tha

The 2021 Nutanix Technology Champion (NTC) applications are open We are accepting submissions up to November 5, 2020, at midnight PST. We will announce the new group in December 2020.This program recognizes Nutanix enterprise cloud experts for their ongoing and consistent external contributions to the community and industry. Nutanix Technology Champions are our advocates and technology ambassadors who influence change with practical advice and bold ideas.The NTC program provides unique opportunities to expand their knowledge further, amplify their brand, and help shape the future of the Enterprise Cloud.Benefits to program members include:Early access briefings about Nutanix products and announcements Access to private betas and insight into ongoing product development Participation in exclusive meetings with engineering teams Access to discussions on the Nutanix NTC slack channel with internal teams Unique activities at our annual .NEXT conference including pre-show briefings Support

At Nutanix, our customers always come first. Throughout the years, we have always made significant investments to ensure our customers have the best experience with our products and services. This has been recognized by our industry-leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) which has averaged over 90 for the past six years in a row. I am also delighted to share that Nutanix has received a number of additional customer service awards this year.For the seventh year in a row, Nutanix received the “NorthFace ScoreBoard Award” from CRMI in recognition of our outstanding customer service and support throughout 2019. In recognition of our sustained excellence for having won this award for more than five years, Nutanix also received the NorthFace Summit Class Award, which is a rare honor. The Nutanix Support Portal was chosen as one of the “Top 5 Support Websites” in the industry by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) for a third time! NorthFace This year’s award recognized our investment in

Just about a decade back, when Nutanix set on the path to bring simplicity to IT infrastructure, we created the operating system for datacenters. An OS that can manage and provide services that typically run in a DC - compute, virtualization, storage, and associated networking. Some of the focused workloads were (and are) End User Computing, Server Virtualization, Database Management (SQL, Oracle, SAP HANA) and so on.On this journey of bringing simplicity and agility, we mastered the art of 1-click (Foundation, Upgrades, Prism), Business Continuity and DR (so mission-critical apps can run confidently on AOS), and Security (making it one of our leading differentiators).Even a decade back, from what I have heard from the early stakeholders, our founders always had a vision about the upcoming Cloud era. Our steps from the beginning were first freedom of choice, second HW agnostic SW, and finally the transition to a software business model and then to subscription. These have all been step

We are pleased to announce that Nutanix has been awarded a Common Criteria (CC) certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 2+ (EAL2+) for the following core products: AOS and AHV. AOS storage is the foundation that makes hyperconverged infrastructure possible to deliver scalable and high-performance storage for all applications. AHV is a license-free virtualization solution for your enterprise to streamline operations. The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation is the most widely recognized international security standard for the evaluation of Information Technology (IT) and IT-enabled products. The Common Criteria requirements and guidelines are defined in International Standards Organization (ISO) 15408.  A rigorous CC evaluation is conducted by an independent accredited testing laboratory to ensure an unbiased assessment of security features. Nutanix’s CC certification is recognized by all 31 CCRA participating countries as well as all 13 SOG-IS participatin

Most traditional IT houses are built on a foundation of some long favored conventional wisdom. To wit, “the fans and early adopters take Windows 10 right out of the box.” “We’re bleeding edge; we’ll take SP1.” “We are an enterprise; we will deploy SP2 in production.” Or, “We’ll wait for RHEL to support VMware 7.0.” If you’ve worked in IT for more than a few years, you know the drill--there are some things your leadership just does not allow in your shop.The list is long and includes, but is not limited to, “hardware replacement after business hours only.” “Patch only when security requires it!” Or, “upgrades on the weekends only when there is less potential to impact the business.”In the end, the life of the crew doing the heavy IT lifting is largely one where even with the above rules, you never know what to expect. Other than to know that your leadership values one thing: stability of the production systems, 24x7.In IT, we get stability by making sure we don’t change anything. The bu

This post was written by Jill Liles, Sr Marketing Manager for Nutanix University Last week we announced several new changes for Nutanix University, including a new certification level (Nutanix Certified Associate) and a new instructor-led training course (Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Fundamentals). This week, we’re excited to let you know about some new - completely FREE - elearning courses and learning plans. Just log in to Nutanix University via your my.nutanix account to enroll and get started with any of these courses.  Nutanix Multicloud Infrastructure Learning PlanThis learning plan includes five new courses covering the products, capabilities, and technologies that serve as the foundation of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.   Configuring and Managing a Nutanix Cluster explores how to configure and manage a Nutanix cluster, including node operations, deploying at remote and branch office locations, role-based access control, and more. Configuring and Managing Nutanix Workloads helps you l

We are delighted to announce that Sophos XG Firewall has been validated to protect Nutanix AHV infrastructure and is Nutanix Flow Ready.Sophos is a worldwide leader in next-generation cybersecurity protecting more than 400,000 organizations from today's most advanced cyberthreats. Powered by SophosLabs - a global threat intelligence and data science team - Sophos' cloud-native and AI-enhanced solutions secure endpoints, servers, and networks against evolving cybercriminal tactics and techniques, including automated and active-adversary breaches, ransomware, malware, exploits, data exfiltration, phishing, and more.Sophos XG Firewall provides comprehensive next-generation firewall protection powered by innovations in deep learning, Synchronized Security, and their new Xstream architecture. Sophos XG Firewall running on Nutanix AHV provides deeper visibility into applications, network activity, and threats – able to stop even previously unseen attacks.Sophos XG Firewall has been validated