All About Community

This post was authored by Sydney Araya, Customer Marketing Specialist, Education Services at Nutanix.   We’ve spoken to dozens of IT professionals over the years, and they all agree that it’s while they are preparing for a certification exam that they learn the most. And studying the Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) program is a great way to build advanced skills that make great IT architects, managers, and CIOs.   The NPX program teaches you a new way to think about IT projects, beyond just the technical capabilities. You’ll learn how business requirements impact technical decisions, how legacy systems shape future projects, and how to communicate your recommendations clearly and confidently.    But don’t take our word about how the program can propel your career, hear directly from our NPXs:   “NPX is a hugely valuable certification because it shows you can apply the same depth of knowledge and conceptual workflows from a VCDX level of knowledge on the VMware platform across mul

This article was written by John Williamson, Nutanix Here’s the thing about traditional disaster recovery solutions. Not only are they expensive and time consuming to set up and maintain, testing them is usually such a hassle that organizations often do the bare minimum required for compliance purposes--if even that. This means that organizations are simply operating on faith that their solution will come through during whatever disaster befalls them. This false sense of security from an untested solution is in some respects worse than having no solution at all. Along comes Nutanix Xi Leap, an easy to use, no-install, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution. Not only is Xi Leap dead simple to set up and deploy, it also offers 1-click failover and failback, with on-demand testing. No more weeks or even months wasted setting up your DR test--and no more excuses for not testing. The good news is you can see it for yourself today. Nutanix now offers Xi Leap Disaster Recovery as

This post was authored by Saad Azam Education & Community Marketing Specialist at Nutanix.   Start 2020 by taking your career to the next level, with an updated slate of training and certification programs from Nutanix University.   We’ve completely updated our core training courses and certification exams to align with AOS 5.10, including: Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) training Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) v5.10 exam Advanced Topics for the Enterprise Cloud training Nutanix Certified Advanced Professional (NCAP) v5.10 beta exam Read below for highlights of each new release or visit the new Nutanix University portal (accessed via my.nutanix.com) and get started today.   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) training course This course is the foundation of your Enterprise Cloud learning path. It explores the deployment, administration, and troubleshooting of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, and covers topics such as securing and

This post was authored by Sydney Araya, Customer Marketing Specialist, Education Services at Nutanix.   Have you been thinking of getting your Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) certification but don’t know where to start? Look no further! Take advantage of these great resources outlined by NPXs themselves:   ·  Start with the NPX Exam Blueprint Guide “Read the blueprints, read the documents and as you’re completing your daily tasks, try to apply that blueprint to your projects. What you’ll end up finding is that you’ll either find yourself working into a project that fits nicely with the certification or it makes it easy to stitch together projects to build a synthetic one that shows your skills as a full stack architect.” - Jon Kohler   The blueprint guide is your roadmap to exactly what is covered on the Certification exam. It breaks down each Knowledge Objective and provides links to resources for additional study for each one. It also includes helpful exam details about the time

This post was authored by Sydney Araya Customer Marketing Specialist, Education Services at Nutanix.   Check out What’s New in AOS 5.17, a new course from Nutanix University! AOS 5.17 is an update that makes its presence felt in several major products in the Nutanix portfolio. Use this course to discover all the new features and get up to speed fast with everything AOS 5.17.    NEW features discussed in this course are: Support for NVMe boot and data drives, Hyper-V 2019, and rack fault tolerance support for Hyper-V The ability to directly attach volume groups in a guest VM cluster Better search, improved Cross-Play, and support for multiple vDisks for Prism Improvements to Nutanix Files, Xi Cloud Services, Flow, and Foundation Central   For all this and more, check out the course today in the Nutanix University Learning Platform.                                                               For all this and more, check out the course today in the Nutanix

This week on the podcast I chat with Madhukar Kumar VP of Product Marketing. We talk about Nutanix Test Drive - a way to experience Nutanix software in the cloud with no setup or hardware required. You can take a guided tour or dive deep and use the tutorials.  On the podcast we talk about ‘why’ we created Test Drive, how behaviors have changed when folks are discovering products and what’s available today in Test Drive.   Follow us on Twitter Madhukar Kumar - twitter.com/madhukarkumar Dwayne Lessner - twitter.com/dlink7 Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix Test Drive - bit.ly/2tIqtet Nutanix Online Community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix Community Blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M Nutanix Customer XTribe - bit.ly/3cMvK61 Nutanix User Groups - bit.ly/NutanixUserGroup 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 s

This post was authored by Lakshana Rajendran and Laura Jordana, Technical Marketing Engineers A little over a month ago, we launched Nutanix Test Drive 2.1 (TD 2.1) to showcase easy-to-use, no-install Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) enabled by Nutanix Xi Leap. Xi Leap is natively integrated with AOS and Prism and utilizes the Nutanix Cloud, a subscription-based public cloud services platform, and features guaranteed SLAs. Read this blog post to see what you can do with the initial Test Drive coverage of Xi Leap. Today, we are pleased to inform you that these capabilities are enhanced with a new and improved Xi Leap deep dive (TD 2.1.6). A deep-dive lab allows you to explore selected topics further with an easy-to-follow guided tour. Read on to see what cool things you can do with the DRaaS Test Drive now! Deep-dive into Disaster Recovery as a Service Get started by navigating to our Xi Leap Test Drive site. You’ll receive an email with a link for direct access to your envir

This post was authored by Mark Andreopoulos, Nutanix System Architect When discussing Nutanix as an HCI solution, I often find myself steering conversations with my customers toward the power of the platform. Make no mistake about it, Nutanix provides a comprehensive platform (a full stack) for not only deploying and managing HCI, but also automating both application deployments, and mundane, manual operational tasks. The benefits of automation to an IT organization are undeniable, however to fully maximize the ROI, one might say that you are only as good as your lowest common denominator. If you are only able to automate one small step in a very large workflow, then how can you ensure the benefits are realized by the consumer and customers of said platform? This is where the power of the Nutanix platform really comes into play. Nutanix Calm provides an elegant way to model and deploy complex, multi-tier applications for various types of consumers. Couple this with Nutanix Prism Pro

This post was authored by Sydney Araya and Saad Azam, Customer Marketing Specialists at Nutanix. How Do You Learn Best? Years of research has shown that people learn differently. Some people learn best by reading about a topic, others from watching videos, and some need to get hands-on and learn as they go. And this holds true whether you're baking a cake or learning a new technology.Let’s look at online recipes for example: You may be the kind of person who can follow the exact recipe and create a beautiful masterpiece or you may create a beautiful disaster even if you followed the recipe perfectly!At Nutanix University, we help you avoid those beautiful disasters by offering training in a variety of styles so you can find the class that works best for you—no matter how you learn. Today, we want to focus on three of our most popular learning options that let you learn from anywhere: virtual instructor-led classes, online training, and online plus training. What is Virtual Instructor-L

This post was authored by Rebeca Kinslow, Content Marketing Team Recent analytics found that before COVID-19, 75 million U.S. employees (about 56% of the non-self-employed workforce) had jobs that are compatible with working from home. Amidst a global pandemic, there’s no doubt that 2020 will be marked by a great shift to working remotely. IT teams are feeling the pressure of being responsible for onboarding significant numbers of employees to remote workplaces and faster than ever before. Getting workers onboarded with virtual desktops and apps (VDI) is new to many, and it’s okay if you don’t have it all figured out yet. We asked our customers what their best tips were for working remotely using VDI. Check ‘em out: 1. Plan first, act second When something needs to get done quickly, our first instinct is to act. However, to make VDI deployments a true success, companies need to invest in taking the time to step back and evaluate what their users really need. Our customers said to

Inbox filled with wishes that you’ll stay “safe and well during these unprecedented times”? Give yourself a mental break and let yourself daydream about the first thing you’ll do once emails go back to just hoping they “find you well.” That’s what we asked our customers to do, and their answers made us smile. Take a look at our customers most frequent responses and share with us below in the comments how you answer the question: If you are a Nutanix customer be sure to register for an account with XTribe. Also check out the latest Nutanix Community Podcast where Christie Vaughan (Program lead for XTribe) talks about the program with two members from the program. 

Welcome to the Nutanix community podcast with Christie Vaughan and Angelo Luciani. This week on the podcast Christie and I chat with two very active members of the Nutanix XTribe customer program Bradley Burgess and Fasial Jawaid.. They are also Nutanix Technology Champions. We chat about the XTribe program, how you can get involved, types of activities to participate in and how to have the most fun with your peers and the community.   Follow us on Twitter Christie Vaughan Angelo Luciani Nutanix Nation Resources Nutanix Online Community Nutanix Community Blog Nutanix Customer XTribe Nutanix User Groups f 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 written by Derek Seaman, Customer Success Enterprise Architect, Nutanix Early on in Nutanix’s history we focused on being the best and simplest HCI solution on the market. Market share, customer response and industry analyst feedback prove that we succeeded in that vision. However, Nutanix kept innovating and our vision has evolved into private cloud, hybrid cloud, and a multi-cloud strategy. As the Nutanix product portfolio has expanded our customers and the field have asked for a concise reference architecture clearly showing how all the pieces fit together, guided by best practices. The result of this effort is the Nutanix Private Cloud Reference Architecture. Reference Architecture Contents One of the key sections in the reference architecture is the Design Objectives. All of the subsequent design decisions in the document are based on these Design Objectives. Some Design Objectives for each customer may be different than what we have defined, which in turn may al

This post was authored by Sydney Araya, Customer Marketing Specialist, Education Services at Nutanix.   Whether you’re looking to advance your career, build your expertise, or deliver a superior experience to your end-customers, Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) certification offers benefits you won’t find anywhere else.   Although NPX certification requires a serious commitment in time and study, earning it delivers serious rewards in terms of knowledge, personal and professional growth, and community connections. Even the process of preparing for it – even if you never formally apply – can have a huge impact on your professional skills.   Need some motivation to get started? Here’s some advice from our NPXs:   Don’t let it intimidate you   “If you’re really serious about the NPX—and way too many people are often intimidated by it—take the boot camp first, pick a design and start writing. Work it every single day, even if it’s a single paragraph. Put yourself in that rhythm and

This post was authored by Jill Liles, Sr Marketing Manager at Nutanix.   Nutanix has always worked hard to deliver unique, innovative customer training programs that pushed the boundaries of IT training and were miles away from boring “death by PowerPoint” training classes.   We’re excited to tell you about the next step in that journey and introduce you to the new home of Nutanix University.     The new Nutanix University collects all of your training and certification programs into a brand-new portal with tons of new features and ways to build your own path and chart your individual career destination.     To get started, log in with your customer account at http://my.nutanix.com and click “Launch” on the Nutanix University tile.     Once there, you’ll find new learning plans that track your progress as you complete training, brand new interactive training courses for key Nutanix products and solutions, and, of course, the same great Nutanix Certification exam prep co

This post was authored by Sydney Araya, Customer Marketing Specialist, Education Services at Nutanix.   Certification exams can be stressful, so we’ve collected several resources that can help you approach your certification exam full of confidence! As you’re studying keep the rubber duck explanation theory in mind - Can you explain it clearly to a rubber duck? For more information on the rubber duck explanation theory click here.   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   Start with Exam Blueprint Guide   “People who are looking for certifications, no matter what level, put yourself in the mindset of applying the certification criteria to your daily work. Read the blueprints, read the documents and as you’re completing your daily tasks, try to apply that blueprint to your projects. What you’ll end up finding is that you’ll either find yourself working into a project that fits nicely with the certification or it makes it easy to stitch together projects to build a synthetic one

This week on the podcast I chat with Sachin Chheda about being ‘Cloud Smart’ what is means, the concept of applications attributes, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index and lifecycle management. There is lot in this podcast, so with that let’s join the conversation.   Follow us on Twitter Sachin Chheda - twitter.com/StorSC Dwayne Lessner - twitter.com/dlink7 Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index Building a ‘Cloud Smart’ Strategy for your Applications: Part 1 Building a ‘Cloud Smart’ Strategy for your Applications: Part 2 Nutanix online community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix community blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M Nutanix Customer XTribe - bit.ly/3cMvK61 Nutanix user groups - bit.ly/NutanixUserGroup 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 improvemen

This post was authored by Rebeca Kinslow, from our content marketing team Wondering what people are doing to stay engaged during quarantine? Here’s a hint: One British book retailer reported a 400% rise in online sales week on week at the end of March... and they aren’t the only ones seeing these massive book sale upticks. Reading has become a staple during social distancing restrictions. If you’re looking to join the trend, or just need a new book to add to your list, we’ve got just the thing for you. We asked our customers for their best IT-related book recommendations, and they were so good, we had to share! From boosting emotional intelligence, to the power of morning routines, lessons from baseball, and the power of introverts, these recommended IT reads have something for everyone. Check out the top 10 book recommendations from your fellow IT professionals: Has your screen time been waaaay up lately, author Cal Newport thinks so? Accept the invitation to reconsider social

We’re happy to announce that the 2020 Enterprise Cloud Solution Design Boot Camp and NPX Design Review schedule is available now!     Currently, we have six Enterprise Cloud Solution Design Boot Camps and two Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) Design Review Sessions scheduled around the globe for 2020.     Enterprise Cloud Solution Design Boot Camps   Prepare yourself to engage with enterprise customers and design Nutanix Enterprise Cloud solutions that deliver real business value, with one of these free, 4-day design boot camps. These boot camps are led by an onsite team of dedicated NPX-certified instructors who will focus on designing multi-hypervisor solutions capable of supporting enterprise-class applications according to clearly defined service level agreements.   The Enterprise Cloud Solution Design boot camps provide great immersive learning experiences that will change how you approach enterprise solution design and delivery.   Whether you are pursuing your NPX certification or lo

This post was authored by Sydney Araya, Customer Marketing Specialist, Education Services at Nutanix.   Do you have a workforce that now needs to work from home?   If you do then you may need to scale up your environment, add more desktops, or simply deploy a DaaS solution, or you may be looking to scale up if you’re already running Nutanix. If you’re new to Nutanix, we will walk you through how to get started, right from unpacking the box and racking a block, all the way up to Prism configuration. And finally, if you’re looking to deliver desktops as a service to your end users, we have a comprehensive training on Xi Frame that covers everything from connecting infrastructure to delivering applications. Whichever route you choose to take, you’ll find useful information in the new pair of EUC courses from Nutanix University.    Delivering Desktops to End Users with Xi Frame   This course provides descriptions and instructions for all the different options that are available

In the first post in this series I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware. We saw approximately 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. Next we compared Deduplication & Compression technologies where we learned Nutanix has outright capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance advantages over vSAN. Then we looked at Erasure Coding where we learned the Nutanix implementation (called EC-X) is both dynamic & flexible by balancing performance and capacity efficiencies in real time. Next we switched it up and discussed how both solutions can scale capacity & we learned while vSAN has numerous constraints which make scaling less attractive, Nutanix allows customers to scale storage capacity by adding individual drives, HCI node/s or storage only nodes without manual intervention. But all these advantages Nutanix has over vSAN don’t mean a thing unless the platform is also highly resilient to failures.

This week on the podcast Dwayne chats with Mike McGhee Technical Marketing Engineer about our upcoming release of AOS 5.17 and some of the new features - like Sync support for AHV, NearSync for Support for Metro (ESXi), network segmentation for replication and much more. There is lots to get excited about in this release, enjoy this episode! I hope you and your family are safe. Lets do what we can to help those in our local communities.   Follow us on Twitter Mike McGheeDwayne LessnerAngelo LucianiNutanix Nation Resources Nutanix online communityNutanix community blogXTribeNutanix user groups 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 the series by seeing what you have to say. Subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, Spotify or Google

This post was authored by Devon Helms, Director of Product Marketing - Storage Services Simplicity is included with Nutanix Files out of the box. Sometimes that means making management and administrative tasks easier so that application and use case owners can self-manage file storage. Other times it means extending control to end users and empower self-service. In a world where more people are working remotely, self-service becomes even more important as the remote user may not have ready access to office resources. A great example of this is the self-service restore feature of Nutanix Files. Nobody is perfect, we all make mistakes. When it comes to a mistake such as damaging or deleting files accidentally, the ability to rapidly recover a known good copy of the file can prevent a minor annoyance from becoming a major problem. Typically recovering a file would require the involvement of trouble tickets, storage or backup administrators, and hours or days of wait time. But with Nutanix

This post was authored by Dwayne Lessner, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer AOS 5.17 in my mind should be officially named the “Disaster Recovery” release. This release provides many great updates for customers using Nutanix Leap: DR orchestration to keep their business running. This release gives more flexibility to protection topologies, reduces system overhead, gives users more choice and reduces recovery point objective times. Single Prism Central Support In past releases in order to perform DR orchestration between two different sites you would have to have Prism Central (PC) at each location forming an availability zone. An availability zone in Nutanix is what one PC manages as a fault domain. This makes good sense in large environments if you were to failover, you would still need a management plane to initiate the action. For smaller sites that want to utilize leap for deploying a PC VM at each site can take of a lot of resources. So now with 5.17 you can replicate between

Check out what’s new from Nutanix University!   We’ve updated our core training courses and certification exams to align with AOS 5.15, including: Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) training Advanced Administration & Performance (AAPM) training Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) v5.15 beta exam Read below for highlights of each new release or visit the Nutanix University learning platform and get started today.   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) training course This course is the foundation of your Enterprise Cloud learning path. It explores the deployment, administration, and troubleshooting of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, and covers topics such as securing and managing a cluster, health monitoring and alerts, networking, data resilience, cluster maintenance, tips for solving common problems, and more. This course is offered as a traditional instructor-led training course with dates and locations – and virtual options! – o