All About Community

This post was authored by Laura Jordana Technical Marketing Engineer, Nutanix We are excited to introduce Nutanix Test Drive 2.1, which now allows you to test drive Xi Leap, our easy to use, no-install, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution. Nutanix Test Drive is a way for you to try out the Nutanix platform easily, through your web browser. Recently, we announced our new and improved Test Drive 2.0 running on Google Cloud Platform, which showcases 3 areas of the Nutanix portfolio - managing your virtual infrastructure with Prism and AOS, monitoring and planning with Prism Pro, and easily deploying and publishing applications with Calm. For more details, click here. With Test Drive 2.1, we have introduced a new tile, My Recovery, which allows you to explore Xi Leap. Xi Leap is natively integrated with AOS and Prism and utilizes Xi Cloud, Nutanix’s subscription-based public cloud services platform that features guaranteed SLAs. Test Drive 2.1 With DRaaS You can get started wit

Who doesn’t love discounts? Now through September 30th, 2020, the Nutanix certification exams are just $99! Take advantage of this limited time offer and get these hot certifications added to your resume:   Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) Nutanix Certified Advanced Professional (NCAP)   Click here to download your discount code. This code can be used for either the NCP or NCAP exam – or both!   What’s next after you get your discount code?   If you need to brush up on your skills, visit the Nutanix University learning platform to start studying today!   If you feel prepared, choose your certification, enter your discount code, and schedule your exam here.     Good luck!   © 2020 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only

We want to hear from you! The Nutanix education team has always worked hard to deliver unique, innovative training programs that push the boundaries of IT training. And we love to hear how Nutanix training and certification programs have brought value to your career. Please take a minute to complete our short survey and help us make Nutanix University even better! We’ll use your feedback to make sure you receive the best possible experience every time you engage with Nutanix University. Click here to start the survey © 2020 Nutanix, Inc.  All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). This post may contain links to external websites that are not part of Nutanix.com. Nutanix does not control

This week is another quick take, and I chat with Chad Dorr, senior system administrator at a healthcare provider and also a Nutanix Technology champion and Nutanix user group champion. We talk about VDI using Citrix, challenges or surprises that the current COVID19 situation has raised and how he is generally dealing with the new distributed workforce. As I mentioned last week on the podcast, I hope you and your family are safe. Lets do what we can to help those in our local communities.   Follow us on Twitter Chad Dorr - twitter.com/thorenx Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix online community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix community blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M XTribe - https://joinxtribe.influitive.com 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 hel

The live version of the new NCAP 5.10 exam is out now! Advance your career by adding the NCAP certification to your resume. The NCAP certification validates your ability to perform advanced administrative tasks and optimize both virtualized workloads and infrastructure components in an AOS 5.10 implementation. It also confirms that you are capable of deploying, administering, optimizing, and securing Nutanix AOS 5.10 nodes, blocks and clusters; and can use Prism Central and Calm to centrally monitor, manage, and troubleshoot multi-cluster deployments.  Objectives covered in the NCAP 5.10 exam include: Administration and Planning Storage Management Data Protection Security Workload Management Administering Prism Central Prepare for your exam by enrolling in the NCAP learning plan in the Nutanix University learning platform. The learning plan will guide you through the exam blueprint guide, training, and practice exams all the way to exam registration.   Enroll in the NCAP learning plan

What do Russia, Paraguay, and Tunisia have in common? Any guesses?   They all have at least one person who has a Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) certification. Since 2018, the NCP program has exploded to have NCP holders in 89 countries and is growing more every day! This is all thanks to the support of our community!     Check out more stats we discovered in the Certification Chronicles infographic!     © 2020 Nutanix, Inc.  All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). This post may contain links to external websites that are not part of Nutanix.com. Nutanix does not control these sites and disclaims all responsibility for the content or accuracy of any external site. Our decision to

This week on the podcast we have a Nutanix Technology Champion round table discussion. We have community members Mike Dent, Wouter Kursten, Rene Bigler, Dave Strum and Timon Watson. We wanted to share some thought on working from home, tips to consider, supporting customers from home, what has worked and rapidly scaling infrastructure to meet the growing work from home demand.   Follow us on Twitter Mike Dent - twitter.com/mikedent13 Wouter Kursten - twitter.com/Magneet_nl Rene Bigler - twitter.com/dready73 Dave Strum - twitter.com/Strumbelievable Timon Watson Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix's Response to COVID-19 - is.gd/NVrZWn Nutanix online community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix community blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M XTribe - joinxtribe.influitive.com/ 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 cho

This blog was authored by Sachin Chheda, Rodney Fite, and Pat Heinrich This blog is a continuation of the discussion on infrastructure and cloud choices. This is the second of the two-part blog series. In the first blog of the series, we covered the approaches for IT and applications teams to align their apps and services to infrastructure/cloud choices. This second blog of the two-part series will cover how various options for infrastructure and cloud align with the different application attributes. Let’s start with a quick recap of the IT infrastructure and cloud choices. Traditional infrastructure — Servers and storage with network connectivity that may or may not leverage virtualization. However, traditional infrastructure lacks basic cloud tenets. Cloud — Infrastructure, Platform, or Software delivered ‘as-a-Service’ to end-users with a mechanism to provision, use or consume, and meter for reporting or chargeback. This includes an extensive set of APIs and other hooks for automati

A few months ago, we released the first in our new series of free, online training courses covering the core Nutanix Cloud Solutions. Today we are excited to release the next three:Nutanix Consolidated Storage Nutanix Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OperationsEach of these courses is made up of two parts. First, you'll dig into product training that introduces elements of the Nutanix product portfolio. Then, you’ll explore how the solution ties them all together.Check out these new courses, or catch up on the previous releases, in the new Nutanix University learning platform.Nutanix Consolidated StorageIn this course, you’ll learn how Nutanix can help you deal with the ever-growing problem of unstructured data. Among other things, we’ll talk through what the storage landscape is like today; why you should deploy fabrics and not silos; and how Nutanix Files, Nutanix Volumes, and Nutanix Objects address storage needs across the spectrum of storage types

This Post was authored by Fred Feirn Digital Photography and Graphic Design Teacher Serving nearly 9,000 students, the White Bear Lake Area School District is at the forefront of educational excellence. We believe technology can do more than simply improve course delivery. It can transform the way courses are taught, and how students learn, by providing access to education anytime, anywhere, on any device. One of our most successful initiatives has been our 1:1 technology program, implemented four years ago. Each student was given a Chromebook to use throughout the school year, enabling them to work on course curricula at school and away from campus. My courses of Digital Photography and Graphic Design were historically taught in a classroom with networked computers. As the popularity of social media and photography grew, more students became interested in photography techniques, and enrollment in my classes expanded. The class also met the state art standard for high school graduat

Welcome back to the podcast, this week is another Nutanix QuickTake with Danielle Tomakin and Christie Vaughan. Today we talk about Nutanix user groups and Xtribe. These are two great community programs that connect you to the broader Nutanix community.   Follow us on Twitter Christie Vaughan - twitter.com/ChristayVaughan Danielle Tomakin - twitter.com/TomakinDanielle Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix online community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix community blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M Xtribe - https://customerxtribe.influitive.com/ 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 improvements in the series by seeing what you have to say. Subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, Spotify or Google  

One of the ways I learn is by joining webinars. Even if its technology that might not be on my radar at the moment, I make the time to engage in discussions and learn about 'what’s new' or learn 'new ways' to do things. This month we have a number of really interesting webinars available. Join one or join them all, one thing is for sure, you will come away more knowledgeable! Check out these webinars; Simple, Affordable, No-Install Disaster Recovery: That’s Xi Leap Mar 4, 2020, 10:00 AM PT Businesses are increasingly dependent upon IT for competitive advantage while threats against IT are ever-increasing. Business-critical applications have become the lifeblood of the enterprise even though the gap is widening between this reliance on IT services and a company’s ability to protect it. The cost of building and maintaining a secondary datacenter for disaster protection is sometimes cost-prohibitive. Coddling together a patchwork of legacy technologies is often the best some companies can

In this series, we’ve learned Nutanix provides more usable Capacity along with greater capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance when using Deduplication & Compression as well as Erasure Coding. We’ve also learned Nutanix provides far easier and superior storage scalability and greatly reduces the impact from Drive failures. We then switched gears and covered heterogeneous cluster support and learned how critical this is to an HCI platform’s ability to scale and deliver a strong ROI without rip and replace or the creation of silos. In this part of the blog series, we cover each product’s I/O Path for write operations with mirroring (a.k.a FTT1 for vSAN and RF2 for Nutanix). I will be publishing a separate detailed comparison between deploying software-defined storage “In-Kernel” vs “Controller VM”, this post will focus on how the traffic traverses and utilises the cluster. Let’s assume a brand new 4 node cluster for both vSAN and Nutanix ADSF and a single VM with

In this series, we’ve learned Nutanix provides more usable Capacity along with greater capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance when using Deduplication & Compression as well as Erasure Coding. We’ve also learned Nutanix provides far easier and superior storage scalability and has greatly reduce impact from Drive failures. In this part, we cover heterogeneous cluster support as this is critical to an HCI platform's ability to scale and ensure ever changing customer requirements are being met/exceeded. Hardware capacity/performance continues to advance at a great pace if customers are forced to use uniform (homogeneous) clusters it will likely result in a higher TCO and slower ROI. That’s bad enough but it also means customers will not get to take advantage of the performance and density advantages of newer hardware without creating silos which lead to more inefficiency. After all we don’t want to be in the same position where we need to “rip and replace” hardwar

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. vSAN, on the other hand, has a rudimentary “All or nothing” approach which can lead to higher front end impact and does not dynamically apply Erasure Coding to the most suitable data. Now let’s learn how both platforms can scale storage capacity: Here we see from a typical “tick-box” comparison that both platforms can add individual drives or additional nodes to scale capacity. As you’ve probably gathered from my previous f

In part 1 of Deduplication & Compression Comparison – Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN, we talked about data reduction/efficiency technologies which apply further storage capacity efficiencies to the usable capacity. In part 2, we’ll look deeper at how, when and where the data reduction takes place. The following table shows the storage tiers the data reduction technologies are supported for both products: vSAN data reduction technologies are NOT applied in the high performance “cache” tier whereas they are with Nutanix where in-line compression for writes is on by default and Deduplication is supported. With vSAN, Deduplication and Compression are only applied once the data is cold and de-staged to the capacity tier. Going back to the reference I made earlier that VMware has consistently been saying that they do not support data reduction on hybrid intentionally for performance reasons. It begs the question then why they do not apply these valuable technologies to their “all-flash” cac

In a recent post, 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 up we compared Deduplication & Compression technologies where we learned Nutanix has outright capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance advantages over vSAN. Now we’ll look into Erasure Coding which is another valuable and proven technology that can drive further capacity and potentially performance efficiencies, complimentary to Deduplication and Compression. As I’ve highlighted in the previous articles, “Tick-Box” style slides commonly lead to incorrect assumptions for critical architectural/sizing considerations such as capacity, resiliency and performance. This problem is also applicable to Erasure Coding, Let me give you a simple example: The above table shows Erasure Coding / RAID 5&6 are supported by Nutanix and VMware vSAN. With this information, customers/partners

In a recent post, I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware and we saw approx 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. The next logical step is to compare data reduction/efficiency technologies that apply further storage capacity efficiencies to the usable capacity. In the previous post, I declared “a wash” between the two products for the sake of simplifying the usable capacity comparison. However, the reality is it’s not a wash as the Nutanix platform has the ability to deliver more usable capacity from the same HW. Combine that with a superior storage layer in the form of the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (ADSF) which compliments data reduction technologies, vSAN is bringing a spoon to a gunfight. In this post, we’ll look at Deduplication and Compression. Data reduction technologies such as Compression, Deduplication are proven technologies that provide varying levels of value to customers depending on their datase

When considering Hyper-converged (HCI) products, often vendors, partners, value-added resellers & customers compare multiple solutions which of course makes perfect sense. During these comparisons, marketing material, in many cases “Tick-Box” style slides being compared and worse still being taken on face value which can lead to incorrect assumptions for critical architectural/sizing considerations such as capacity, resiliency and performance. Let me give you a simple example: A customer chooses/needs 16 nodes to meet their requirements and they choose the most popular form factor being a 4 node per 2 rack unit (4N2U) for the density, power efficiency and high performance. The nodes are populated with 6 x 1.92TB drives (All-Flash) as the cost of flash was justified for their use case/s. So we’re left with 16 hosts * 6 drives = 96 total drives 96 x 1.92TB drives with a formatted capacity of ~ 1.78TB = 170.88TB Then the customer compares vSAN and Nutanix which both use replication as

To fully experience a conference is to get immersed in it, and one way to do this is to be a speaker. This is a great way to build your personal brand and get out of your comfort zone and share with the community the cool things you have been able to achieve. Show your passion for solving IT bottlenecks to the world! We are looking for industry go-getters to speak at our upcoming .NEXT conference in Chicago and we think you’d be the perfect fit for  one of our speakers! Take center stage and build up your brand by leading your very own session at one of the world’s leading tech conferences. If selected you will have a 30-minute session dedicated to the topic of your choice during the main event AND you will also receive: A complimentary conference pass 2 nights hotel accommodation in Chicago covered by Nutanix A session owner to guide you through the process Professional speaker coaching from our award winning coach Feedback on presentation content Professional services for Powerpoint

This post was authored by Gabe Contreras, Enterprise Architect Nutanix When discussing big data architectures, we are talking about how data is taken in, processed and consumed.  This constitutes your big data pipeline.  The architecture can vary greatly.  For instance, take one of the most common architectures with Lambda, you have a speed processing and batch processing sides.  Speed processing is more real time analytics and querying. Batch processing takes longer and is normally done at scheduled times for taking a deeper look over a longer period of time. The components to build this vary greatly, it can be a choose your own adventure book with how you build your pipeline.  Some of the components used are Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, Elasticsearch and Cassandra.  All of these systems have one main thing in common, they are highly scalable.  These components can grow in size as your needs grow to be able to handle large data flows.  This scalable nature is what also makes Nutanix Enterpri

This post was authored by Mike McGhee Technical Marketing Engineer at Nutanix The Ever-Expanding Universe of DataFrom enterprise applications to the internet of things (IoT), the number of connected devices which produce data is growing at a staggering rate. Business Insider forecasts that by 2020 more than 24 billion internet-connected devices will be installed around the globe [1]. It’s no wonder analysts from IDC predict that by 2025 the world will produce 175 zettabytes of data, a tenfold increase from what was generated in 2016 [2]. The vast majority of this data is forecast to be unstructured. While much of this unstructured data will reside within Object Storage based services, a large amount, and likely the most actively accessed, will reside in network attached storage (NAS) leveraging the SMB and NFS protocols within datacenters. Traditional systems with their inherent limits on managing unstructured data at scale will be unable to handle the coming data explosion.

This post was authored by Saad Azam Education & Community Marketing Specialist at Nutanix. We have finally come out with What’s New in AOS 5.16! You can use this course to help you learn about all the features and get up to speed fast with everything AOS 5.16.  This short online training covers advanced features found in AOS 5.16 including storage capacity, data protection, security, cluster lifecycle management, and much more! The NEW features discussed in this course are: Secure Boot Support for VMs, and Nodes running AHV Upgrading AHV Hosts using Life Cycle Manager (LCM) We look forward to seeing you explore the different lessons and areas that are of significance to you. Get started here! ©️ 2020 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification p

This post was authored by Jill Liles Sr Marketing Manager at Nutanix.We want to let you know about an exciting addition to the Nutanix Certification program: digital badges and improved certificates. Digital BadgesWe have partnered with Credly to use their Acclaim platform to distribute digital versions of all your Nutanix certifications. Digital Badges provide information describing your qualifications and the steps you completed to earn your certification.There is no cost for using a Digital Badge, it’s simply another way to share your achievement with the world. BenefitsEach digital badge you earn comes with these benefits:Social Sharing – Share your accomplishment on social platforms including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Xing. Logo – Download the logo representing your certification/badge for use in e-mail signatures or other representation outside of social media. Printable Certificates – Print out your certificate, which has been newly redesigned to be more visually appealin

This post was authored by Lauren Willard Nutanix We already know that Nutanix built hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to solve datacenter complexity issues. But you may not be aware that we also have our own virtualization offering, AHV (it’s not an acronym, I checked). AHV was created to further reduce complexity issues around virtualization and HCI. It’s the answer to merging and converging virtualization and is a crucial part of HCI. You can either bolt on a hypervisor or choose to have it integrated and built into your HCI product to gain additional benefits without the extra cost and time it takes to add it to your infrastructure. Integrating virtualization into HCI infrastructure allows you to be more application focused making your infrastructure more service-based. What are you paying for? While you can use other virtualization solutions with our HCI, you may be paying for it unnecessarily. Nutanix includes a license to use AHV on our HCI platform at no additional cost,