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This post was authored by Jill Liles Connected Customer Experience Manager at Nutanix.The Nutanix Certification team is thrilled to let you know about our new exam delivery platform, available today!This new platform offers streamlined enrollment and registration, while maintaining exam security and the flexibility of remote delivery. The new platform will also provide faster exam results – you’ll know your certification status immediately. Download step by step registration instructions here.What’s new:Exam Scheduling: The new system has you schedule your exam time in advance, which lets you plan your time and study schedule. Of course, we know things change, so rescheduling is simple too. Self Service Exam Registration: Simply log into your Nutanix Education account and click on the “Take an Exam” link. Select the exam you want to take and you’ll be automatically transferred to the new platform to finish registering. Immediate Results: Because the exam is proctored in real-time you n

This post was authored by Luke Congdon, Sr. Manager, Product Management for AHV Keep database licensing under control by combining strong storage policies with AHV auditing In the early years of my career in enterprise software, I often heard that downtime of servers, networks, and components was undesirable, but the fidelity of your data was mission critical. Most things can be restarted or fixed, but lost data might remain lost forever. It’s a real concern when you run a mission-critical workload that might be responsible for making your end of year financial sales, or a workload who’s resulting work could impact lives. It’s no surprise then, that databases are critical components of any stateful computer architecture. Databases and database management systems have a long history and come in many generations and vendors. By the 1990s, relational databases (RDBMS) became very popular. Despite newer NoSQL databases having come to market in the 2000s, relational databases are

This post was authored by Jill Liles Connected Customer Experience Manager at Nutanix.   The brand new Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Solutions online training series introduces you to the fundamental building blocks of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. Each course consists of two parts: A deep dive into the product themselves, through videos exploring these core components See how we tie them together to help you solve your business needs   Four courses are currently available, and our curriculum team is hard at work building out even more: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) - If you're new to hyperconvergence and/or the Enterprise Cloud, start here. You'll learn about AOS, AHV, and Prism - the cornerstone of everything we've built at Nutanix. Security and Governance – By adding Nutanix Flow and Nutanix Beam to your core understanding, you’ll see what these products do and how they form a true Security and Governance solution. End-User Computing - Build on your core knowledge Nutanix by discov

This post was authored by Jill Liles Connected Customer Experience Manager at Nutanix.   On-prem vs. cloud. Public vs. private. 3-tier vs. hyperconverged. Computing choices have come a long way since IBM released the first commercial mainframes back in the day.   Join us as we take a look at the mile markers of our ever-evolving industry – from ENIAC and servers, to datacenters, web-scale infrastructure, and the cloud.   Welcome to the Fundamentals of the Enterprise Cloud, perhaps one of the most interesting technology stories of our times.   Click here to get started.   ©️ 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 purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). This post may contain links to external websites that are not

This post was authored by Saad Azam Education & Community Marketing Specialist at Nutanix. Help build the future NCAP! The Nutanix Certification team has been busy developing an update for the Nutanix Certified Advanced Professional (NCAP) program to cover AOS 5.10 – and it’s now ready for beta testing at no charge. But there is a catch – the beta exam is only open to the first 100 people to complete it. After that, we’ll pull the results and begin working towards the live exam. Beta testers are also a critical part of the exam development process, and Nutanix is one of the few companies to open this process to the public. We hope you’ll take part and support the program’s success. To get started, Review the exam blueprint guide Register just like you would any other exam Enter discount code W5C3U2XT at check out to remove the exam fee  Frequently asked questions  How do Beta Exams differ from Live Exams? Beta exams are a little different from a fully live (or GA) exam, in a couple

This post was authored by Laura Jordana, Technical Marketing Engineer, Nutanix We are excited to announce the release of our new and improved Nutanix Test Drive, running on Google Cloud Platform! Nutanix Test Drive History For the past couple of years, we have offered the capability for customers and prospects to try out a Nutanix instance directly from their web browser. The original offering was a cloud-based version of Nutanix Community Edition (CE). In early 2019, we were able to deploy the full-blown Nutanix AOS software in the cloud and enhanced the experience by incorporating a couple of guided demos on how to create a storage container and a VM on a fully functional, live system. It was a way to get a feel for what Nutanix had to offer, but by no means did it do justice to the full functionality of our solutions. Test Drive 2.0 With Test Drive 2.0, we wanted to start expanding the offerings to showcase more of the solution portfolio. The initial release allows users to explore

What a great way to start the new decade, here are your 2020 Nutanix Technology Champions (NTC). 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. Last year we introduced the NTC Elite designation and this year I am excited to add one more person to that list. The power of mentoring and encouraging others to strive for more is what being part of a community is all about. NTC Elite is for those that have also earned their NPX designation.  This past year has been opportunity for us to see other grow, learn and get out of their comfort zone. From blogging, running user groups and being fully immersed in our .NEXT conference experience.   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 hash

This post was authored by Yashesh Mankad, Staff Engineer Nutanix Nutanix Era is a suite of software that automates and simplifies database management, bringing one-click simplicity to database provisioning and life cycle management (LCM), copy data management (CDM), and database backups. Era also provides simplicity in tracking and limiting access to databases and their copies through a sophisticated role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism. While Era does not access any data in a customer's databases, it does maintain metadata about those databases and virtual machines, including the database name, size, access credentials, version, and configuration details. Additionally, it maintains metadata about entities like databases, clones, time machines, backups, and so on to help manage the database estate. Era stores all of this metadata in its repository, which is powered by Postgres.  Repository Clustering By default, Era's repository runs on a single-instance Postgres database. Custom

This post was authored by Saad Azam Education & Community Marketing Specialist at Nutanix.   As many of you already know, we have partnered with Credly to use their Acclaim platform to deliver digital badges for Nutanix Certifications. These badges provide information about your qualifications and are an easy way to share the investment you’ve made in your own professional growth.   But did you know you can use these badges to find your dream job from the Labor Market Insights data?     What are Labor Market Insights? Labor Market Insights is a neat area on the Acclaim platform that helps you find career opportunities. You can filter by job title, location, employer, and even salary range. All the job postings on the platform are active, as data is updated 24/7.   The screenshots below walk you through the two ways to find relevant jobs: Search by badge Search by skill tag   Accessing Labor Market Insights Go to your profile page on Acclaim.     Click on one of your badges and

 Updated: April 9, 2025Certify after Nutanix TrainingOur Exam Preparation classes help you get ready for your certification exam by reviewing key exam topics and answering practice questions. They are offered in Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and On Demand formats and include an exam voucher.NCA Exam Prep On Demand NCP-MCI Exam Prep On Demand NCP-MCI Exam Prep ILTOur Instructor-Led product training classes also include an exam voucher for the associated certification.Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Fundamentals Enterprise Cloud Administration Advanced Administration and Performance Management  Nutanix Unified Storage Administration Nutanix Database Management & Automation Nutanix Multicloud Automation Administration Nutanix Cloud Clusters Administration - Azure Nutanix Kubernetes Platform Administration Certify at Nutanix EventsDon’t miss out on the opportunity to earn a Nutanix certification or receive a free certification voucher at an upcoming event..NEXT on Tour 50% off for Nutanix User G

This post was authored by Devon Helms, Senior Product Marketing Manager - Storage Services IT departments around the world are realizing how much better life can be when they simplify their architecture with hyperconverged infrastructure like Nutanix. As organizations adopt Nutanix for HCI, IT leaders are coming to understand that simplicity of invisible infrastructure can extend beyond hypervisors and VM storage and into the very fabric of their datacenters. And by fabric, I mean the storage that houses all of their data. Nutanix identified this evolution early and is leading the way in providing a platform that can service a broader range of IT solution than anyone in the industry. As IT leaders look to simplify their file and object unstructured storage architecture, Nutanix is ready to serve. In the Magic Quadrant on HCI, Gartner noted that draw backs from many competitor HCI platforms is their lack of breadth in storage protocol support. Supporting VM storage is table stakes. But

This post was authored by Dwayne Lessner Principal Technical Marketing Engineer Nutanix There is an old saying, “The devil is in the details”. If you have ever assumed something and then had to pay more, fix something or be left in a spot were what you bought wasn’t going to work, you have felt this pain. Late last year I wrote an article around the importance of Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) along with providing the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). I wanted to share some more technical details of my on-premises lab cluster that I am using to connect to the Xi East Region. I want to prove Xi Leaps SLA around RTO while maintaining performance of your application when you do failover. Proven ResultsDuring my testing I was able to achieve: A restore time under 8 sec per VM The same virtual machine on-prem or in Xi could achieve the same performance, +600,000 transaction per minute Nutanix snapshots are efficient over the wire to Xi when creating VMs from the same image

This post was authored by Dan Chilton Staff Core Performance Engineer, Nutanix Only have time for the summary? Recently released, Files 3.6 brings performance improvements that impact VDI and other critical workloads. These improvements  include user desktop density increases and SMB encryption performance equivalent to non-encrypted SMB performance. Detailed performance numbers are updated in this Tech Note. Time for the full story? Here goes. . . Being from the United States and a child of the 80s, I have a love/hate relationship with owning cars.  Expensive to own and operate, cars serve many important purposes for myself and my family.  Here are the top three. Safely and securely transport my kids to school. Perhaps the most important task for my car.  This is aided by many security features including turn signals, seat belts, airbags, and let’s not forget bumpers. Provide enough space to transport not only my immediate family but also close friends using the 3rd-row seats, which a

This post was authored by Michael Haigh, Technical Marketing Engineer, Nutanix Nutanix Calm is a multi-cloud application lifecycle manager, which means it allows you to model your applications in easy-to-consume blueprints, deploy those apps across a variety of on-prem and public clouds, and manage them throughout their entire lifecycle.  Combine this functionality with a self service focused Marketplace, robust policy and governance, and showback, and Calm enables IT and Developers to quickly turn complex operations into a simple, one-click request. While in-depth knowledge of application blueprints is not required for the majority of Calm users, it is necessary for IT Operators and Developers who are looking to build custom blueprints from the ground up.  This blog is aimed at those users who are looking to learn more about the objects within a Calm blueprint, and how they interact with one another. We’ll first walk through importing an example blueprint into your own Calm environmen

With each new release, Kubernetes becomes more powerful and complex to deploy and manage. As a result, enterprise organizations undertaking cloud native projects are compelled to seek out solutions such as Nutanix Karbon and Nirmata which can simplify the configuration, deployment, and management of on-prem Kubernetes clusters. Nutanix Karbon and the Nirmata Kubernetes cloud-based management plane are fully integrated, and can simplify cluster operations and workload management for all hybrid and multi-cloud use cases. Nirmata is the Kubernetes management plane designed for enterprise DevOps teams. It is delivered as a highly scalable and secure cloud service. Nirmata can manage multiple Karbon clusters, as well as Kubernetes clusters running on any cloud provider, via a single, unified management plane. Let’s take a look at 5 things Nirmata can do for your Nutanix Karbon clusters: Complete visibility into clusters - Get full visibility for cluster components and workloads with easy au

This post was authored by Yashesh Mankad Sr. Member of Technical Staff NutanixPostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source relational database system that is robust and reliable with a fully extensible architecture. It runs on all major operating systems and offers a number of add-ons that can transform a PostgreSQL instance into diverse applications like time-series databases, messaging queues, and so on.Due to Postgres’ strengths, it is a popular data persistence choice for complex applications, especially when considering open-source databases. Postgres can be deployed as a standalone instance or in the form of a cluster. Most serious deployments quickly hit limits of scale and availability with single-instance deployments. Postgres offers building blocks for high availability like replication, read replicas, single vs. multi-master master deployment, and so on. However, it does not offer a built-in solution for clustering and high availability. Nutanix database as a service (known as Nuta

Many of you already know X-ray as a valuable tool for measuring performance and resiliency on Nutanix.   It’s always been built from the ground up with hyper-converged and cloud based platforms in mind and focuses on real world scenarios that you might encounter.  For more background on why testing hyperconverged platforms with X-ray will give you the results that really matter see this excellent blog.This post was updated May 16, 2022X-ray 3.6 (coincidentally this was released alongside Files 3.6) introduced the capability to run I/O tests against an NFS file share.   You can use this for stress-testing and sizing your Nutanix Files deployments.  The Nutanix philosophy regarding X-ray has always been transparency above all else.  In keeping with that tradition, X-ray doesn’t create the Fileserver or shares itself.  We also leave the choice of fileserver configuration up to the user.  The only new information that you need in order to run a test is the NFS fileserver hostname or IP and

This post was authored by Maksim Malygin, Global Solutions Architect NutanixAlmost every application that you are interacting with through the day, from your company’s CRM to the game that you are playing on your phone, and self-service POS at the grocery shop is supported by a database, either cloud-based, on-premises, and, possibly, delivered as a service. These databases are used by the applications to operate and process the data and directly impact how applications scale and perform; making database platform a keystone for business success. With the rapidly growing number of applications, the database market grows as well and is expected to reach USD 155.50 Billion by 2026 (link).At the same time, DBaaS (database-as-a-service) is shaking the way how databases are used by the developers, by removing the need for them to manage complex databases or deal with DBA and infrastructure teams so that they could focus on the application development instead. Let’s take a closer look at the

This post was authored by Michael Haigh, Technical Marketing Engineer NutanixCountless studies have shown that reducing the amount of time for developers to receive feedback on code changes improves software quality.  Automating the build, test, and deployment of software with tools such as Jenkins is one of the best ways to accelerate software development.  If you’re unfamiliar with Jenkins you can learn more on their website here.In this blog post, we’ll walk through deploying Jenkins onto Nutanix Karbon with a Helm chart.  We’ll then configure an example GitHub repository for our code base.  Each time we push our local code changes to our GitHub repo, a Jenkins pipeline will be initiated, which will build our new docker image, push that image to DockerHub, and automatically update the deployed application.CI/CD with Nutanix Karbon and JenkinsSince this will be a more involved post than usual, we’ll be breaking it up into a 3 part series.  Stay tuned for the next posts in the coming

This post was authored by Michael Haigh, Technical Marketing Engineer NutanixIn our first post, we deployed Jenkins onto a Karbon Kubernetes cluster using a Helm chart, and configured GitHub and DockerHub to store application code and containers.  In our second post, we added credentials to allow Jenkins to authenticate to the other tools, and created our Jenkins Pipeline.  In this final post, we’ll be creating our Jenkinsfile, deploying our application, and finally updating our application through a single git push.Jenkinsfile and Yaml CreationBack in your workstation, use your favorite text editor to create a file called Jenkinsfile within the base hello-kubernetes/ directory.  Copy the following contents into your file, but be sure to change the bolded items to your particular values (the IDs are from the credentials section of part 2):node { docker.withRegistry('', '93632a7f-bcab-4677-9e91-0aad2ebfb6ec') { git url: "https://your-internal-github.com/your-name/hello-kuberne

This post was authored by Michael Haigh, Technical Marketing Engineer NutanixIn our previous post, we deployed Jenkins onto a Nutanix Karbon Kubernetes cluster with Helm, configured a GitHub repository to store our application code, and configured a DockerHub repository to store our application containers.  In this blog post, we’ll be configuring Jenkins, and creating our Jenkins Pipeline.Jenkins Credential CreationThe first step of our Jenkins Setup is to add our various credentials to Jenkins’ credential store, which gives Jenkins the ability to authenticate to other pieces of our pipeline.  We’ll first add our DockerHub credentials, which allows Jenkins to push images.  Depending on your GitHub settings, you may also need to add GitHub credentials, so we’ll walk through that.  And finally, we’ll add our Karbon kubeconfig file to allow Jenkins to deploy our application directly onto our Kubernetes cluster.In the Jenkins UI, select Credentials along the left, and then the global domai

This post was authored by Sachin Chheda, Senior Director, Customer AdvocacyThank you, Copenhagen for playing host to our 2019 .NEXT Europe user conference in October. I know a few weeks have passed since the conference, but I had this feeling that I had to put in words--how fantastic it is to see the Nutanix community, the .NEXT conference (and our install base) grow. We have come a long way from the humble beginnings of several hundred attendees the inaugural .NEXT Europe in Vienna just a few years ago. The AC Bella Center in Copenhagen welcomed over 4,100 attendees—making it one of the largest gatherings of professionals focused on IT infrastructure and hybrid clouds in Europe.What struck me about this year’s conference was the fact that Nutanix has a lot in common with Copenhagen and Denmark. This became crystal clear on my ride to the airport. As I got talking with the taxi driver, he shared a surprisingly simple reason as to why his fellow Danes were so happy and satisfied. Denmar

This post was authored by Michael Haigh and Rahul Dabke, and co-hosted on D2IQ’s blog.Traditionally, deployment of stateful data services on Kubernetes was not easily managed and required manual intervention. Operators are powerful design patterns that help deploy stateful data services on Kubernetes and help developers with application lifecycle management, taking Kubernetes to the next level of orchestration. In order to create a production level operator, it is not uncommon to write tens of thousands of lines of code in the process. Writing, managing and implementing gobs of code has been cumbersome and often unforgiving.Writing an operator requires deep understanding of the underlying service in addition to a deep understanding of Kubernetes. Although there is commonality between two different data service operators, the need for managing different orchestration concerns commonly requires significant implementation differences. What is needed is a set of operators that are packaged

This post was authored by Gabe Contreras, Enterprise Architect NutanixWith many big data applications like Elasticsearch, one question that invariably comes up is “Why have RF2 at the Elasticsearch layer and still have to do RF2 at the Nutanix layer?”.There are many reasons operationally why you would want Elasticsearch on Nutanix, especially with AHV, rather than on bare metal.  Those operational reasons such as not having application silos, leveraging spare compute and storage, having a single pane for all your workloads and supporting a single platform all lead to operational efficiencies, especially at scale. These help you turn your big data deployments into a private cloud for all applications and lets you use spare capacity for workloads such as extra compute to run kafka consumers and producers.There are also space saving features such as compression and EC-X on Nutanix.  While Elasticsearch does have compression since it is contained per data node, Nutanix gets even more compr

This post was authored by Sarah Hernandez Member of Technical Staff - Prism UI It is no secret that automation has become a necessary part of IT Operations to ensure the success of your business. With automation comes with the benefits of reducing manual, repetitive tasks, minimizing human errors, and enabling IT teams to scale operations without needing to increase headcount. However, automation also introduces a new level of complexity with larger unknowns and risks. When you start letting the machine take actions without the proper intelligence, things can quickly spiral out of control. Teams are often reluctant to start automating tasks, due to the risk that they could spend more time debugging issues in the automation, than if they just did the tasks manually in the first place. Today there are many tools that offer ways to automate operations in the data center, but none of them are able to remove the complexity that can help alleviate the fears and risks of automating tasks