Year: 2015

NPX – The Journey to Number 8

VCDX and NPX sound great (how can so few letters be so difficult to achieve?), but it is very, very hard work with many hours of effort and stress, including juggling a day-job that bleeds into your personal life.  I have to profoundly thank my wife and children for putting up with my passion (or obsession?) for knowledge and learning.

At VMworld US 2014, I first heard rumblings that Nutanix was planning an elite certification for HCI under the mentorship of Mark Brunstad.  My opinion is that HCI is the future of data center infrastructure and legacy, three tier infrastructure will eventually die out, just like Token-Ring and Novell Netware (what is that?).  Right there, I made the promise to myself that I would be one of the first to attempt (and hopefully pass) NPX once it became publicly available.  And who better to align my efforts with than the inventor and leader of the HCI space?

Continue reading NPX – The Journey to Number 8

NPX – Design Exercise (Nutanix Design)

The NPX Design Review (NDR) has a 60 minute “Design Exercise” where the NDR Examiners present a design scenario with a set of business requirements and constraints that you need to address.  This post is an enhancement of the design strategy I developed for VCDX and tailored for NPX and Nutanix XCP design.

The NDR Examiners are playing the role of a “customer”, with minimal training and knowledge of the platform, and the NPX candidate is the “expert” driving the logical design for the solution.

This post is written with an ESXi and AHV focus (clearly understand what AHV is capable of), Hyper-V is not covered at all.

Continue reading NPX – Design Exercise (Nutanix Design)

NPX – Hands-on Exercise (Nutanix Troubleshooting)

The NPX Design Review (NDR) has a 30 minute “Hands-on Exercise” where the NDR Examiners present an issue with a live system that you need to resolve.  This post is an enhancement of the troubleshooting strategy I developed for VCDX and tailored for NPX and Nutanix XCP troubleshooting.

The NDR Examiners are the only ones with access to the live environment, so you need to talk them through what interfaces and screens to access.  They are playing the role of a “customer”, with minimal training and knowledge of the platform, and the NPX candidate is the “expert” driving the resolution.

This post is written with an ESXi and AHV focus, Hyper-V is not covered at all.

Continue reading NPX – Hands-on Exercise (Nutanix Troubleshooting)

NPX – Controller VM Sizing

The Nutanix Controller VM has some sizing guidelines that are published in the official documentation, but the majority of the sizing logic is embedded within Foundation (and Phoenix) which is applied during the node deployment process.

As a customer you can ignore this under the guise of “invisible infrastructure”, but as an NPX candidate you need to understand the details.  Be aware that Nutanix is constantly trying to optimise the CVM code to “do more with less” and leverage the CPU features of each new generation of Intel processors. Continue reading NPX – Controller VM Sizing