Those of you following Nutanix know that the NPX program was announced earlier this month. My wife is well on her way to agreeing that I should make an attempt in 2015 or 2016 (touch wood plus a Louis Vuitton).
The NPX Link-O-Rama is a great resource for all things NPX, including this applicable list of articles in my VCDX Deep-Dive series (more than 70 posts).
From the blueprint, I have drafted the following TO-DO List to start the process:
- I have enrolled in the Nutanix nu.school Online Plus training course for US$495
- In the next month I will sit the NPP and NSS exams
- Currently immersing myself in DevOps and Kanban
- Deep diving into the Nutanix related design guides and blog posts
- Deep dive into 3rd Generation Web services (like Pivotal Cloud Foundry)
- Deep dive into Virtual Machine design and performance (particularly for large Exchange Servers, Java Platforms, Oracle DBs and SQL Server DBs)
- Deep dive into the Public Cloud offerings of AWS, vCloud Air, Azure, etc.
- Need to select and develop a suitable design with supporting documentation
- Need to master at least one more hypervisor. If I choose Hyper-V, maybe take the exams to achieve MCSE Private Cloud.
- Need to find an NPX study group
- Need to secure a Nutanix VCP environment for functional, performance, recovery and integration testing
My current indecision on demonstrating mastery of two Hypervisors:
- Do I have vSphere in my design submission and then defend AHV/Hyper-V or vice-versa?
- Do I forget vSphere completely and prove mastery of AHV and Hyper-V?
By submitting a design with AHV/Hyper-V, my VCDX-validated vSphere skills would hold me in good stead for the live troubleshooting and design scenarios.
The crazy part of me is attracted to mastering AHV and Hyper-V together and forgetting vSphere. The problem is AHV does not have a lot of published works and training available, which increases the level of difficulty and increases my time to submit.
If I wanted to defend in 2015, it would make sense to design for Microsoft Hyper-V and defend with VMware vSphere. Like vSphere, there is loads of training and publications available for Microsoft Hyper-V. Plus I already have a long history of using Windows Server that I can build upon.
vcdx133.com 