Category: NPX

Nutanix Platform Expert Study Resources

Nutanix Test Drive Revamped

The Nutanix Test Drive environment has been revamped with a new look and feel. Gone is the Community Edition running on Ravello, it now uses the latest version of AOS and runs on GCP. There is also a helpful interactive storyboard that takes you through the Prism UI, which is great if this is your first time with Nutanix.

To access Test Drive:

  • Visit the Nutanix Test Drive page
  • Enter your details and press “Launch Test Drive”
  • Take note of the admin credentials and press “Start Test Drive”
  • Accept any SSL warnings and the Prism UI will appear
  • Follow the Interactive Demo prompts to learn the Prism UI
  • This instance is available to you for 2 hours
  • Test Drive only covers Prism Element, the advanced features of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud are not included

Nutanix .NEXT EU 2018 Announcements

This week, Nutanix .NEXT EU 2018 is being held in London. There are six announcements of note:

  • Nutanix Xtract announcements:
    • Xtract 2.0 GA Targeted for FY Q2
      • Support for AWS as a source
      • Performance enhancements to reduce migration time
      • Installation & Upgrade improvements for 1-click experience
    • AWS to AHV Customer Preview
      • Migrate running EC2 instances to AHV
      • Mini instance of Xtract deployed on AWS to orchestrate migration
      • User VMs “instrumented” to determine change block tracks and AHV conversion
    • Hyper-V to AHV Alpha
      • Win 2012R2 and 2016 supported
      • Alpha in progress and GA targeted for 1H 2019
  • Nutanix Era announcements:
    • Era 1.0 is GA
    • Supports Oracle 11.2.0.4 & 12.1.0.2
    • Supports PostgreSQL 9.6 & 10.3
  • Nutanix Karbon announced and in Tech Preview (on-prem Kubernetes)
  • Nutanix Files:
    • Version 3.2 November 2018 GA
      • Nested Shares
      • Larger Shares (140TB/share)
      • SMB signing performance
    • Version 3.5 December 2018 GA
      • NFS v3 Early Access
      • Multiprotocol Early Access
      • File Analytics 1.0
      • NFS self-service restore
      • NFS Change File Tracking (CFT)
  • Xi Leap DR service available in December 2018:
    • North America only
    • Offered as a cloud service with monthly, 1 year or 3 year subscriptions
    • Sold directly and through channel partners
  • Xi IOT service announced (no other details provided)

Running @IBM AIX with @Nutanix software

Earlier this year IBM announced that AIX is supported on the Nutanix platform. This is in addition to the 2017 announcement of PowerLinux being initially supported.

What does this mean if you are a customer, particularly in finance? You finally have a web-scale platform that you can use to consolidate all of your legacy and cloud-native applications onto. Those vertically-scaled mission critical applications running on AIX and PowerLinux finally have a modern platform that aligns with your x86 workloads. Strategically, this makes the Nutanix platform a great choice if you need a stepping stone for non-x86 to x86 application refactoring (assuming your applications fit on the scale-out POWER8 CS hardware and do not require the POWER8 E8XX big iron).

Requirements of the solution:

  • You need IBM POWER8 technology-based CS821 and CS822 nodes.
  • Running Acropolis Operating System (AOS) 5.2.1.1 and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) 20170331.78.
  • For AIX 7.2 with the 7200-02 Technology Level with Service Pack 7200-02-02-1810 and APAR IJ05283, or later.
  • For PowerLinux, SLES 11 or 12, Ubuntu 16.04 or 17.04, CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 are supported.

Some caveats and additional information:

  • LPARs, VIO Server and HMC are no longer required and are replaced by AHV, Prism and IPMI as the management and virtualization platform.
  • Nutanix X-Ray 2.3 and above supports the IBM CS platform as test targets for scenario-centric performance testing.
  • Need to ensure app/DB binaries are ported to ppc64le (PowerLinux) and ppc64be (AIX) to run on the IBM CS platform with AHV.
  • NIM/mksysb are supported.
  • Data can be migrated using similar techniques available to the Nutanix x86 platform.
  • Intel CPUs have 2 threads per core, IBM POWER8 CPUs have 8 threads per core.
  • AHV schedules threads for x86 and cores for POWER8.
  • POWER8 processors excel at computationally intensive workloads, in particular high throughput databases and congnitive/AI workloads.
  • Purchases are transacted through IBM channel partners or IBM Power Systems server sales.
  • You contact IBM for support.
  • Implementation services via IBM Lab Services.
  • Nutanix sales teams can assist customers with the sales process.

Additional Resources

Nutanix .NEXT US Announcements

This week, Nutanix .NEXT US is being held in New Orleans. There are five announcements of note:

  • Nutanix Beam: Rebranding of the Botmetric acquisition by Nutanix. This adds Cost Optimization and Visibility, Centralized Financial Governance and Intelligent Consumption Planning to the Nutanix Cloud Management suite.
  • Nutanix Era: Suite of software that adds Database Lifecycle Management to the Nutanix Cloud Management suite. Version 1.0 will support Oracle and PostgreSQL databases.
  • Nutanix Flow: Includes incorporation of Netsil acquisition by Nutanix. Provides micro-segmentation, application traffic visualization and service chaining.
  • Nutanix Xtract: new version will support migration from AWS EC2 to Nutanix AHV.
  • Nutanix X-Ray: Automated test platform will be Open Sourced and the latest version supports testing of Microsoft Hyper-V and Storage Spaces. Continue reading Nutanix .NEXT US Announcements

Nutanix AOS 5.6 Released

Nutanix has released version 5.6 of their Acropolis Operating System (AOS). This is the next installment of their AOS “Obelix” release from late last year.

This obviously also means that many of the supporting components of the Nutanix eco-system also have new releases to complement AOS, namely AFS, AHV, Prism Central, NCC, LCM and Foundation. Please refer to the resources section at the end for links to downloads and release notes.

Continue reading Nutanix AOS 5.6 Released