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.

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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

NPX – Sizing a Nutanix Cluster

If you are used to sizing traditional 3-tier infrastructure, you will have to alter your methodology to correctly size a Nutanix Cluster.  The major difference is the selection of the correct appliance hardware and sub-options for the cluster (Vendor, Sockets, Cores, GHz/core, RAM, SSD, HDD, SED, GPU, 1GbE, 10GbE, Rack Units, Power, Cooling) and allow for the correct sizing of the Controller VM (vCPU and RAM) per Node/Host. Continue reading NPX – Sizing a Nutanix Cluster

Announcement – VMware Photon Controller Open Source Availability

The Photon Controller Open Source is now available.  The VMware Photon Platform (announced at VMworld) will be available in 2016 with Private Betas starting now.  To avoid confusion, be aware that vSphere Integrated Containers are separate from the Photon Platform.  vSphere Integrated Containers are a Unified Hybrid Platform that extends vSphere to be “container compatible” and the Photon Platform is a Cloud-native Platform that is optimised for containers and large-scale API automation.

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