Nutanix Weekly

In this week's episode, we cover the top 10ish announcements from Nutanix .NEXT 2021 according to Jirah.  With a few interruptions from his friends.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Randy Brown
Guest: Jeff Melnick

People have many reasons for getting technical certifications. It can be a stepping stone to a new job. It can be a way to show off what you've learned over the years. And some people collect them to prove their professional expertise across a variety of technologies.

IT companies create certifications for many reasons as well. It can help customers get the most value out of the product. It can help reduce support costs, which frees up company resources to focus on innovations and new products. And it can help ensure that their partner ecosystem is fully up to speed on all the latest and greatest developments in their product.

But none of those reasons matters if no one is aware of your certification, or it has no value to the overall industry and job market. That's why salary surveys like the ones produced by Global Knowledge, Robert Half, and others are so important. They poll the industry globally and find out what areas are growing, what areas may be declining, and help IT professionals make educated decisions about how to guide their career for the future.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Provisioning new databases and cloning database requests make up a hefty portion of a database administrator’s (DBAs) workload. As reported in Forrester’s Total Economic Impact survey for Nutanix Era, database provisioning is time consuming, tedious, and often requires additional approvals for new systems to support the new provision. DBAs reported that “to handle the capacity of existing database management and incoming requests, the DBA teams often needed to work overtime and weekends” (Forrester p7). As one respondent noted: “We get requests for new databases all the time, but we have to have a server before we can even start. Our database and operations teams were resource-constrained, and a request could take up to two weeks to deliver. That was just too long” (Forrester p7).

The Forrester study also noted that many organizations lack standard workflow procedures that can streamline the provisioning process for more effective procedures in database provisioning. Surveyed customers commented that, when workflow best practices are applied holistically across several different database types, common provisioning mistakes could be avoided.

Nutanix has partnered with ServiceNow, Inc. to integrate Nutanix Era™ into the ServiceNow® platform. Using the ServiceNow Nutanix Era Plugin for Database Management, Era and ServiceNow customers can use standard workflow processes to ease database provisioning even further.

Nutanix Era can increase database provisioning by 97% through its one-click database management and control plane as noted in Forrester’s TEI report for Era. This process can be streamlined even further through the integration with ServiceNow’s digital workflow processes.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Jon Spallone

Operating systems can end up being a lot of work for administrators. They need to work to configure the image, install the applications, and provide the best user experience possible. As with any software, what is provided to you is what the developer intended, but not necessarily what you want or need for your end users.

This blog series introduces you to Microsoft Windows® Operating System (OS) optimizations, starting with version 1903. I will attempt to keep these optimizations as environment agnostic as possible. Hopefully, these optimizations will be just as good to administrators of physical machines as to a virtual environment utilizing Nutanix Frame, Citrix, or VMware Horizon VDI solutions.

This series aims to share the seemingly infinite number of ways you can optimize a Windows environment, with something for beginners as well as administrators familiar with optimizations but looking to deliver an even better experience within their environment.

Of course, the optimizations provided in this blog series are intended only as a guide. Be sure to test the optimizations described in this series internally before pushing the changes to your production environment.

The previous entry of this series covered Active Setup. We discussed what Active Setup is, how it works, and how to optimize it.

This blog addresses the Microsoft Store: its purpose, how it works, and what can be done with it. This particular area of the OS is continually changing and, as such, will require constant management to optimize in the way you desire. This blog potentially saves even more headaches than any other blog in this series.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Havery Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Jon Spallone

Operating systems can end up being a lot of work for administrators. Work to configure the image, work to install the applications, and work to provide the best user experience possible. As with any software, what is provided to you is what the developer intended, but not necessarily what you want or need for your end users.

This blog series introduces you to Microsoft Windows® Operating System (OS) optimizations, starting with version 1903. I will attempt to keep these optimizations as environment agnostic as possible.  Hopefully, these optimizations will be just as good to administrators of physical machines as to a virtual environment utilizing Nutanix® Frame, Citrix®, or VMware® Horizon solutions.

This series aims to share the seemingly infinite number of ways you can optimize a Windows environment, with something for beginners as well as administrators familiar with optimizations but looking to deliver an even better experience within your environment.

Of course the optimizations provided in this blog series are intended only as a guide.  Be sure to test the optimizations described in this series internally before pushing the changes to your production environment.

This installment addresses Active Setup: its purpose, how it works, and what can be done with it.  This particular area of the OS is criminally underused as a method of optimization.  As such, it should provide useful information to a wide range of readers.

Host:  Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jon Spallone

The modern workplace has changed dramatically since the COVID 19 pandemic, and organizations everywhere are adopting digital workspace solutions to ensure business productivity, continuity, agility, and security, all while lowering costs.

Digital workspaces are not a new idea, but too often deployment and operational complexity have kept organizations from realizing the benefits these solutions offer. Fortunately, there are solutions that can help significantly reduce this complexity.

Building a simple, secure, and performant digital workspace solution requires choosing the right technologies at every layer of the stack. In this seven-part blog series, we discuss how running Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform simplifies your solution, delivering an excellent user experience, improved productivity, greater business agility, lower risk, and higher ROI.

Each installment of the series addresses a key aspect of a complete digital workspace solution. We discuss the traditional challenges that administrators face, and explain how a Citrix-on-Nutanix hybrid and multicloud solution helps you to avoid the pitfalls that have bedeviled admins for years, resulting in interminable delays, substandard performance, poor user experience, and excessive operational overhead and costs.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Jon Spallone

Today, we are proud to announce the availability of Nutanix Mine™ with Commvault®. Nutanix and Commvault have had a longstanding partnership over the last six years. Commvault was the first partner to provide data protection as a simple, secure, and transformative reality for our joint customers. Data protection has become a global IT directive across countries, industries, and organizations that are busy responding to the rapid shift of remote work and rising cyber threats. That is why the most recently engineered solution provides a simple yet intelligent data protection platform that delivers efficient backup and recovery services no matter where your data resides so that you can keep your business up and running under all circumstances.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

To cut through the ubiquitous noise of automation hype, let’s briefly talk at a high-level about the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure industry’s automation journey and provide applicable guidance regardless of where you may be along your unique journey.

With recent advances in automation, machine learning, data analytics, and cloud computing, we are all expected to achieve more with less. Even the most technologically savvy departments in our organizations have had challenges adapting. Almost every organization is trying to find the right balance and approach to incorporate automation in its processes. In order to get a sense of how the IT industry is thinking about automation, we surveyed 500+ IT professionals as part of the Automation Coffee chat in Nov 2020. From this survey, we gained insights into:

• Where are practitioners today?
• What challenges lie ahead?
• Where is the industry headed?

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Xi Leap is a natively integrated DR Service that serves as a seamless extension to the onprem infrastructure - thus providing a true hybrid cloud experience. Customers can configure Protection Policies and Recovery Plans to protect and recover applications in case of a disaster OnPremises to the Cloud. True to Nutanix’s design principle of simplicity, a lot of complexity associated with traditional DR - Multi Vendor Point Solutions, different panes of glass for administering infrastructure and DR, Application Re-Ip post failover, lack of SLA’s etc - has been done away once a customer moves to Xi Leap.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

I am pleased to announce the latest version (version 3) of the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Reference Architecture tech note is now available for download. The Nutanix® Hybrid Cloud Reference Architecture is a comprehensive document that is meant for an organization’s Enterprise Architect team. This guide is very technical and walks a customer through more than 100 design decisions that should be taken into consideration when deploying Nutanix solutions in a hybrid cloud or private cloud model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox