Nutanix Weekly

One of the leading concerns of moving to a new hypervisor is the perceived risk and cost of migrating. Nutanix Move makes migrating to Nutanix AHV simple, and over the past year, more than 100,000 virtual machines (VMs) have been migrated to AHV. While there are several ways to migrate from traditional 3-tier infrastructure or competing on-premises or public platforms,  multiple factors are leading to the rapid adoption of AHV and Nutanix Move.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers

Blog Link: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-ahv-and-nutanix-move-a-year-of-remarkable-success

Customers with the most demanding workloads will be excited to see the latest expansion of database support on the Nutanix Cloud Platform that provides a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and optimizes performance.   

The enhancements, which became available to Nutanix customers as part of the AOS 6.6.2 release, include support for compute-only nodes running either VMware ESXi or Nutanix AHV along with best practices for optimally configuring hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) database clusters using a combination of compute-only and storage-only nodes.

Host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Blog Link: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/introducing-the-optimized-database-solution

During its annual .NEXT conference, Nutanix, the leading provider of hybrid multicloud infrastructure solutions, unveiled a series of new product offerings and an ambitious vision to help customers streamline their operations across distributed environments and accelerate the deployment of modern applications.

Project Beacon

Nutanix announced Project Beacon, a multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) level services available natively anywhere – including on Nutanix or the native public cloud. With a vision of decoupling the application and its data from the underlying infrastructure, Project Beacon aims to enable developers to build applications once and run them anywhere.

As the initial phase of Project Beacon, Nutanix will expand the capabilities and benefits of Nutanix Database Service (NDB) to the public cloud as a managed service, providing the same database automation and management experience already available on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). The company plans to subsequently extend this effort to other popular data-centric platform services

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Donvan Linton
Co-host: Marina Troyano

The Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Cost Governance™ solution is ideal for customers challenged by the ongoing analysis and reporting of spend by cost center, driving accountability against budgets, and finding opportunities to optimize your cloud spend. Through one unified interface, NCM Cost Governance allows customers to manage costs across their public, private, and hybrid multicloud environments. 

As investment in public cloud resources increases, the need for robust cost management across hybrid multicloud endpoints also grows. Gartner estimates show the magnitude of the savings opportunity with “Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services forecast to grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.” 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

 The recent pandemic upped the ante on IT modernization as most organizations accelerated cloud deployments to support workforces that distributed overnight. Now as we emerge on the other side, many enterprises are reexamining their workload deployments in the face of escalating cloud costs. Indeed, Gartner® predicts that “by 2027, 85 percent of the workload placements made until 2022 will no longer be optimal, due to changing requirements.”1 As enterprises pursue more agile, mobile, and portable applications, IT leaders need to make quick decisions about where to house their workloads and, in so doing, reevaluate their cloud strategy.

As organizations are rethinking their infrastructure strategy, they are looking to leverage new opportunities and innovations to gain agility, simplify management, drive operational efficiencies, and better equip their IT teams with the resources and skills needed to be competitive, all while keeping costs in check. The options are overwhelming. And if placing 100 percent of your workloads in the public cloud isn’t the answer, what is?

IT workload environments aren’t “one size fits all.” Many IT leaders are finding success with hybrid IT infrastructure, where applications and data are spread and shared across a combination of on-premises, colocation, and public cloud environments, based on the unique characteristics, resource utilization, performance specifications, and security requirements of each application. Hybrid IT strategies offer a host of benefits, not the least of which is that IT leaders regain control of their data, making it easier to support a remote workforce, scale their operations, increase agility, and protect critical assets, all while being cost-efficient.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers

In this multi-part series, the goal is to first familiarize you with the solution and then provide guidance on preparing to deploy Flow Network Security and help you learn the constructs that form your policy framework.

So, what is Flow Network Security?  By now, you may have heard the name, read about it or had a conversation about it with a Nutanix employee.  First off, and in most basic terms, Flow Network Security is built-in security for workloads that run on Nutanix AHV, our native hypervisor.  Think of it more as a feature or solution rather than a separate “product”.

While AHV has been available for many years, one thing became obvious as customers were looking to have more security options in their Nutanix environment; we didn’t have a Nutanix-developed solution to provide network security.

Enter microsegmentation.  Network virtualization got its beginning as a Stanford University research project that ultimately became a startup and commercial solution from Nicira, circa 2007.  VMware acquired Nicira in 2012 and the solution became, as you may know, NSX, which offered software-defined networking and microsegmentation functionality.  Since this time, other software companies have brought their own solutions to market.  

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Within Nutanix we have Replication Factor (How many data copies are written in the cluster) and Redundancy Factor (how many nodes/disks can go offline). Both can have a value of 2 and 3. What is what is explained here: Blog Post.

So, when we have a larger cluster, we always recommend using RF3 (Redundancy Factor 3) as the risk is higher that you have multiple nodes/disks go offline at the same time.

During trainings and onsite customer work I often get the question, "what will happen if multiple nodes go offline in Redundancy Factor 2?" In this blog post I will explain different scenarios and their behaviors.

Blog by: Jeroen Tielen
Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Nutanix launches the most significant update yet to its Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) hybrid cloud software, now enabling organizations to run the Nutanix Cloud Platform™ software on the Microsoft Azure® cloud service. With support for both the AWS and Azure clouds, NC2 is a true hybrid multicloud platform. It provides easy access to Azure services from customer VNets running enterprise applications. There’s a simple migration path for applications without modification, and expanded license portability with a consumption model choice.

Organizations are increasingly investing in the public cloud to solve business and IT challenges for improved operational flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency. According to 1,700 IT decision makers polled for the 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index report, 83% agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Nutanix launches the most significant update yet to its Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) hybrid cloud software, now enabling organizations to run the Nutanix Cloud Platform™ software on the Microsoft Azure® cloud service. With support for both the AWS and Azure clouds, NC2 is a true hybrid multicloud platform. It provides easy access to Azure services from customer VNets running enterprise applications. There’s a simple migration path for applications without modification, and expanded license portability with a consumption model choice.

Organizations are increasingly investing in the public cloud to solve business and IT challenges for improved operational flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency. According to 1,700 IT decision makers polled for the 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index report, 83% agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Storms, tornadoes, human error, and ransomware. While these disruptions have different root causes, the potential aftermath is the same: downtime and data loss. 

On average, downtime costs organizations $540,000 per hour. Every minute of downtime is a direct hit on revenue, reliability, and reputation. This is one of the most dreaded situations an IT department can face, which is why it’s crucial to have a strong data protection plan in place. 

Nutanix’s Cloud Platform’s data protection capabilities are robust and trusted by organizations who may have a need to build a solution for their highly sensitive and mission-critical data. The Nutanix® snapshot technology is natively built into the Nutanix Cloud Platform and offers a backup and disaster recovery plan that can be customized for your data protection needs in concert with a powerful ecosystem of Nutanix-certified backup vendor partners. 

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