The conference has started, we got reserved some great seat right up front next to two huge names, do you recognize them. What are the odds?
Making Infrstructure Invisible is the “why” Nutanix is here, says Mr Howard Ting who is introducing us to the conference. He presented a few slides about the growth of the company and how AWS has not only challenge them but also inspire them.
Now on the stage, we have Mr. Dheeraj Padey Founder and CEO of Nutanix. He is talking about the “founder mentality” and how to grow a company and his vision, the importance of employees, customers and partners.
Dheeraj shares how the company is focused on customer support, obsession for detail and innovation.
Switching gears towards the power of the community and how NutanixCE has provided a lot of feedback and been activated about 500 times a week by customers and partners.
We are now seeing how NutanixCE inside a NUC is driving an autonomous drone
Nutanix is now creating a platform that will allow customers to integrate processes, automation and Security. We are now talking about new projects, one-click upgrades and one-click moves and the project to move bare metal workloads to Nutanix. I will be covering the session later today and will blog about it.
Now we have Sunil on stage taking us through their continues innovation process and their main question when looking at new features “is this adding complexity”? Nutanix is always looking for a No answer to this question.
So what has Nutanix been doing last few years? Take a look to the pictures
So what is next?
New features are great, but what is the adoption from the customer? 43% adoption for 4.6 release in just 100 days
The relationship between Citrix and Nutanix has grown, We are now able you use Nutanix file services and Citrix MCS provisioning on Nutanix AHV to make a great VDI solution and deliver a very fast results for customers.
Acropolis Block services is the technology that will allow customers to run bare metal workloads on Nutanix cloud fabric. This is the first major thing on 4.7. Making this product a single platform for all needs
Single fabric across all workloads, physical or virtual; VDI or DBs
First demo of the keynote is deploying a XenDesktop environment on a Nutanix cluster. How to use Citirx MCS and Nutanix SMB shares for home directories and user profiles, the same cluster is also running SQL vms and presenting block storage to Oracle RAC
AHV was launched last year and it is now the fastest growing product for Nutanix, 15% of customers are running AHV in production data centers. NASDAQ is up in stage to talk about how they are using and why they decided to use it. The major factors that made them go to it are: integration with hardware, ROI and that is based on a hypervisor they are familiar with, KVM.
The second big announcements is the ability to run containers directly on Nutanix and adding persistent portable storage volumes for those containers.
A great feature for one-click upgrades for the whole stack from hardware to software.
Coming soon on the next realize “Asterix” is a full orchestration / self service infrastructure functionality
The demo showed us how to create catalogs and provide access to users to request environments. While the demo was nice, I think the solution is pretty IT oriented and requires knowledge of things such as what template to use, how much RAM to assign, etc. We will need to take this to the next level and make it more business user friendly.
The self service feature has security and workflow built-in, by creating projects, roles, users, quotas fully integrated with AD and Prism.
NutanixCE is now also available as a service on demand. Anyone can signup for a free two hour session on Nutanix website. Yes free, even if you don’t like the solution just play with it to say you have.
Since Nutanix is hypervisor agnostic, the solution fully support Microsoft hyper-v and VMware vSphere. With the release of the Nutanix Asterix version, Prism (management web interface) will now be able to fully manage the vSphere hypervisor without the need to go to vCenter.
On the stage we have T-Mobile explaining how they were challenged in IT because of the fast growth the company has seen during last two years.
Taking a look to Prism new features to allow for less clutter, actionable actions, multi hypervisor management.
The image below shows high level capacity indicators with forecasting for those values that allows the administrator to understand what is happening with the environment and where it will be in the near future.
Machine intelligence is the new feature that will use machine learning to forecast the performance of the system, the system will recommend when to add and what size to add. The only thing missing is one click procurement, just kidding ?
Another example of forecasting and what-if analysis for the Nutanix cluster.
A huge announcement is the integration of Network views to troubleshoot and have full visibility of the stack. This is part of Asterix but still on its infancy. We need to see more integration with Cisco and Brocade and other providers.
And with this we are out.