Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Announcements from Nutanix .Next 2017: Here comes Nutanix Cloud Services


Three New Offerings From Nutanix announced at .Next

Officially announced today at the .Next Keynote, Nutanix is entering the realm of cloud services providers with their newest product Xi. Xi will come in two offerings: Xi Cloud Services, and Xi Disaster Recovery Service. Early indications on positioning for Xi Cloud Services appear to be a native cloud extension to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, while Xi Disaster Recovery Service looks to leverage rapid and intelligent protection of your Nutanix environment without the need to purchase and maintain separate infrastructure. Nutanix looks to offer these products for early release in November 2017, with GA coming in 2018.

Nutanix will start out with 4 data centers across the United States and expand over time. Long term plans include sites globally as well


Management of the solutions will be done through Prism. Nutanix has stated their goal is to offer an "iCloud like ease of use" when it comes to disaster recovery and Xi given that there is no new software to install and clients can experience "instant" provisioning of a recovery site. Enterprise Cloud OS will act as the go between for the local sites and Xi DR hosted locations.Xi DR also offers non-disruptive fail over testing for readiness & compliance purposes, as well as site to site encryption of data. Subscriptions will be available based on RPO, with RPOs as low as 1 hour.

Coming off of last year's acquisition of Calm.io, Nutanix also announced Nutanix Calm. Rather than just re-branding Calm.io, the product has been integrated into Prism. Much like Xi, calm has two initial offerings. Nutanix Calm provides application automation and life cycle management for the Nutanix Cloud Platform as well as public cloud offerings. Nutanix Marketplace allows organizations to fully automate the provisioning of hybrid cloud architectures, scaling both multi-tiered and distributed applications across different cloud environments.



Blueprints will be offered against varying cloud providers, and will also be managed through Prism. Pricing & licensing is currently being worked out, but early indications are that will be be on a per VM basis and scale out. To start out it's life, Calm will exist next to Marketplace, but eventually will be merged. Calm 1.0 will be released summer of 2017, with a 1.1 & 1.5 release expected about every 8 weeks respectively. 1.0 is going to offer support for AWS & AHV, with ESXi being added in 1.1. Look for Hyper-V, Azure, and Container support with Calm 1.5.

The final major announcement coming from .Next is Xtract. Xtract is a one click experience to simplify the on-boarding of VMware VMs to AHV. Xtract for VMs will be made public beta on June 30th, with full GA expected in Q1. Xtract for DBs will go GA on Friday June 30th as well. Nutanix states that Xtract offers agentless migrations with near-zero downtime. The migration will retain network configurations and automatically insert AHV drivers into the VMs.

If you'd like to join the conversation about Nutanix's new offerings, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on my podcast, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

ExploreVM Podcast - Episode 8: ExploreVM Live - VMware 101

Today on the ExploreVM podcast, we've got a special episode in a series I'm calling ExploreVM Live. The following session was recorded at a company meeting where I was giving a VMware 101 lesson for our engineers who work outside of data center technologies. It's a high level overview, but we do have some laughs, I hope you enjoy.

Listen to "ExploreVM Podcast" on Spreaker.

Session Slide Deck



Friday, June 16, 2017

ExploreVM Podcast - Episode 7: Making the Move to a Pre-Sales Role with Patrick Kremer

Considering stepping out of the comfortable hum of the datacetner and into the unfamiliar glow of the yellow sun to enter the world of pre-sales? Worried you will lose your technical skill set? Is the sales side all it's cracked up to be? My guest today has made this very journey and has survived to tell you all about it.

Listen to "ExploreVM Podcast" on Spreaker.


To Contact Patrick

https://twitter.com/KremerPatrick
http://www.patrickkremer.com/


If you'd like to join the conversation about the show's topic, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

ExploreVM Podcast - Episode 6: Storage in a Cloud World with Howard Marks

Time keeps marching forward, technologies change, and vendors work to keep up.
Public cloud has made its presence known quite heavily over the past couple of years.
Join us today as we explore legacy storage in a cloud world.


Listen to "Storage in a Cloud World with Howard Marks" on Spreaker.

To Contact Howard

https://twitter.com/DeepStorageNet
http://www.deepstorage.net/


If you'd like to join the conversation about the show's topic, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.

Monday, May 22, 2017

Join ExploreVM at the WIVMUG UserCon 2017

Join me this week at the WIVMUG UserCon in Milwaukee, Wi. on Thursday, May 25th at the Wisconsin Center. This year I will be doing not one, but two sessions!

Lunch Keynote


I am honored to be part of the lunchtime panel that features VCDXs Sean Massey and Rebecca Fitzhugh, as well as Sarah Johnson, Technical Account Manager from FujiFilm Medical Systems. We will be discussing the many twists and turns of our careers and how you can continue to grow!

Sean on Twitter
Rebecca on Twitter
Sarah on Twitter

Community Session: Troubleshooting & Assessing the Health of VMware Environments with Free Tools 


In this session, I will review some of the tools I've used in both my home lab and professional life to assess the health of VMware environments. I will also provide demonstrations and real world examples on how these tools have helped me solve problems. And the best part, these tools are free!



To view the full agenda or register, click HERE!

If you'd like to join the conversation about any of my sessions, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on my podcast, reach out to me on Twitter, Email, or on Facebook.

Links to tools featured in the presentation:

vCheck
RVTools
Veeam One Free Edition
VMware PowerCLI MP for Linux & Mac OS
vRealize Ops Manager
vRealize Log Insight

 


Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Nutanix & IBM Announce Strategic Parternship

Nutanix and IBM Announce Strategic Partnership

Nutanix moves to be first hyperconverged offering on RISC architecture

On May 16th, 2017 Nutanix and IBM announced a multi-year partnership to bring Nutanix software to IBM Power 8 series hardware. The solution using Nutanix AHV, will be available on Linux on Power Systems. Applications such as WebSphere, open source databases like MongoDB and Casandra, and emerging technologies/cognitive computing are the initial use cases being called out by Nutanix. The goal is for IBM users to be able to experience Nutanix's cloud-like ease of use and flexibility, positioning Power systems for greater use in the evolving data center world. This move helps Nutanix extend their reach into the Forbes Global 2000 with IBM's foothold among the companies on the list.

As this is a partnership announcement, more technical details will become available once the products are announced. Nutanix anticipates the products will be announced at the end of June at their .Next Conference. What is known now is that Prism Pro will be functional across x86 and non-x86 clusters. However, individual clusters cannot contain both x86 & RISC architectures. The same cluster licensing available for other Nutanix solutions will be offered with the IBM products. Pending the results of testing, Nutanix expects both all flash, and non-flash nodes to be supported.


The Nutanix.Next Conference runs June 28-30th 2017 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Not only will I be in attendance, but I will also be presenting. Keep an eye on ExploreVM.com & Twitter for updates and announcements from the conference. 

If you'd like to join the conversation about Nutanix's new offerings, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on my podcast, reach out to me on Twitter, Email, or on Facebook.


Official Nutanix Press Release 

Sunday, May 14, 2017

ExploreVM Podcast - Episode 5: VMware on AWS with Chris Porter

The cloud is just someone else's computer. And as such, why can't we extend our virtualized datacenter to the cloud? Have no fear, VMware is here with just the solution. This episode we discuss VMware on AWS and Amazon Web Services with vExpert Chris Porter.

Listen to "ExploreVM Podcast" on Spreaker.

To contact Chris

https://twitter.com/uprightvinyl

Links:
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2017/05/06/virtually-speaking-podcast-vmw-cloud-aws/
http://www.vmware.com/cloud-services/vmware-cloud-aws.html
http://www.vmware.com/cloud-services/vmware-cloud-aws-overview.html
https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rqv5Gg1VSk


If you'd like to join the conversation about the show's topic, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.