Nutanix

The Virtual Horizon Podcast Episode 2 – A Conversation with Angelo Luciani

/ seanpmassey

On this episode of The Virtual Horizon podcast, we’ll journey to the French Rivera for the 2017 Nutanix .Next EU conference. We’ll be joined by Angelo Luciani, Community Evangelist for Nutanix, to discuss blogging and the Virtual Design Master competition.

Nutanix has two large conferences scheduled for 2018 – .Next in New Orleans in May 2018 and .Next EU in London at the end of November 2018.

Show Credits:
Podcast music is a derivative of Boogie Woogie Bed by Jason Shaw (audionatix.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Nutanix Xtract for VMs #blogtober

/ seanpmassey

One of the defining features of the Nutanix platform is simplicity.  Innovations like the Prism interface for infrastructure management and One-Click Upgrades for both the Nutanix software-defined storage platform and supported hypervisors have lowered the management burden of on-premises infrastructure.

Nutanix is now looking to bring that same level of simplicity to migrating virtual machines to a new hypervisor.  Nutanix has released a new tool today called Xtract for VM.  This tool, which is free to all Nutanix customers, brings the same one-click simplicity that Nutanix is known for to migrating workloads from ESXi to AHV.

So how does Xtract for VM differentiate from other migration tools?  First, it is an agentless migration tool.  Xtract will communicate with vCenter to get a list of VMs that are in the ESXi infrastructure, and it will build a migration plan and synchronize the VM data from ESXi to AHV.

During data synchronization and migration, Xtract will insert the AHV device drivers into the virtual machine.  It will also capture and preserve the network configuration, so the VM will not lose connectivity or require administrator intervention after the migration is complete.

Xtract1

By injecting the AHV drivers and preserving the network configuration during the data synchronization and cutover, Xtract is able to perform cross-hypervisor migrations with minimal downtime.  And since the original VM is not touched during the migration, rollback is as easy as shutting down the AHV VM and powering the ESXi VM back on, which significantly reduces the risk of cross-hypervisor migrations.

Analysis

The datacenter is clearly changing, and we now live in a multi-hypervisor world.  While many customers will still run VMware for their on-premises environments, there are many that are looking to reduce their spend on hypervisor products.  Xtract for VMs provides a tool to help reduce that cost while providing the simplicity that Nutanix is known for.

While Xtract is currently version 1.0, I can see this technology be a pivotal for helping customers move workloads between on-premises and cloud infrastructures.

To learn more about this new tool, you can check out the Xtract for VMs page on Nutanix’s webpage.

You Got Your Nutanix in My UCS #NTC

/ seanpmassey

In the 1980s, there was a commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter cups that described the product with the following lines: “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter.  You got your peanut butter in my chocolate.”

This describes  hyperconverged infrastructure and the Cisco UCS converged platform.

By combining storage and compute into the same nodes, a hyperconverged infrastructure offers many features for customers.  These include highly performant storage, simplified management, and a reduced footprint in the datacenter.  But networking has remained an island unto it’s own, and its still it’s own silo in data centers with hyperconverged infrastructure.

Cisco’s UCS provides similar benefits by converging compute and network – simplified policy-based management combined with high performance compute and networking.

So what happens when you combine them?

You get a best of breed platform that brings the fully-converged stack to life.  Network, storage, and compute are unified with a Nutanix-powered hyperconverged platform running with policy-based hardware management through UCSM.

Today, Nutanix announced support for UCS C-series rackmount servers.  Unlike the previous platform expansions, Nutanix on Cisco UCS will not be an OEM partnership.  It will be a meet-in-the-channel approach where customers would buy Cisco UCS and Nutanix licensing separately, and the integration would take place when the system is installed at the customer site.

Nutanix has certified some Cisco UCS C-series platforms, and they provide the certified Bill of Materials to simplify ordering with your preferred channel partner.  Nutanix is not supporting Cisco B-series blades.

The combination of Nutanix and UCS brings yet another powerful combination to customers who want to utilize the best-of-breed technologies in their data centers.