My Experience Attending Nutanix .Next Europe 2017!

I was lucky enough to attend Nutanix .Next Europe 2017 in Nice, France. Really, it went beyond my expectations as a technology conference. Starting with the name of the venue “Acropolis Conference Center”, Opening Keynote with more than 2,200+ Cloud Builders, Recognizing of NutanixNTC, Live Demo by Steven Poitras (Writer of The Nutanix Bible) followed by very inspirational presentation by Fabien Cousteau & Rob Lloyd (CEO Hyperloop One), Ending with an remarkable closing keynote by Mick Ebeling “Founder NOT IMPOSSIBLE”.

Also, witness the passion for the technology & innovation between all attendees, including Nutanix Top Management, Staff, Sponsors and Customers.

Moreover, it was a good opportunity to hear all the latest announcements including “Acropolis Object Storage Service, Nutanix Calm & XI Cloud Services” and upcoming features in AHV 5.5 (e.g. Support for vGPU & Citrix PVS)

If you missed .Next Europe 2017, You still have the chance to watch the recorded Morning Keynote Day1, Afternoon Keynote Day1 & Keynote Day2

Or, register for .Next On-Tour to hear the highlights and hottest announcements from the .NEXT Conference.

Nutanix X-RAY

Nutanix X-Ray is an automated testing framework and benchmarking application for enterprise grade datacenters. With X-Ray, teams can simulate how applications are impacted during common events and scenarios, including system failures, spikes in application use, software upgrades, and more. Run multiple workloads in the same environment, while ensuring that heavy demand of one application does not negatively impact performance for other workloads.

The following areas are covered in the X-Ray test scenarios:

• Availability X-Ray tests how a hyperconverged solution tolerates a node failure during a workload. Consistent performance and stability test the system's availability and the management fabric's failure tolerance.

• Realistic Performance X-Ray tests the system's solution to handle mixed workloads. The solution can include running databases on a single node, simultaneously running VDI workloads on multiple nodes, mixing VM snapshot, VDI boot storms, VM provisioning, and multiple workloads or stability over an extended period of time.

• Feature Set  Ideal features include clones for VM provisioning, deduplication, compression, VAAI support, native VMlevel replication, Cloud Connect, 1-click software and hypervisor upgrades, BIOS/drives, compatibility with multiple hypervisors and the ability to migrate and convert between hypervisors with the same solution.

• Data Integrity X-Ray tests the data's safety during power outages or component failures.

Download Nutanix X-Ray and Docs

Nutanix Xtract

Nutanix Xtract provides a simple method for businesses to migrate existing VMs & Databases from VMware ESXi clusters to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS.

Xtract for VMs has been designed for all workload types, providing an efficient method to onboard a large number of VMs very simply and quickly. Its architecture is designed with performance and efficiency in mind, and starts with a deployed virtual appliance. IT admins follow a 3-step process in the Xtract administrator console to configure and run migrations.

Where Xtract for VMs takes a “lift and shift” approach to migration, Xtract for DBs, operates at an application-level to handle the migration, and importantly, transformation of Microsoft SQL Server databases.From the initial discovery and scans of SQL Server environments, performance and configuration information is used in-conjunction with Nutanix best practises to create a design template. Xtract uses this template to create a new SQL Server deployment on Nutanix, migrating only the data within the databases into the newly created VM. The application of Nutanix best practices ensures the database instance is right-sized during the process.

Key Benefits:

• Streamlined VM migrations with one-click simplicity
• Agentless infrastructure discovery and migrations
• Flexible VM network mappings
• Control over the cutover process with near-zero downtime
• Cost efficient – included with all Nutanix software editions
• SQL migrations from any source platform (hardware, virtual or cloud)

Read More: VM Migrations and Database Transformations for Simple Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Nutanix Xi Cloud Services

Nutanix Xi Cloud Services provide a native extension to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, delivering an integrated public cloud environment that can be instantly provisioned and automatically configured.

Xi Cloud Services will be operated by Nutanix and delivered from datacenters in the U.S., located in Northern Virginia and San Francisco Bay Area. We have also teamed up with Google to Fuse Cloud Environments for Enterprise Apps and deliver Xi from Google Cloud Platform datacenters.

Disaster Recovery (DR) Service

The first Xi Cloud Service that will be available is Xi Disaster Recovery (DR), a turnkey and integrated service that rapidly and intelligently protects the applications and data in your Nutanix environment without the need to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure stack. Customers will be able to simply select VMs for protection, choose one of several subscription plans and setup protection – all from within Prism! The VMs will then be replicated in the background, ready to be recovered in the public environment in the event of a site failure.

Read More:

• Xi Disaster Recovery (DR) Service 
• Xi Disaster Recovery – A New Approach to Cloud Services

Nutanix Calm!

Nutanix Calm provides application automation and lifecycle management for the Nutanix and public clouds. Calm orchestrates the provisioning, scaling, and management of applications across multiple environments to make the entire IT infrastructure more agile and application-centric.

Calm defines applications via simple blueprints that administrators can easily create and instantly deploy. IT managers can either utilize pre-integrated blueprints or create their own, then publish them to the Nutanix Marketplace. 

Organizations can now fully automate hybrid cloud architecture deployments, scaling both multitiered and distributed applications across different cloud environments, including AWS.

Calm’s policy-based governance and reporting show the overall utilization and true cost of your public cloud consumption at a glance so you can base application provisioning decisions on business needs and budget requirements.

Read More:

• Application Automation with Nutanix Calm
• App Centric Infrastructure for Any Cloud

HYCU - The only backup and recovery purpose-built for Nutanix

HYCU  (Haiku: a traditional form of Japanese poetry valued for simplicity, openness, depth lightness) is the first data protection solution powered by ‘Comtrade Software’ that is fully integrated with Nutanix AHV. HYCU makes data protection easy to deploy and manage with automated application discovery. 

Features:

• Native & Reliable data protection for VMs and mission-critical applications. 
• 3 minutes to deploy through Nutanix Prism web console. 
• 4 minutes to learn and protect virtual machines and applications. 
• 2 minutes to restore VMs & Applications. 
• Predefined backup policies (Gold, Silver, and Bronze) that simplify the data protection implementation. 
• Automatic backup scheduling provides data protection based on your recovery point objectives (RPOs). 
• In-built application awareness provides application discovery and application-specific backup and restore. 
• Multiple data storage targets, including cloud services (Amazon, Azure) also local storages using NSF & SMB. 

Licensing:

HYCU comes with a prebuilt Instant-on license that expires automatically after 45 days and cannot be reused. HYCU license is based on the number of CPU sockets on all Nutanix clusters.

Perpetual license:

•Nutanix SX series: USD $999/socket

•Nutanix NX series: USD $1500/socket

Subscription:

•USD $75/month/socket

Resources:

Press Release: Comtrade Software Introduces the First Data Protection Solution Purpose-built for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform

The Register: Software 'submarine' surfaces data protection for the Nutanix hypervisor crowd

Trial: http://tryhycu.com

Comtrade SCOM Management Pack for Nutanix Version 2.0

Comtrade SCOM MP for Nutanix V 2.0 designed to integrate end-to-end service monitoring of Nutanix' award-winning Enterprise Could platform into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

What's new?

• Easy Configuration Wizard.
• Optimize the performance of Microsoft Exchange Server and  SQL Server on Nutanix.
• Troubleshoot Microsoft SharePoint Server issues faster, more accurately.
• An insightful lens into your bare-metal server health.
• Free 1-year subscription to Comtrade OMS Solution for Nutanix.

Free Trial