After a great night with some of the NTC’s, today it started. A short wrap-up of the day.

Pre-NTC TS 1; LCM information

Although the day is about to start at 8.30am, Cameron grabs the moment and is talking about LCM and the focus of his team. Where the focus was lately on reliability, the focus will change to scale and speed. However speed is something that depends on the cooperation with the hardware vendor. It is not only Nutanix that has to speed up things.

Pre-NTS TS 2; Warm welcome by the CEO

Rajiv is entering the stage. It is great to see him performing for this group of NTCs. Maybe more relaxed because of the location, he is really aware of trends in the market and has a great vision how Nutanix will respond to this trends.

Some information: NKP is now generally available. The interest of the market is beyond expectations.

When there is asked after the migration from VMware to AHV, Rajiv is telling about all the possibilities Nutanix offers for this. Only ESXi to AHV is very easy. It becomes more difficult when additional features as NSX and vROI are used. Nutanix is willing to help migrate these features to Nutanix functionality as well.

More customers increases the demand on support. Nutanix is investing in R&D and support. Nutanix is also looking for a more prominent role for partners for some levels of support.

1st ‘scheduled’ session; Nutanix Cloud Manager

First regular session of the day is about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). NCM comes to live in a real hybrid world. Nutanix clusters are located in the datacenters, public cloud and in the edge. Platform engineering is the future. Just see the infrastructure as a set of APIs to deliver all the services an organization needs as simple as standardized as they want.

A good overview about the components is provided during the session. Sometimes it is hard to convince the customer to use NCM, but is really useful for hybrid multicloud infrastructures.

Next session NKP

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform is based on Mesosphere after the acquisition of D2IQ. Deepak Goel joined Nutanix with this acquisition. What is the purpose of NKP?

Today almost all developers don’t want to manage infrastructure, but they have to. Developers also want to use VMs and containers on the same infrastructure. There is also a high demand of persistent storage for container.

This are also the current challenges. You don’t want developers wasting their useful time to manage clusters.

Why transform from NKE to NKP?

With NKE customers had to bring all management tools around Kubernetes himself. With NKP, the management is included in the product. There are multiple open source components included in the management shell of NKP. All this products are stable, but it is hard to combine these in a shell to make sure all components are interoperable. Nutanix is the key partner for customers to bring all the goodness of open source to an enterprise grade product.

It is not hard to transform from NKE to NKP. Nutanix has a guide and is possible to automate the process. Nutanix is willing to migrate all NKE customers to NKP in the upcoming year.

There is much more to say about NKP. This will be done in a separate post.

Session AOS 6.10

It is a huge upgrade from 6.5 to 6.10. Updates on different levels for the product. There are major improvement on scalability, performance and security.

Performance is optimized. The number of IOPS is increasing and the latency decreases. It is not fair to share numbers, as the number depends on multiple factors. But in general a better performance is expected when upgrading from 6.5 to 6.10.

But there will be more in a new release of AOS. Features Nutanix is working on are for example AHV Metro Independent Witness, support for AMX, anti-affinity policies using categories and vNIC granularity in Flow. As you may expect no GA date available for these features.

Session NDK

NDK is targeted for organizations with really strict demands on Disaster Recovery when modernizing their infrastructure. NDK leverages Advanced Data Management Services for Kubernetes Applications.

NDK will help organizations to improve their business continuity. More information in the already announced post about NKP.

AHV improvements

This session started with a question to all NTCs. What are the most annoying parts of AHV? There were a few. The upgrade van NGT and VirtIO are not the most pleasant ones. Migrating bulk VMs during LCM can be annoying as well.

New features of AHV and AOS are discussed. There are some good discussions about the scheduler (ADS). It might be that in the feature you are able to disable the scheduler at all. Also there are some thoughts about priority VMs. You can prioritize VMs in HA in case of node failure.

Automatic refresh of NGT certs is coming in an upcoming release.

1st day closure

After the session of AHV there ware sessions about NDB and Nutanix Central. These sessions will be covered in a separate post. After all, it was a great day with great sessions. Last event of the day was a reception in the Nutanix Garden. Can’t wait to the sessions of tomorrow.