Intro
Last week as you’ll probably already have seen I was at the Nutanix .Next 2017 Europe event in Nice, France. During this amazing event, I visited several sessions going from sales talks, via an NDA session to a deep dive. In this post, I will try to give a bit more information about the sessions I followed as far as I can do.
Disclaimer: this overview is based on notes written during the session and my memory and since specially the latter is not failsafe they could be some untrue things in this post. Please send the feedback directly to me so I can adjust them. Also, I don’t have equal amounts of text about all sessions because nothing is equal.
Nice disclaimer, right? This was just if the disclaimer all presenters had to read before starting their sessions. On screen, there was an even bigger one equally to the one showed during the keynote’s.
Index
These where the sessions that I followed:
Dell-EMC: 6 rules of disruption
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The six rules of disruption
While this clearly is a sponsored session only the middle part was commercial. Before and after that it was about those six rules and what they are according to them. I will give a bit more explanation about them that also might include my own opinion about them.
- The interface is everywhere
- It is, just think of your smartphone, Google home, an Echo dot or maybe your home thermostat. Everything has an interface these days. While voice commands where hard years back it has become really mature these days on some of those devices.
- Remove the friction
- If something doesn’t work flawlessly users will not accept it and the product will fail. Same with doing business, if it gets hard for a customer to do business with you they will go away and take their business somewhere else.
- Prepare for abundance
- With this they say that we should prepare for more and more data. Everything will have a sensor in the future, from the floor you walk on, trough the shoes you walk with up to the hat you have on your head. This will need to be handled somewhere.
- Embrace non-linearity
- With this they try to say we shouldn’t keep thinking the same way. Change needs and will happen and if you refuse to change you will lose.
- Be honest
- If you are not honest this will haunt you. In a world where a single tweet can bring down companies being dishonest might result in that tweet.
- Be curious
- If you don’t keep pioneering and developing yourself there is no way forward. If companies keep doing the same repeatedly they will fail in the end. Same with people, if I never learned anything new or would never think outside of the box I would have been unemployed for years already.
This was a fun session to follow and while the 6 points ‘coincidentally’ are generally the direction Nutanix is going they are also what lots of people see happening in the (near) future.
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VMware VDI on Nutanix
This session was meant to be presented by Brian Suhr but he managed to brake his leg the week before so he was replaced by Kees Baggerman of Nutanix and VCDX-DTM Sean Massey. I had to sit in front because I big mouthed Angelo Luciano to sit up front and Sean made me take his place. Me always with my big mouth. While a lot of the content in this session was already known to me it was good to see some of my knowledge once more confirmed and they presented us with some figures I would never have guessed. I always knew that optimizing an image is required but up to 50% performance was new to me. Also, they gave numbers to prove that data locality is essential for VDI. I can’t remember the exact numbers but there was a big difference with or without shadow clones enabled. This was a very good session that showed the audience on how to design a good working VMware View environment on Nutanix.
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NX Files
Since this was an NDA session there’s not a lot I can say besides that it contained presentations about ideas and product improvements that came out of the Nutanix Internal Hackathons. Only point I have about this session that it contained code samples that where hard to read since the text was too small.
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SOS Troubleshooting
To start this session had some hard to read blue titles in the PowerPoint and too small text size ssh session screens. Content wise this session was about the tools you can use to manage and troubleshoot your Nutanix Environment like the alerting services, NCC, syslog, Pulse and Prism analysis. Further it went deeper into the thought process and framework required for successful troubleshooting.
Some of the key takeaways from this session where that an admin should always run NCC before logging a case. Also, Pulse should be enabled where possible and allowed. This sends only relevant information to Nutanix that contains no IP or data. This was a great session with heaps of technical information.
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Puppet
The presenter for this session introduced himself as an engineer but the first five minutes sounded commercial. Luckily, I had an excuse to escape since Sean Massey asked me to record a podcast about automating Horizon View with PowerCLI
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Calm deep dive
Again, this was a good session to follow. Some of it might have been lost on me but Calm looks to be an awesome and easy tool to use. The real nerds will be able to dig deep into it though and can connect it to any automation tool already in use and can even create the json config files automatically using other tooling. Calm itself consists of two docker systems running on Prism Central, by default it will be disabled but once enabled (and maybe the ram for the Prism Central server(s) is expanded it will give access to just about anything you want to automate ranging from PowerShell to SSH, batch or the programming language you might prefer.
