In this multi-part series, the goal is to first familiarize you with the solution and then provide guidance on preparing to deploy Flow Network Security and help you learn the constructs that form your policy framework.

So, what is Flow Network Security?  By now, you may have heard the name, read about it or had a conversation about it with a Nutanix employee.  First off, and in most basic terms, Flow Network Security is built-in security for workloads that run on Nutanix AHV, our native hypervisor.  Think of it more as a feature or solution rather than a separate “product”.

While AHV has been available for many years, one thing became obvious as customers were looking to have more security options in their Nutanix environment; we didn’t have a Nutanix-developed solution to provide network security.

Enter microsegmentation.  Network virtualization got its beginning as a Stanford University research project that ultimately became a startup and commercial solution from Nicira, circa 2007.  VMware acquired Nicira in 2012 and the solution became, as you may know, NSX, which offered software-defined networking and microsegmentation functionality.  Since this time, other software companies have brought their own solutions to market.  

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Within Nutanix we have Replication Factor (How many data copies are written in the cluster) and Redundancy Factor (how many nodes/disks can go offline). Both can have a value of 2 and 3. What is what is explained here: Blog Post.

So, when we have a larger cluster, we always recommend using RF3 (Redundancy Factor 3) as the risk is higher that you have multiple nodes/disks go offline at the same time.

During trainings and onsite customer work I often get the question, "what will happen if multiple nodes go offline in Redundancy Factor 2?" In this blog post I will explain different scenarios and their behaviors.

Blog by: Jeroen Tielen
Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Nutanix launches the most significant update yet to its Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) hybrid cloud software, now enabling organizations to run the Nutanix Cloud Platform™ software on the Microsoft Azure® cloud service. With support for both the AWS and Azure clouds, NC2 is a true hybrid multicloud platform. It provides easy access to Azure services from customer VNets running enterprise applications. There’s a simple migration path for applications without modification, and expanded license portability with a consumption model choice.

Organizations are increasingly investing in the public cloud to solve business and IT challenges for improved operational flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency. According to 1,700 IT decision makers polled for the 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index report, 83% agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Nutanix launches the most significant update yet to its Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) hybrid cloud software, now enabling organizations to run the Nutanix Cloud Platform™ software on the Microsoft Azure® cloud service. With support for both the AWS and Azure clouds, NC2 is a true hybrid multicloud platform. It provides easy access to Azure services from customer VNets running enterprise applications. There’s a simple migration path for applications without modification, and expanded license portability with a consumption model choice.

Organizations are increasingly investing in the public cloud to solve business and IT challenges for improved operational flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency. According to 1,700 IT decision makers polled for the 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index report, 83% agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Storms, tornadoes, human error, and ransomware. While these disruptions have different root causes, the potential aftermath is the same: downtime and data loss. 

On average, downtime costs organizations $540,000 per hour. Every minute of downtime is a direct hit on revenue, reliability, and reputation. This is one of the most dreaded situations an IT department can face, which is why it’s crucial to have a strong data protection plan in place. 

Nutanix’s Cloud Platform’s data protection capabilities are robust and trusted by organizations who may have a need to build a solution for their highly sensitive and mission-critical data. The Nutanix® snapshot technology is natively built into the Nutanix Cloud Platform and offers a backup and disaster recovery plan that can be customized for your data protection needs in concert with a powerful ecosystem of Nutanix-certified backup vendor partners. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

The results are in! With NVIDIA’s newest GPUs designed for virtual desktops and applications, you can address a wider variety of use cases than you could ever before. In our independent testing using the NVIDIA® nVector benchmarking tool, we saw that a single A16 GPU could support 64 virtual desktops, each with 2vCPUs and 1GB framebuffer profiles, per node. With two A16 cards installed we were able to scale to 128, albeit we would recommend a high-performance CPU when scaling to 128 desktops. In a minimal Nutanix® configuration of a three node cluster that equates to 384 users per cluster, all having access to 1GB of framebuffer profile!

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Get excited! The latest upgrade to the core Nutanix® hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software is live. The AOS™  6.5 release is our most comprehensive update ever, with improved performance, security, and integrated data services required for demanding database workloads and business critical applications. 

We encourage you to take a fresh look at AOS 6.5 while keeping three key things in mind: 

1. Performance-hungry business-critical applications and databases are coming to HCI 
2. Cyber-resilience is ideally built-in to storage architecture - not bolted on   
3. Granular snapshots and replication data services are a key buying criteria  

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: ben Rogers

We're pleased to announce that the Approval Policies feature is now available in Tech Preview for the Nutanix Cloud Manager™ (NCM) Self-Service.

NCM Self-Service (formerly Calm) provides an easy and seamless way to consume simple Infrastructure as a Service VMs and multi-tier applications via the marketplace[JG1] . This is possible via easy to use blueprints to automate complex application deployment processes. As NCM Self-Service continues to grow its footprint across enterprise deployments, customers have remarked on the need for even better governance and controls on resources provisioned and managed. Governance is key to building a cloud-like experience for IT organizations, and the ability to easily define and monitor policies are important for enterprise customers.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Data is the lifeblood of today’s enterprises, and an extremely lucrative target for attackers. Ransomware, which essentially holds data “hostage” by encrypting it until a ransom is paid by the company, is increasingly common and becoming more advanced every day. 

In fact, some estimates say that a ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. These attacks can cripple an organization, causing unexpected downtime and wreaking havoc on an enterprise’s operations, production, customer service, and even future reputation. 

It can cost a lot of time, effort, and money to recover from a ransomware attack. Simply having a backup of your data is no longer sufficient, because attackers can now infiltrate backups as well. 

In addition to practicing “defense in depth,” IT professionals are now beginning to see the critical need for immutable backups as a last line of defense from ransomware and other attacks—and a smart way to maintain a successful strategy for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

On my previous blog (Link) I showed you how to build a metro availability. Now I want to "upgrade" both clusters to AHV and enable data protection with the help of Leap to achieve an RPO of zero (0).

This blog post are two posts combined. First is the in-place conversion of ESX to AHV and the second is how to enable and configure Leap.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

With unstructured data growing exponentially, securing shared storage is increasingly becoming difficult. It is an operational nightmare to identify datacenter weak points let alone predict the next threat. Ransomware attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated, surpassing firewalls and anti-virus software. 

Does this sound familiar? You plug one hole another opens, you update software, you train end users on how to detect suspicious files or emails but the threats keep coming. The rise of Ransomware in recent years has put companies on red alert. CIO’s are well aware of the impacts this can cause and nearly all would say that security is a top priority for their business.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Although Kubernetes was originally designed to run stateless workloads, the technology has matured over time and enterprises are increasingly adopting the platform to run their stateful applications. In a survey conducted by the Data on Kubernetes community, 90% of the respondents believe that Kubernetes is ready for stateful workloads, and 70% of them are already running them in production with databases taking the top spot. Having the ability to standardize different workloads on Kubernetes and ensure consistency are seen as the key factors that drive value for businesses.

Nutanix provides an industry-leading HCI platform that is ideal for running cloud-native workloads running on Kubernetes at scale. The Nutanix architecture offers better resilience for both Kubernetes platform components and application data. With the addition of each HCI node, apart from scaling the Kubernetes compute nodes, there is an additional storage controller as well which results in improved storage performance for your stateful applications. 

The Nutanix Unified Storage is made available to cloud-native applications with the Nutanix CSI driver. Applications use standard Kubernetes objects such as PersistentVolumeClaims, PersistentVolumes, and StorageClasses to access its capabilities. The CSI driver also enables users to take Persistent Volume snapshots using API objects VolumeSnaphot, VolumeSnapshotContent, and VolumeSnapshotClass. Snapshots represent a point-in-time copy of a volume and can be used to provision a new volume or to restore existing volumes to the previous snapshotted data. OpenShift Container Platform deploys the snapshot controller and the related API objects as part of the Nutanix CSI Operator as described in Blog 3. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Purpose

The infrastructure for Nutanix Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) supports a tenant cluster and a production virtual private cloud (VPC) for each customer. Customers generally have production VMs running in their on-premises cluster, which is connected to the DRaaS VPC using an IPsec tunnel. This is used by the DRaaS workflow to replicate on-premises production data.

During a disaster recovery situation or while running disaster recovery tests, VMs will failover from on-premises to the DRaaS cluster. When this occurs, all VMs in one subnet of an on-premises network (e.g., 192.168.10.0/24) usually failover to DRaaS. If the customer chooses to preserve the IP, VMs in DRaaS come up with the same IPs as on-premises (e.g., 192.168.10.0/24 network).

In this type of disaster recovery situation, customers can choose which critical VMs are replicated to DRaaS. But in those cases, on-premises VMs cannot communicate with VMs in DRaaS. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Introduced with the Nutanix Files™ release 3.8, Smart DR brought share-level replication between active file server instances for disaster recovery. If you’re not yet familiar with Smart DR, you can get an overview of the feature and its benefits here. Shortly after its initial release, Nutanix introduced 1-minute replication interval support with the Files 3.8.1 release. 

The recent Files release 4.0 further enhances Smart DR with scalability improvements and self-service restore (SSR) integration

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

The Nutanix Files™storage solution introduces new enhancements in its newest 4.0 release that improve client performance, enhance file server compute efficiency, and deliver a consistent experience in mixed environments.  We’ve also done some scalability testing we’re excited to share.

• Improving Synchronous Random Write Performance
• CPU Scheduling with NFS
• Flow Control with Nutanix Volumes
• Pushing the Performance Envelope

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Havey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

I want to start this post with a quote by an Infrastructure Engineer from a food and beverage company that we received a few days ago, “As always, very impressed with Support. We rarely need them, but the team was great helping us through this one and their help was much appreciated.” Feedback is a gift as it helps us understand what we are doing well but also where we need to improve. I see feedback like this everyday and it reiterates why Nutanix Support is known throughout the industry for delivering world-class support.

Year over year we continue to execute not because we have done it before but because we are never satisfied. We are very proud of the accomplishments we have made as we strive to continuously learn, innovate and improve. This requires us to listen to what our customers as well as employees are saying.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that for nine consecutive years we have received the NorthFace ScoreBoard (NFSB) Service Award for 2021, with the special Summit classification that recognizes exceptional organizations who have earned the award for seven or more years in a row.  Every year, the NFSB Service Award recognizes companies who provide superior customer service as voted by their customers. The award uses the image of Mount Everest to symbolize exceeding customer expectations.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

新年快樂! Wishing those who celebrate a prosperous and healthy Year of the Tiger! With new year celebrations, comes resolve. Usually everyone does this one January 1, but it’s never too late to celebrate the new year and make a new resolve. 2022 is in full swing and that means understanding your database challenges and simplifying that complexity should be at the top of your priority list. Let’s make this a New Year’s Resolution for IT to deliver. Nutanix has partnered with HPE to power up your databases for impactful business performance through the powerful combination of Nutanix Era® database manager on HPE’s Greenlake® offering. Database management can be just as tedious as your server sprawl. That’s why management of costs to align with actual usage and supporting rapid deployment is critical. This has become essential for enterprises and even large international retailers, especially as they journey between holiday sales and new product launches a new year can bring.

It can be done! A Nutanix customer, an international retailer, not only survived, but thrived when harnessing HPE GreenLake with Nutanix Era for database management to simplify their database administration, enable rapid deployment, and move to a true consumption-based cost model. HPE GreenLake in combination with Nutanix Era helped this retailer deliver the outcomes that their business demanded.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Fast and flexible access to IT infrastructure has become a critical success factor for modern business. Nutanix and Equinix have joined up to help enterprise IT teams reduce time to market for new applications and services. Equinix Metal™ enables as-a-service infrastructure deployment globally and rapid scalability for hyperconverged infrastructure using the Nutanix® Cloud Platform, enabling you to shift CapEx to OpEx while reducing hardware spending on key workloads and enhancing your ability to reach the users, partners, and clouds that matter most to your business.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Hyperconverged storage is a part of hyperconverged infrastructure that brings cloud architecture to IT datacenters and powers modern enterprise applications without the need for dedicated storage arrays and storage teams. It uses distributed storage algorithms to keep data protected, available, and secure at all times. Compared to traditional infrastructure, hyperconverged storage makes it easier for IT admins to manage storage resources and lower total cost of ownership, securing better pricing on storage than from public cloud service providers.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

This week Nutanix announced the general availability release of our AOS™ 6.1 infrastructure software, delivering to customers higher performance, simpler management, enhanced orchestration capabilities, and more. The new functionality enhances the value of our customers’ HCI deployments and further simplifies deployment and provisioning, and customers can easily upgrade to this new version to benefit from these new capabilities.  

An increasing number of IT organizations are standardizing on Nutanix® HCI to power the applications and services that run their businesses. We have been working closely with our customers to guide product development efforts and have simultaneously invested in our vision to lead the next era in IT by bringing powerful yet simple hybrid cloud infrastructure to organizations everywhere. Let’s take a closer look at the most impactful new functionality delivered with this release.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Cybersecurity attacks are becoming progressively complex with an increase in Cloud, Digitization, and Work-from-Anywhere practices.  State, Local, and Education (SLED) organizations must begin improving their security posture and aligning to a Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA). Since organizations  are required to move away from  perimeter-based security solutions, they will need to modernize their IT operations, increase agility, and work to implement network, application, user and data-based security to support mission success based on Zero Trust. 

This is where Nutanix comes in, helping you protect your SLED organization’s public information from cyber threats. Over time, Nutanix has honed in on the core concepts of security while improving data resiliency strategies. We have elevated our presence in the security space by releasing new solutions with a proactive security focus.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, and Citrix Systems, Inc. formed a strategic partnership to help you build a simple, secure, and performant infrastructure for a digital learning environment. From K-12 to research universities, running Citrix® Virtual Apps and Desktops on the Nutanix® Cloud Platform simplifies solutions, enhances security, and delivers excellent student and staff experience.

There are 3 major benefits of building a Nutanix + Citrix technology stack at your institutions.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

I’m a habitual note-taker when speaking with customers about their efforts in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and hybrid cloud. And most of the time, I always find a fascinating story buried in the observations I put to paper.

This happened when I examined my notes from a recent discussion with Adrian Darmawan, executive vice president and CTO of First Foundation Bank, which provides personal and business banking, private wealth management and trust services.

He gives credit to the Nutanix HCI for helping to navigate banking regulations, manage $7.7 billion in assets, and support customers and employees at 23 locations – while reducing the time spent on infrastructure management by up to 40%

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Chances are, traditional SAN has been part of your lineup for many years—and you’ve likely wondered, “what else is out there?” We've been conducting some in-depth field research and discovered that HCI truly is the way to go.

But in the interest of fairness, we wanted to share some of the most compelling reasons to move to HCI from your SAN solution.

If your goal is to accelerate your digital transformation so that you can improve customer experience and help your business evolve, then Nutanix HCI is your perfect match. Nutanix helps you automate IT operations, consolidate all your workloads, and easily extend to the cloud. Which could be cool, if you’re into that sort of thing.