Category: Releases

April 27

Hi everyone

Hope all is well at end of quarter. We did release a new sprint with some nice enhancements-

• Mine can now have Objects as it archive. So you can put a lot of the archive data on cheaper storage. Screenshot below. You can adjust the mix of how much to put on Mine vs Objects
• AMD sizing is ready … well whenever we have AMD models. Ratan worked through lot of narly stuff to get this ready and wanted to plug his efforts and good that Sizer is ready
• NX – 12 cores rule for 12TB HDDs are there
• DX – added the gpu cables and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM to the BOM).  We are pretty complete on offering full BOM for DX now
• VERY COOL department…
  • Go to a workload and scroll down and you will see on your left a menu with the sections that scroll with you (attached). Sizer in last couple years has way more stuff in a workload and so resulted in lot of scrolling, but now we made it easy to go all round
  • Manual sizing UI is nicer now too

April 13

• New edit/add workload page –  We want to introduce new functionality as we develop Sizer Basic and Advanced. We are now offering our new workload page. It is easier to select what you want. Hope you like it and describe it below·
• N+1 yellow indicator. When we do an auto sizing or you do a manual sizing we let you know if the resiliency is N+0, N+1., or N+2.  Most people shoot for N+1. What we do is under the covers is remove a node and go through all the sizing rules and equations and make sure indeed it is less than the N+0 threshold (for example for CPU that is 95%). That is all good but you can be close and so we wanted to let you know. Using the CPU example if within 5% of the n+0 threshold we keep it N+1 as technically it is but turn it yellow.  Given sizing is lot of estimates it is best to have some margin for error and let you all know your close to the edge.·
• Migration for VDI Display protocol –  Display Protocol was added recently as an input for VDI sizing. The VDI gurus felt it was needed going forward. It is very expensive though adding 40 to 45% on cores. While this is valid sizing this could break any old sizings. So in older sizings it will default to None·
• Mine licenses updated

April 6

GREAT NEWS

We have Frame for AHV live in Sizer

As mentioned in the town hall,  EUC and in particular Frame for AHV is a hot market in extremely difficult times.  We were working on it but pulled it in.    We always want Sizer to enable you guys to do the amazing work you do.  In these times though, we will acutely focus on solutions that are  really hot right now.  I see improving upsell (replace or increase nodes in existing clusters) as next focus.

Very simple to use if you are familiar with VDI in Sizer (which is one of top workloads and so presumably you are).    Frame for AHV is simply a different broker and the display protocol is selected.  All the other options are the same.Beyond enabling it in the tool, we will soon add licenses to make that easier to quote (we have AOS and the HW now).  We will also enhance collateral with the solution as time goes on.Hope you like … let us know.  Attached is short video

Frame for AHV

 

March 31

Hi gang

We are actively building out Sizer Basic and Sizer Advanced.  Sizer Basic for customers, reps, other non-technical folks who want a sizing and just go with the default profiles.  Sizer Advanced will offer the SE much more advanced functionality for multiple workloads, multiple clusters, etc

As we build those out we want to get some of the functionality out in Sizer when available.  Today we introduced Workload Filters.  We see a workload where with Collector you may have a hundred workloads and finding what you want will be hard.  Enter the filter where you can filter by workload name, workload type, number of VMs. cores, RAM, SSD (either less than or greater than a value ), status (enabled/disabled).

Examples

• Show me just workloads of certain type (e.g. VDI)
• Show me workloads that have min or max of so many cores (could be RAM, HDD,SSD)
• show me just enabled workloads
• show me ones with certain name string or partial string
• Combine all the above

This will ultimately be accompanied with BULK EDITs.  So find me all the VDI workloads with certain name string and change profile to Power User for example. Here is screen shot (edited)

 

March 16

We did come out with new Sprint last night

Backup  is now a  regular primary workload like VDI, Server Virt, etc (see below).  It had been a target for existing workloads but now Backup can be a primary workload where you figure out the backup requirements if the customer is just wanting back up some data from some other systems beside Nutanix

12TB HDD/min12 cores

Partial population rule for Nutanix with 1.92TB SSD

NX: 128GB with mCPU, LCPU

various updates for Dell XC

 

March 2

Great to see so many of you at GTS America

We did go live with the new sprint.

Now have full BOM for HP DX.  Why that is important is as you go to the HP store to place a quote you will have full information you need including the power supply for example.  At GTS, people asked about us making a call to the HP store.  Unfortunately they don’t have a API we can call.  We will work on making it easier though with a link from Sizer We did do The cascade refresh CPUs but not live in Sizer yet.  I would expect those in next 2 days

 

Feb 24

Hi everyone

I am at GTS Americas.  Hope to see lot of you.  I have a presentation tomorrow with the Partners and one on Thursday with NX field.

• A lot of very cool things are happening in the Sizer area which I’ll discuss in these presentations but here is the summary.
• Collector 2.2 is out but coming is Collector Portal which allows customer to share their collection much easier than with Excel
• Sizer Basic is in the works and should be out this qtr.  This is streamlined for volume sales and will be available to customers.  We have had a customer program for some time which has been a success and this will be cool.  Think about collaborating with the customer on sizing.  I’ll talk more
• Sizer will get a lot more advanced.  We are moving to multiple clusters and ability to have different sizing for each cluster and for each cluster to adhere to different policy.  Auto will provide 3 options – low cost, high performance, and high cap .  Wow lot of options to play with
• Ok if that was not enough we are working on Sizer Xpert.  Sizer today is deterministic.  You want replication, RF3, Era, yada yada, by golly Sizer can do it to the 4th decimal place.  Well great if you know that is what you need.    Working on Xpert that will review your solutions and prescribe ideas.  We worked on it at hackathon and now in development.  hope to see a lot of you this week and please do reach out if want to meet 1 on 1.  Ratan Kumar will be in EMEA GTS later next month.  We will cover APAC one too

January 21

Collector

• Collector or RVTools –  Can now size for just powered ON VMs or both Powered ON and OFF VMs. Was just Powered ON.
• Collector or RVTools profile can go up to 64GB RAM (was 32GB)

Usability

• Rich Text Format is now available for  Scenario Objectives. So you can bold things or underline words in the Objectives to make a key point.  This also makes it into the BOM and so a  nicer document

January 31

Products

• Complete HPE DX BOM.  Now Sizer will provide a complete BOM including chasis, power supplies, etc.  This makes it easier and reduces potential errors when quoting HPE DX models on HP’s configurator.
• Update to 8155-G7 product rules

Workloads

• Allow for 240TB per node for Objects Dedicated workloads.   Since it is Objects Dedicated workloads other applications are not allowed

 

Dec 20

Hello everyone We went live with our latest sprint today with following key items:

• Add some workload VMs to Object Dedicated clusters for free (1 VM per node)
• Storage Capacity Calculator – Added support for NVMe only models and SSD/NVMe models
• New Intel models – S2600WF0-2U1N-12 and S2600BPS-2U4N-12

Dec 9

Hi everyone.  We launched our latest sprint.

• Glad to offer Mine as backup target now
• Sizing Improvements and Processor input/Workload
  • Added Cascade Lake processors to the pull down list when you start a new workload

Usability

• Allow editing of cluster in a workload – Now you can move workloads around to different clusters without cloning a new workload and deleting old one.

General

• Add N+0/ N+1 pulldown to Extent Store Charts – UI. Now Extent Store charts and Extent Store values in the Sizing details are in sync.
• Add scenario delete operation on dashboard (list and tile view) – Can get rid of old scenarios easier than opening each and deleting them.

Product Alignment

• XC 740xd-24update/1.6TB SSD
• Add 8260M and 8280M processors for Nutanix
• DX is available to Nutanix partners
• Added more profiles for the V100 GPU with 32GB RAM

Workloads

• Now Mine is available.  In any workload you were able to direct backup to a different cluster and now Mine can be the target.  Sizer will do the sizing and include all the skus including the Nutanix skus for Veeam or HYCU software.  Unfortunately, you have to create a new opportunity in Sales Force and quote the Mine products separately from the main cluster with CBL.

Nov 25

Latest sprint went live last night, with the following changes:

• Retain fields in manual mode: In manual mode, while changing the model, quantity is retained, previously it used to get reset.. similarly, all the other fields
• CPU/Memory/SSD/HDD/NIC/GPU is retained upon changing the model type or even model if it has the same components..
• Validator updated with latest product changes/rules for 3rd party platforms..
• Platforms: Dell XC : XR2(XC Core only platform), HPE DX 560 Gen10 24SFF  available for sizing..
• NX 8170-G7 ready from Sizer end..

Nov 11

Latest sprint went live last night and includes:

• Deep Nodes for NearSync – We already made changes to extend support for hourly snapshots (1 hour RPO) for nodes with up to 64TB HDD ( for hybrid nodes) and up to 80TB SSD (all flash nodes). This was for async.  We now did that for NearSync as well.
• Correct RVTools capacity  – Collector 2.1 stores VM capacity data in GiB/MiB (and not GB/MB) both for VMware and Nutanix clusters as stored that way in Prism and VCenter.   RVTool  unfortunately states states the capacity in GB/MB even though the data VCenter is in GiB/MiB.  We now treat the capacities as GIB/MiB which is correctWorking on SAP Hana, Mine, 8170-G7 … all coming soon

 

 

 

Sizer 4.0

Here is the info –

Sizer 4.0 Introduction

 

Sizing improvements

• Show Extent Store for N+1 in Sizing Details. We have Extent Store and here discount the largest node to accommodate for N+1
• Min 8 cores per socket when NVMe is included in a model. This is new request from Engineering and so we moved it fast.  For NX this effects the NX-3170-G6 (NVMe+SSD), NX-8035-G6 (NVMe+SSD) , and NX-8155-G6 (NVMe+SSD) where C-CPU-6128 is no longer valid

Use Cases

• Server Virtualization Enhancement. We will be enhancing our workloads with the rich data we get from Collector.  Right now with Server Virtualization we defaulted to VCPU:pCore ratio of 6:1.  Well at times that is too much for core overcommit and at times it is too little.  Now when we gather data on the customer’s source clusters we will determine the ratio that exists and use that to create the workloads.  We also know the processor that is used in those clusters and so precise requirements are coming into Sizer with combination of knowing the processor and the current overcommit ratio.  You of course can tweak that.

Business functionality

• Discounting for SW licenses in budgetary quotes

Product Alignment

• 3155G-G7 model and parts addition
• XC740-xd 24 update
• HPE DX 380 G10 8SFF (GPU model)
• Moved 5055-G6 to manual
• CPU 6226 update for Lenovo

Sizing improvements-

• Updated the snapshot frequency for dense nodes. With 5.11.1, the limits for hourly snapshots have moved from 32TB to 64TB for Hybrid and from 48TB to 80TB for All Flash. Below these capacities we support hourly snapshots but above those capacities we support snapshots every 6 hours.  This is update from what we did in July.
• SSD N+0 threshold for Hybrid is now 90% (except for Files Dedicated or Objects Dedicated). Given the drop in SSD prices it is best to be more conservative (was 95%) and this matches the HDD threshold.

Use Cases-

• Era Support in Sizer – This was a heavy lift developed over couple months.  Should be big for SE’s given Era’s momentum.  Era is now supported in Sizer for both Oracle and SQL workloads.  Era snapshots are available.  Both the continuous snapshots for the Era Time Machine as well as traditional daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly snapshots. Era cloning is also supported for both clones of the database only (storage) as well as setting up new database VMs (cpu, ram, and ssd).  To complete the picture the licenses are added to the BOM, budgetary quote and actual quote to SFDC
• Several Files 3.6 updates. User connection assumptions in Files Storage has improved.  In File Storage we now assume 100% concurrent users (was 50%) and Vcpu:pCore ratio is 1:1 (was 2:1).  Given typically low core requirements for Files Storage this should not make a big impact

 

Product Alignment

• Multicomponent support. This is ability to have more than one type of component for same component type.  For example two different ssd’s.  Traditionally Sizer assumes one component sku per component type.  Our first step is support for multiple NIC cards in HP DX.
• Added the 7.68TB SSD in Storage calculator
• Several product updates

Sizing improvements

• Processor pull-down as workload input. This is cool. For all the history of Sizer when you enter cores or so much MHz for workload inputs we assume a baseline processor. Now you can tell Sizer to assume some processor and we have Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake and Cascade Lake processors to choose from.  So benefit is more precision if you tell Sizer to refer to a processor that the customer is using
• Cascade Lake updates(specInt values) for all vendors. We had updated Nutanix in prior sprint and got the rest of the vendors now.
• Compression changes. From a lot of analysis on current compression ratios found in installed base we have gone a bit more conservative depending on workload.  Also hover over the slider and you see both the percent savings and the ratios like 50% and 2:1

Use Cases

• Objects updates. We have had Objects (was Buckets) for 6 months now and got latest updates from Engineering
• The Files and Buckets skus are updated with the new skus. For example Files Pro is now Files Dedicated.  Also updated the File license names in the Files workload.
• File Analytics. You can include that now in the Files workload sizing.  No specific licenses required and available to both Files and Files Dedicated (Pro).
• Changed name of Buckets to Objects

Business functionality

• Very cool is we have a new BOM. It has never been updated in big way and we went all out. Even the dials from the UI are in the BOM.  I believe a much more professional document to share with your customer
• New SFDC rules on what you can combine in a quote. SFDC has stricter rules now and we make Sizer follows those.

Product Alignment

• Various product updates for NX-8155-G7, XC740xd-12 minimum drive count is now 4, and DX default NIC.
• NX-8155-G7 is now live in Sizer
• HPE-DX Robo Model – The 1-socket DX360 4LFF is considered as a Robo model and so can be 1 or 2 nodes

Sizing improvements

• Update Rules as per compatibility matrix (G6 Models)
• GPU sizing parity between auto and manual
• Async snapshots for Large Nodes – Large nodes which is currently defined as a hybrid node with 40TB or more of storage (hdd and ssd combined) or all flash nodes with 48TB  or more of storage, has limits on hourly snapshots.    Sizer will enforce the following for auto or manual sizing.  In either case,  the customer is willing to have 4 or less hourly snapshots per day OR the cluster needs to be resized with smaller nodes to keep under 40TB storage
• Auto/Manual Parity – minimum nodes for workloads. There are few gaps where Auto has more rules than manual and we want to close those.  There are workloads that have requirements on node counts.  For example, Buckets can only have 32 nodes max and can require certain number of nodes to process requests.  Files requires 3 min typically (yes can do 2 nodes with 1175S).  Now we test for these type conditions in manual too

Use Cases

• Calm we now have their bundles
• Updated Oracle specint min down to 55 (was 60)
• Updates to Buckets Sizing (Removing versioning, clients fields) –  We have had Buckets out for about 6 months and got feedback and came to ideas to streamline the sizing approach

UX

• A long-term request is ability to hide scenarios in your Dashboard. We want SEs work interactively with their customers using Sizer to build out the requirements.  Awkward is if they see other customer scenarios.  Now you can easily just show what you want. By default, all scenarios are displayed but there now is a Custom View button.  Click on that and you can quickly hide all the scenarios and just select what you want to show.

Product Alignment

• Fujitsu – XF core
• Inspur NF5280M5 12LFF
• New OEM- inMerge1000 – Inspur
• Lenovo – NVME drives :HX7820 & HX7520, GPUs: HX3520-G
• Improved HCL integration – Downstroking for SSDs (80GB per drive set aside). Also more important is we test if a component is End of Sale.   HCL will have a long list of components that are supported but not all of them are currently for sale and we exclude those in Sizer