Category: Releases

January Sprint 1

Key enhancements

• We heard from field and partners that getting either budgetary quotes or getting real quotes created is well hard (I can’t repeat what we heard in interviews as I want to keep the channel G rated ).  Partners were saying it can take a week to get either budgetary quote or real quote going.  Distributors were saying we retype what is in the Sizer BOM to create a quote.  Nutanix SE’s saying this is really hard with CBL.

We knew we can help and so we took it on big time in last three months and now in summary we can say a partner or NTNX field  person can create either a budgetary or real quote for any business model be it appliance, disagregated Nutanix, XC Core, CBL SW sale .   Attached is the matrix with details.  I believe this is about improving sales velocity.

• We now have the  new File licenses going with Standalone cluster.  So here for Files Pro you can create the Files cluster with IONLY the Files skus attached (no AOS licenses).  More changes coming but big step
• Data Center and ROBO Solutions. These are addons for your HCI recommendation where we add right amount of things like Prism Pro or Flow.

Product Updates

• We always pull the latest from SFDC for Nutanix products
• Implemented several Nutanix product rules like allowed CPUs for 3070 if GPU is desired.
• We always pull the latest from HCL for SW only vendors

January Sprint 2

Key enhancements

• Include ECX in auto sizing. We always took in the savings after the recommendation was determined and so the HDD utilization was accurate.  We hadn’t taken that into account though in determining the recommendation.  Now that we have really large workloads for Files and soon Buckets this became an issue.  So now Sizer recommendation is accurate
• Clone Workload Feature. This is cool.  Define a workload and can clone it and then just modify what you want.  For example, you want five different Server Virtualization workloads that are all similar but different.  Define one and clone/edit the rest.
• Thick VMs sizing logic improved when uploading Collector or RVTools outputs. Now no compression is taken.  A subtle but important Sizing improvement

UX improvements

• Budgetary Quote – Added Hardware Support quote line
• Making List view as default dashboard view instead of grid.
• Implement Open/Closed Opportunity Filter – UX

Product Updates

• New model – Fujitsu XF8050 HY/AF
• HPE are DL380/360 again instead of DX . There was a problem with HCL but addressed it
• We always pull the latest from SFDC for Nutanix products
• Implemented several Nutanix product rules like allowed CPUs for 3070 if GPU is desired.
• We always pull the latest from HCL for SW only vendors

 

Coming soon

• Buckets !! Should come out this week.  I’ll announce it later but you can start thinking about Buckets by sizing different opportunities

In month of December we made following enhancements

• Partners can now generate Salesforce Quote for Nutanix Appliance. This is first time they can create the quote and then their distributor applies discounts and request approvals in the Distributor Quote Tool. We will enable quoting for Nutanix Disaggregated, XC Core, HX Core, CBL in January.
• Sizer now integrate with Hardware Compatability List for all SW vendors including HP, Cisco and Dell PE. The benefit is we can keep Sizer in sync with the changes more consistently.
• Nutanix Files enhancements

 Increased maximum capacity to 10 PB (Petabytes)

Support for Nutanix File licenses. The budgetary quote, quote and BOM includes the new licenses

• HX Core support
• Intel server support (new vendor)
• NX-5155-G6 in Sizer
• ECX and Block Awareness together supported
• Sizer Wiki Search – find information faster
• Budgetary Quote changes for CBL
• Oracle AWR tool support

November Sprint

• Collector 1.1 Support  – Sizer to include median values from Collector.  We mine the VCenter data and get actual core usage.  THIS VERY COOL AS CAN SAVE CBL CORES WHICH COSTS LOTS OF $$.
• Velocity models for partners and Nutanix users –  Velocity models are the NX-1065-G6 and can be up to 8 nodes but offer better discounts.
• XC Core support.  Quotes and BOM show CBL and XC Core. Budgetary quote coming soon
• Applied spectre adjustment for VDI and Xenapp – Windows 7 – 20% hit, Windows 10 version 1709 – 7% hit, Windows 10 version 1803 – 11% hit
• Performance Improvements.  Homogeneous sizing typically reduced by 50%, while heterogeneous sizing reduced by 30%
• File Services updates like setting Erasure Coding to ON by default
• Budgetary quote improvements – can now apply discounts for SW Only quotes or NX Disaggregated quotes
• New product updates for various vendors

Hi everyone

We released the October sprint

• The BIG thing is Hardware Disaggregated quoting is now in Sizer. As a SFDC user you can start a scenario and tie it to a account and opportunity as you do today. If that account is a Software Choice account (where disaggregated is used) then Sizer will create the proper quote where it includes the Software licenses (Capacity based licenses), Hardware and the Hardware support. In addition, you will see that quote reflected in the BOM. Soon the budgetary quote will be provided too. If the customer is not enabled for Software Choice then the regular appliance quote can be created as it is today.

• Collector and RVTools summary (excel you receive from Sizer after uploading the tool output) now gives explanation when certain VMs are not sized. For example, if the VM was powered off.

• SFDC syncing on daily basis. Now we pull SFDC changes once a day automatically. So any price changes or product changes are updated in Sizer. This is key for sizing but also when we show budgetary numbers

• Nutanix G5 models except the NX-1175S-G5, 8150-G5 and 3155G-G5 are in manual only since only these G5 models can still be quoted.  In manual sizing you can still do a sizing with the G5 models.

 

September sprint includes:

Budgetary Quote UI:

User doesn’t have to download excel to see the pricing on quote. The new interactive UI will allow one to see list prices and apply discounts to see the sales/net price. You can iterate the entire process (size, generate budgetary quote and apply discounts) and download the quote when fully satisfied.

Enhancements to the Financial assumptions:

– Support levels have been sorted

– Monthly support terms (14months, 26 months..etc.) have been added

– Brief description has been been added next to each support level

– Ability to apply discounts to Budgetary Quote has been moved to the new Budgetary Quote UI.

Regular/Robo Models

There was confusion on how robo models like the 1175S should be sized.  For Regular models which are used in data centers,  PM originally wanted to restrict the 1175S to just backup usage.  That in ROBO they could be used as application nodes that could be 1, 2, or 3+ nodes.

That brought some confusion when SE wanted to size a small cluster with say qty 5 of the 1175S.  Sure could do it in ROBO, but SE would say it is not a ROBO customer project.

So I worked with PM and we streamlined the rules and now models like the 1175S (lot of vendors have similar ones) are treated as fully functional models as follows:

Regular Model Rules

• All models included
• All use cases are allowed – main cluster application, remote cluster application and remote snapshots
• 3+ nodes are recommended for any model. It is considered good data center practice to have a minimum of 3 nodes.

ROBO Model Rules

• All models but only some models like the 1175S can size for 1 or 2 node, while others require 3 min nodes
• All use cases – main cluster application, remote cluster application and remote snapshots
• All models can go to 3+ nodes depending on sizing requirements

So what should you do

• Just stay with Regular models for most of your sizing needs. It is default and models like 1175S can indeed run applications.  Any recommendation would be 3+ nodes
• Only go to ROBO if you need 1 or 2 node for 1175S

For more info go to the Sizer wiki –  ROBO-Regular

Rack Awareness:

Nutanix has always had node awareness and for long time block awareness both of which are in Sizer.  With this release, Sizer will also have rack awareness where Data Availability is maintained even in an event of an entire rack or top-of-the-rack switch failure.

Supported Use Cases

• Heterogeneous solution made up of several different homogeneous blocks

–    For example, could have several 3460 blocks and several 3360 blocks

–    Here the 3460 blocks are all identical, while all the 3360 blocks are identical.  Given that, the 3460 block is homogeneous and the 3360 block is homogeneous.

–    These homogeneous blocks are dispersed across sufficient racks to meet rack awareness

• We will support a cluster wide setting for rack awareness and assume all workloads in that cluster must adhere to rack awareness

Other things

• Share notice in email. Sharing has been around forever and put in your Shared Scenarios but now when a person shares a scenario an email goes to them.  Great to increase collaboration and we will do more
• We have all Sizer and “non-Sizer” parts for all HP and Cisco models. Non-Sizer parts are things sizer does not analyze like say storage controller, boot drives , etc.  Where before we asked you to click link to HFCL we got in the BOM.
• Lots of product updates
• Inspur is a new vendor
• 3060-G6 NVME is there
• We allowed “no modification” as option for VDI when selecting desktop or office version.  Sometimes people have need to size for so much MHz or Cores per user and don’t want the modification.  In future Collector will use that option too when we upload a collector output

 

 

In August we added

• Collector 1.0 is now General Available (GA).   Nutanix Collector will ultimately change how Nutanix sells its products where we first collect all the pertinent customer workload data to then design the optimal solution in Sizer. 

In its first release, it takes inventory snapshots of the application VMs. In next few months it will take in time series information to get best insight.

VDI will be the first workload use case. Ultimately we will cover several different workloads, hypervisors and operating systems

• Collector Input.   Just like uploading a RVtools output into Sizer you can upload a Collector output

• Sizer Wiki –  This facility 🙂   This is important for the following reasons
  • All Sizer users (NTNX users and partners) get access to the information
  • It is safe as need to be a sizer user
  • Allows us to communicate updates and explain how Sizer works
• Planned failover for Storage Calculator.  Now you can select the failover level you expect and get the storage capacity for a cluster

• Numerous product updates across various vendors
• Hitachi added as a vendor

 

hi everyone

A few presents from the Sizer team before SKO. This is our July sprint

– NEC Vendor addition

– Common panel to define license, support and discounts. Just above the workloads on the left. This is where you apply these things for quotes, BOM, financial analysis

– Discounts support in Budgetary quotes – Now can apply discounts in in budgetary quotes. So you can see net price !!!

– Multiple nodes support in Storage capacity calculator – Hey if one node is cool why not more!

– License and Support SKUs support in BOM – we are getting it to be more complete

– Extent Store View in a scenario – We are trying to give you every chart known to mankind .. well at least storage people. Extent store is reported in sizing details and now a nice chart

– Replacing License/Support configuration in quote modals with data from financial assumptions

Key things added

• Unbalanced DIMM skylake update. Skylake is different than Broadwell for unbalanced dimms. With broadwell it was just dimm count. With skylake it is dimm count at times, but at times it also depends on how dimms are laid out on the motherboard. Finally the memory bandwidth can effect things too. At any rate we made big update here and Sizer takes all that into account.
• Storage Calculator updates. From user feedback we streamlined some things. For example the extent store is adjusted by the RF factor you set. So you see the combined storage but also breakout for ssd and hdd. We did add newer drives like the 10TB hdd
• Budgetary quote – now has license and support
• We re-enabled license and support with SFDC quotes. This was hard work in that we had a swat team that came up with lot of test cases and just kept ironing out issues.
  • Why you should care as an SE. Now go ahead and create the quote within sizer and then either you or your rep can deal with discounts and approvals in SFDC. The benefit is the quote lines are created properly. Both a labor savings and less errors

 

Here is more info on unbalanced dimms

Good news right now no model has the expensive 50% hit

Skylake processors is more complex compared to Broadwell in terms of whether a system has unbalanced dimms

We now test for the following

• CPU – skylake
• Model – Balanced_Motherboard – true (described below)
• Memory bandwidth – go with slower figure for either memory or CPU. If 2133 Mhz then -10% memory adjustment. If 2400Mhz or 2666Mhz (most common with skylake models) we take a 0% adjustment

Like before, we find the DIMM count per socket. There is typically 2 sockets (cpu’s) but can be 1 and starting to introduce 4 socket models

Using the quantity of DIMMs per socket we should apply following rules

If CPU is skylake

• If dimm count per socket is 5,7,9,10,11 then the model is considered unbalanced and we need to take a -50% memory adjustment
• if dimm count per socket is 2,3,4, or 12 it is balanced and memory adjustment = 0%
• if model is balanced and DIMM count per socket is 6 or 8 then it is balanced and memory adjustment = 0%
• if model is unbalanced and DIMM count per socket is 6 or 8 then it is unbalanced and memory adjustment = -50%

 

hi everyone

• We went live with our May sprint

1. Numerous updates to various vendor products – Nutanix, Dell XC, Lenovo, Cisco, HPE, Dell PowerEdge

2. Show Extent Store in Sizing Details

There has been discussion on Usable Remaining Capacity in Sizing Details compared Extent Store.

Usable remaining capacity is what is left after accommodating workloads, RF for the workload, snapshots, etc but also include savings such as compression.

Usable remaining capacity should reflect what the customer will see after deploying their workloads as you defined in Sizer.

Extent store is what storage is “available” for the customer given the recommendation. That value is simply the raw capacity less CVM. It represents what is available to them without any workloads

It is not one is right and other is wrong but answering two different questions and so we are providing both those answers
• In May sprint (now live) you see the usable capacity and now the Extent Store values in the Sizing Details.

Again usable capacity is what is left after accommodating their workloads, while Extent store is what is in totally available to them

• In June sprint we will bring over the Extent store into charts

 

Hi everyone

We launched the April sprint today. Key things in this sprint

• Sending a quote for SFDC users now includes support and licenses and not just hardware. We want to tighten the integration with SFDC and more things coming.

• Added Calm support. Now you can select if you want any workload managed by Calm. Sizer then will collect all the workloads requiring Calm and provide the proper SKUs and quantities in the BOM

• VDI Financial Analysis. Now for VDI we are providing an extensive TCO analysis

• Now support NFS in AFS’ application storage along with current SMB protocol

• Improved Storage Calculator by adding more HDD options