Posts

Posted on

Budgetary Quote

Budgetary Quotes can be generated from Sizer by clicking “Generate Budgetary Quote” button on the scenario. To create a Generate Quote from Sizer make sure that Sizing has been completed (workloads must be added to the Scenario to enable “Generate Salesforce Quote” button).

Required User Permissions: Nutanix Portal or Salesforce Login

Steps to generate a  Budgetary Quote:

  1. Go to Scenario and click on next to the scenario name.
  2. Click on “Generate Budgetary Quote” action.
  3. On the “Generate Budgetary Quote” modal, you get the opportunity to review the Financial Assumptions section on this modal.
  4. Click on Generate.

If quote generation completes successfully, you will see a notification on the page. Budgetary quote will be downloaded on your local system.

Posted on

Financial Analysis

In addition to cost comparison of owning legacy and Nutanix products over the next 5 years, Financial Analysis section also shows the estimated savings one can realize by opting for Nutanix Products.

To view Financial Analysis section:

  1. Open a scenario and scroll down on the right section of the page until see you see “Sizing details” selected in the dropdown.
  2. Change the dropdown value to Financial Analysis.

Note: Make sure that on the right section, “All clusters” have been selected in the “Summary For” dropdown.

Posted on

Sizer Team

The Sizer team is passionate about building a cool tool for demanding technical users.

We hope that Sizer is your trusted advisor to determine the Nutanix-based solution that best meets your requirements.

A bit about our philosophy.

  • We view sizing (determining the best solution that meets your needs) as a journey vs a destination.   There is always product updates, workload changes, and we are continually working with experts to hone our sizing approaches.  So you will see changes on a monthly basis.  We recognize that can be disconcerting but striving for the best is our goal
  • We don’t try “dumbify” the tool.  We know you need controls and the tool is here to guide you.  We do hope we can hit a range of technical users who are up on Nutanix architecture.  So we have defaults but usually allow you to make edits

We of course hope you like Sizer,  Please send us feedback at sizer@nutanix.com

 

Posted on

August 2018 Sprint

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

 

Posted on

July 2018 Sprint

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

Posted on

June 2018 Sprint

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%

 

Posted on

May 2018 Sprint

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

 

Posted on

April 2018 Sprint

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

Posted on

March 2018 Sprint

hi gang

We went live with our March sprint. We were scheduled for last Thursday but with all the product model changes more testing was needed

The big things

1. Designbrewz changes. Designbrewz and Sizer are similar in that they both deal with storage capacity but ask a different question. For Designbrewz it is what is the effective capacity for some many nodes and you define number of hdds and ssds in a node. Nothing about workloads or snapshots. Well Sizer is all about workloads and so it tells you what is available given the customer requirements. So we broke this out into two parts

– Storage calculator – Here it is a designbrewz calculator where you enter nodes and what is in a node and you get the effective capacity. We introduced that a month ago

– Sizing Charts – This is now a 1:1 mapping of all the detail in Sizing Details but in nice chart form.

No more 3rd order differential equations or requirement that you have a Phd in Mathmatics to understand the chart. Just kidding but common question for sure.

Attached is doc with picture

2. More sophisticated Auto Controls From user feedback we provided additional controls with Automatic sizing.

– Threshold adjustment. If you want more headroom for a given resource can use slider to assure you have more. For example dial down CPU from 95% to 85% if want more headroom. Your solution may be under that anyhow but this would assure that is the case

– Hybrid storage. We have All Flash option for long time and so added this as well. This forces a hybrid

– Maximum budget. Here put in list price for hardware and you can be assured the price won’t exceed that. We went with list price for hardware as then we can offer this feature cross all the vendors which is important when you clone the scenario. We don’t have discounts or support for example for non-Nutanix vendors.
–
3. Async and NearSync. We made a big update for Async DR. Now you can have a local policy and a separate yet different remote policy. We also introduced NearSync so you can have 1 min snapshots

4. Numerous product updates for all vendors

Posted on

February 2018 Sprint

hi everyone

We posted our February sprint last night

This sprint we did a lot of development for the future. We are enhancing automatic sizing options and enhancing our product data models to allow for lot of product component options from multiple vendors. This is work for the near term future

What we delivered in February is important though:

1. Storage calculator like Designbrewz. Later we will replace what is in Designbrewz.com itself

2. Block Awareness. So for any workload you can have block awareness and we will put the nodes in separate blocks

Attached a couple graphics on the calculator