Month: September 2018

Posted on

Roadmap

Attached is the current 12 month roadmap.  We group innovation by product initiatives, which are areas where Sizer needs to excel

Product –  Considerable development and product management resources are put into keeping up on latest product from all the various vendors.  Sizer needs to keep up on their innovation or it won’t be the trusted advisor on what to sell.

Sizing –  Equal in priority to keeping up on new product is adopting the latest sizing approaches.  We work with both Engineering for cluster sizing but also workload experts for workload sizing.

Usability –  The tool is getting more complex with more products and use cases as well as user requests.  So we do try to look at opportunities to make it a better user experience

New Use Cases – We do target new use cases where Sizer can help you enter new markets with Nutanix

Tool Integration –  We strongly feel to really improve sizing and define the truly optimal solution (not too big or too small) customer workload data acquired over reasonable time is needed.    Nutanix Collector is our premier offering to gather the right data

Technical Debt – In any product it is important to invest for the future in terms of performance, availability, scalability, etc.  Sizer is a critical tool for Nutanix.

 

Posted on

No Optimal Solution

At times no optimal solution can be found

Typical – No Optimal Solution Found Issues

When Sizer cannot find a solution given various settings and constraints it will simply say No Optimal Solution found. For example, if set node count to 3 nodes and ask for extremely large workloads it will say No Optimal Solution found as there is no 3 nodes solution to cover that many users.

So here is the list of common things users set that may cause No Optimal Solution.

  • Node count set too low in the Auto Sizing panel
  • Budget set too low in the Auto Sizing
  • Set models to say 1065 and ask for lot of demand that requires more than 8 nodes
  • NearSync is selected and using ROBO models like 1175S

What to do

  • Get back to Automatic Sizing with
    • No Node Count filter
    • No Max Budget filter
    • Set model types to All Regular models

 

Posted on

Scenario Actions (when sizing is near completion)

Once we have your sizing complete or near complete you can do the following with your sizing

In the upper left can click on the actions button:

 

For Salesforce Login: 

  • Clone Scenario – Can clone the scenario (copy of the scenario) with a unique name. Often this is done if want to leverage same scenario but make a few changes in workloads, models, etc.
  • Delete Scenario – This is used to delete the scenario. Do note it is NOT recoverable
  • Download BOM – Here a PDF is created with the recommendation, all the workload inputs, sizing details and detailed BOM.
  • Attach BOM to Opportunity – The BOM pdf for the scenario will be attached to the opportunity in salesforce.
  • Generate Budgetary Quote – The BOM is put into an excel file and shows list prices.
  • Generate Salesforce Quote – A quote can be created for the scenario BOM in salesforce for the opportunity linked to scenario.
  • Import RVTools output – This allows a RVtools output run in a customer environment to be imported into Sizer.

For My Nutanix Login:

  • Edit Scenario – Here can enter in assumptions that you have with the customer and that is kept in the BOM.
  • Clone Scenario – Can clone the scenario (copy of the scenario) with a unique name. Often this is done if want to leverage same scenario but make a few changes in workloads, models, etc.
  • Delete Scenario – This is used to delete the scenario. Do note it is NOT recoverable.
  • Download BOM – Here a PDF is created with the recommendation, all the workload inputs, sizing details and detailed BOM.
  • Generate a Budgetary Quote – The BOM is put into an excel file and shows list prices
  • Import RVTools output – This allows a RVtools output run in a customer environment to be imported into Sizer.
Posted on

Rack View

There is a rack view that you can access within the scenario page.

To see the power requirements click on the upper right link

Posted on

Search

Search for a scenario

How do you find a scenario if you got 500 of them?  In a word … Search .  However there is a panel.  There are two options

With the scenario search, just start typing and should see name of scenario

 

 

 

 

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