Month: March 2019

Posted on

Sizer for Customers

Customer Access to Sizer

In the right situations, Sizer can be very beneficial for technical customers planning deployments for the following reasons:

Collaborative sale

  • Customers can scope out new emerging projects and then later pull in SE
  • Customer confidence and ownership in a proposed solution increases when they are involved in sizing
  • Build a better bond with SE

Customers can do what-ifs

  • if add 100 more users how many more nodes needed
  • If certain application core usage spiked 2x what is the impact on a cluster

Requirements for Success

  • Customers have to understand Acropolis and the workloads they are sizing. Sizer does have profiles and offers guidance in the wiki, but we assume a knowledgeable user.
  • SE would need to provide training though there are videos on the wiki
  • SE would need to be front line support to explain nuances in AOS, workloads, sizing, and Sizer

By default,  when customers sign up on MyNutanix, they have access to the “Basic” version of Sizer. The basic access limits the hardware sizing to Nutanix NX hardware. 

Process to request access to the Advanced version of Sizer

1.   SE requests Sizer PM (sizerhelp@nutanix.com) to bump up the customer level to Sizer advanced

2.  SE agrees to be front-end and provide training (to complement videos)

Key things to note

  • SE has to provide support
  • We will need to know what vendors the customer can have access to like Nutanix, HPE, Cisco, etc.  We can offer almost any combination
  • Customers will see budgetary list pricing with the Budgetary quote option
    • Nutanix software pricing is available irrespective of the vendors
    • Hardware prices are available for Nutanix NX, HPE-DX and AWS Bare Metals
      • Nutanix and HPE-DX hardware prices are updated monthly and quarterly, respectively.
      • AWS Bare Metal and EBS Volume prices are fetched on the fly
Posted on

February 2019 Sprint

We had two sprints in February and released the following:

New Features

  • Changed the Nutanix Files Licenses and now reflect the Jan 2019 changes for Files and Files Pro

Sizer is up to date with the latest licensing including putting Files Pro in a standalone cluster and not allowing Files to be in a standalone cluster. You will see the label standalone cluster in the cluster list. All things are enforced regarding capacity, compression, etc

Nutanix File license now has no maximum capacity

  • Create scenario proposal

We got feedback from the SE council that SE’s need help in proposals. Often SE’s were taking screenshots of Sizer UI like dials or configuration information. Now a pulldown option to download proposal. A new tab shows all the charts, dials, sizing detail tables. You can download to a powerpoint too. That take the images you want :blush:

  • Collector Import – Now  we note in the the workload if sizing information came from Collector.  This is true for the BOM or in View workload

 

  • VDI Solution

Allows you to sell a VDI solution based on user pricing. Customer pays for so many users independent of the workload demands they have. Separately is the hardware cluster which is sized to meet the workload demands

By selecting Enterprise VDI Solution when creating a VDI workload that workload is put into a standalone cluster and then the only VDI license is charged. Separately the hardware is sized for that workload and potentially other Enterprise VDI Solution workloads

  • Buckets Licensing – Licensing is now implemented to include rules for Nutanix Buckets and Nutanix Buckets Pro
  • Nutanix File Pro Encryption and Nutanix Buckets Pro Encryption has been added as option in those workloads
  • Intel models available to NX partners. Initially for just Nutanix employees, but not Nutanix partners too.

Product Updates:

  • HCL Product updates for SW only vendors
  • XF1070 – Fujitsu – product updates
  • Lenovo Product updates: New model: HX2320 & added 16G DIMM for HX7820
  • Nutanix G6 Product Constraint – GPU_4PORT_NIC_limit was added
  • Validator Updates from HCL
Posted on

ROBO VM Solution Sizing

Robo VM Solution

The idea of Robo VM Solution is to combine the sizing of Robo Models with Decoupled  Quoting (separate license and hardware).

So in the end you pay for Robo VM licenses and the ROBO hardware but NOT the AOS cores or SSD TiB capacity.

Here  I defined a couple workloads with total VM count of 100.   You can have as many as you want.

Then in the sizing panel selected Robo Models

The resulting budgetary quote shows you pay for the Robo VM licenses and the decoupled hardware.

Ok, there are some limits

No user VM can be more than

  • 32 GB  RAM (** this will be enforced in AOS)
  • 2 TiB  total for hdd and ssd storage per vm
  • 50 TiB total or hdd and ssd  storage within each standalone cluster

Can have multiple workloads that are assigned to a cluster.  The cluster limit though is 50 TiB

Can have multiple standalone clusters which can represent different sites.  So could have two clusters that are 40 TiB each and that is fine

  • No limit on cores

If any user VM exceeds those constraints then present following error message

“This exceeds the Robo VM limits and so please select Data Center Models”

 

Posted on

N+0, N+1, N+2 Failover Indicator

N+0, N+1, N+2 Failover Indicator

This is a BIG sizing improvement in Sizer where Sizer will always tell you if you are at N+0, N+1 or N+2 failover level for all resources (CPU, RAM, HDD, SSD) for each cluster.

Now as you make   changes in automatic sizing or manual sizing you always know if you have adequate failover.  Best practice is N+1 so you can take down any one node  (e..g take one node offline for an upgrade) and customer workloads can still run.

This can be very hard to figure out on your own.  ECX savings for example varies by node count.  Heterogenous clusters mean you have to find the largest node for each resource.  Multiple clusters mean you have to look at each separately.  Sizer does this for you !!

Here is what you need to know. 

Let’s take a two cluster scenario.  One called Cluster-1 is Nutanix cluster running 900 users for VDI and the Files to support those users.  The other is a standalone cluster for Files Pro with 100TB of user data

All clusters:

In a multi-cluster scenario All Clusters just provides a summary.  Here it shows two clusters and the hardware for the clusters.  In regards to N+1 indicator on the lower left it shows the worse cluster.  Both are N+1 and so you see N+1.  Had any cluster been N+0 then N+0 would be shown.  Great indicator to show there is an issue with one of the clusters

 

 

File cluster

This is the Standalone cluster for Files.  You see the hardware used in the cluster.  You see the failover level for each resource (CPU, RAM, HDD, SSD).  N+2 would indicate possibly could have less of that resource but often product options force more anyhow.  This is cold storage intensive workload and so HDD is the worse case.

Cluster -1

This is the Nutanix cluster for the VDI users.  You see the hardware used in the cluster.  You see the failover level for each resource (CPU, RAM, HDD, SSD).  This is core intensive workload and so that is the worse case.