Rick Gouin

Category: Hyperconverged

Dell PowerStore Released!

· Rick Gouin

Dell officially announces, releases, and launches their new midrange storage product today. You may have heard rumors about this platform under its code name midrange.next. Today, the product is released as PowerStore, so lets take a minute and talk details! I was happy to participate in the beta program several months ago, so I’ve already gotten up close and personal with the array. Lets start at the top, because there is a lot to unpack here. First, there are 2 distinct versions, the PowerStore X and the PowerStore T. Within each of these are separate models. I’ll get into what […]

Nutanix AOS 5.9 in a Nutshell

· Rick Gouin

AOS 5.9 is now available.  This comes about 3 months after AOS 5.8 was released back in July.  Its worth noting that this is the release that adds support for VMware 6.7.  If you are currently running AOS 5.5 or better, you can upgrade straight to AOS 5.9.  If you are on AOS 5.1 or earlier, you may be looking at a multi-step upgrade.  Don’t worry though, it will all be handled via One Click Upgrades in Prism. I think the biggest enhancement in this release is some additional functionality and flexibility in software based encryption that was introduced back […]

Game Changers at Nutanix .NEXT 2018

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix .NEXT 2018 was held the 2nd week of May in New Orleans this year.  I have to say that I greatly appreciate attending a conference somewhere other than Las Vegas.  Keep it up as long as you can Nutanix! There were a number of announcements, and quite a bit of talk about some of the features that came out recently with AOS 5.6.  Here is a quick summary of some of the biggest new things to come from Nutanix, featured at .NEXT 2018: Beam. This is a governance tool at its core.  It is provided as a “Software as […]

5 Fun Things in Nutanix AOS 5.6

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix released AOS 5.6 on 4/16.  In addition to a bunch of cool features we will highlight below, this also marks a change to a new release schedule.  The new release schedule sounds a bit like what you might find from Ubuntu Linux.  There will be long term support releases, as well as periodic (quarterly?) feature releases. Nutanix API v3 now GA and available in the API Explorer! When I built out the Enterprise Cloud tool, I had to use API v1, because that was all that was available at the time.  The v1 API didn’t have a lot of […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: Rollup

· Rick Gouin

Coming out of .NEXT 2017, we saw 3 major strategic announcements from Nutanix, as well as a number of smaller updates.  Some of these had been previously announced, and some were all new.  In this article, I’d like to give a quick overview on some of those smaller announcements or changes that didn’t get the press they may have deserved. First, lets review the big 3: Calm Xi Xtract These 3 updates are the ones you’ll find all over the trade papers if you search on Nutanix.  They are stealing the spotlight, but there are some other noteworthy things that […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: XI and GCP

· Rick Gouin

In this article, I talked about the first of 3 major strategic announcements to come out of .NEXT 2017.  That article goes over how the calm.io acquisition has been put to use by Nutanix in their Enterprise Cloud Platform.  Now, lets talk about the 2nd major announcement, which is Xi and the partnership with Google Cloud Platform. One of the things I enjoy about being a Nutanix partner is the pace of innovation.  They consistently come out with new ideas that I didn’t even know I needed.  When I think back to the announcements from 2 years ago that they […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: CALM

· Rick Gouin

Today marks the end of the 3rd US Nutanix .NEXT conference.  When I think back to the first .NEXT that I attended in 2015 in Miami, everything starts to click.  At that very first .NEXT conference, there was lots of hinting towards integrations with cloud providers.  At the time, all the talk was about AWS and Azure, but we all saw a vision of the future where Nutanix enabled customers to easily deploy hybrid cloud solutions.  That future is now! There were 3 strategic announcements coming out of Nutanix .NEXT 2017, as I see it.  In this article, I’m going […]

Nutanix AOS 5.1 Available!

· Rick Gouin

Just a quick note about Nutanix AOS 5.1 that was just released on 5/1/17.  There are a few things in this update that I’ve been waiting for, so I thought I’d outline a couple of the more interesting changes here.   User Defined Alerts.  This is really cool.  As a long time Compellent user and employee, I really like the “threshold alerting” that the product has had built in for years.  This is very similar to that.  You can define criteria that triggers alerts.  For example, trigger an alert if a certain guest VM exceeds 99% CPU utilization.   Support […]

Nutanix CE Memory Requirements

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix CE has a bunch of powerful features, and new ones are coming out all the time.  Some of them, however, require the CVM to have additional RAM in order to work properly. For example, in version 5.0 of both the commercial and CE product, Nutanix added a cool new self service portal that provides great multi-tenancy features as well as self service file restore straight to your internal customers.  This portal, however, requires at least 24Gb of RAM.  Other features, such as DeDupe or replication also recommend an increase in CVM memory. As these features come out, you may […]

Nutanix CE 5.0 Released

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix 5.0 Asterisk was released in the commercial version about 2 weeks ago.  Then, about a week ago, it became available in the CE version.  I have already upgraded my home lab to run CE 5.0, and wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some of the key updates in this new release.  There have been a LOT of changes, but I’m just going to focus on the things that I think are big news.  Most of this stuff applies to both the commercial and the CE release. For those of you that are wondering, I have this […]