Nutanix Weekly: Migration to AHV Brownfield Considerations

As far as analysts and customers were concerned, hypervisors within the datacenter were a very mature segment that had been on cruise control for the past decade.

VMware was a leader for most of the 21st century. However, during the past decade, Nutanix has been developing AHV to meet customer demand and has made steady and noteworthy progress.

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/migration-to-ahv-brownfield-considerations

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra
Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra
Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

Transcript

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Philip Sellers: Hello and welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly.

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Philip Sellers: A. Podcast all about nutanix from your friends here at Zintegra. We like to call these content with context because we take the best information we can find on the Internet and bring it to you with our context from real world experiences.

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Philip Sellers: I'm your host today, Phil Sellers, I'm the practice director here at Syntegra for Modern Data Center.

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Philip Sellers: And I'm joined with 2 of my solutions architects both of which, interestingly, are former nutanix employees. Both have spent time working with customers from Nutanix 1st up Mr. Andy Green

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Philip Sellers: Andy. Good morning, and hope you've had a good weekend anything

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Philip Sellers: special over the 4th of July.

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Andy Greene: It was a great 4, th you know. Friday was all about family. Saturday had a few chores to get done, and Sunday I was able to head out to Falls Lake and do some paddle boarding. So really nice extended weekend, and excited to be here.

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Philip Sellers: We had the weather for it. It was beautiful, this weekend hope that everyone really listening had a great 4th of July also joined with Chris Calhoun, the man, the myth, the legend.

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Philip Sellers: Chris, how was your 4th of July?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Fantastic. No, it was great.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: very much enjoyed. The long weekend weather was great like you mentioned good time with family so definitely relaxed and refreshed, so that was a well needed, long weekend.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, you know, that's that's the thing. Right? Work. Life balance is is tough. We all work in technology. It's a pretty demanding job.

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Philip Sellers: especially if you're on role, you know some sort of an on call rotation, or if you're not able to maybe share the time with family because you're

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Philip Sellers: necessary and can't get away. So I appreciate everybody, practitioners and things who maybe didn't get to spend as lovely of a 4th of July with us. The the way that we did with our families. But yeah, that, that's the line of duty here in it. And you know. 24, 7 is the demand, sometimes with our companies, with our businesses. And so we understand that

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Philip Sellers: it may not be possible. So we really do appreciate all the hard work that you're putting in to make things happen for.

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Philip Sellers: or the business that you work for.

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Philip Sellers: Speaking of making things happen today. We want to talk a little bit about migrations. And you know, this is a big topic because of a number of different things. But let's be honest. One of the major things is the shift after broadcom acquired vmware that has

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Philip Sellers: made a lot of mid market customers where we work most often.

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Philip Sellers: Really

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Philip Sellers: look for alternatives. And so, as you look for an alternative, migration is an inevitable part of moving your workloads. And so there's a lot of different ways that we could go and approach migration. But

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Philip Sellers: you know, easy is the best path. Right? Guys.

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Andy Greene: Yes.

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Philip Sellers: And and one of the things that I do love about Nutanix is is they've given us a number of ways to make it easy.

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Philip Sellers: you know, it would really be

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Philip Sellers: difficult, if not impossible, without migration tools, if we had to sit and actually rebuild every Vm in an environment from scratch. I mean that the time and effort required would not be worth migration.

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Philip Sellers: You know.

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Philip Sellers: Andy, as you kind of work with our customers and advise them. What are you sort of looking at in terms of readiness, or

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Philip Sellers: you know what makes sense in terms of rebuild versus migrating.

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Andy Greene: Yeah, really good question. So you know, I'll preface this by saying, when I started at Nutanix back in 2016 Ahv was newer technology for them. And what I saw over the next 6 and a half years while I was there was that every single year it became more and more mature. We saw more workload support.

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Andy Greene: and it became just a very tightly integrated part of the Nutanix ecosystem. And I was there at that point that that critical point where we started seeing new deployments. Over half of them were on Ahv. So it was a really interesting time to be there

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Andy Greene: with regards to migrations. I think that a lot of the workloads that we see in the data center are just table stakes. At this point things like windows, vms, Linux vms. We can generally just trust that we're not going to have any issues there. Specifically, in the migration world. There are a few workloads that we treat as special things like domain controllers

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Andy Greene: can have some difficulties migrating. So typically I'll recommend that my clients stand up a new domain controller, sync it with their active directory, and then transfer those roles from the old environment to the new. Pretty, simple, extra couple of extra steps that we have to do there, but it's generally in the wheelhouse of these. It teams that we're working with.

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Andy Greene: Databases can be another challenging workload. In a lot of cases. We'll actually recover those we'll use their 3rd party backup solution. That can be a really good way to redeploy that database onto a new virtual machine running on Nutanix.

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Andy Greene: But the ones we really have to look out for would be anything that that's, you know, some type got some type of 3rd party integration directly with vmware. And we need to understand if if there's an option for that that software to to integrate with. Ahv, so

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Andy Greene: you know, I typically, ask my clients, did you have any workloads that deployed as an ova or an Ovf inside of your vmware environment? And and with those we're going out to the vendor's website. We're looking to see if there's an ahv package that we can download and deploy. But those are the ones that we really tend to put a lot of focus into what that is going to look like running on Nutanix's Hypervisor.

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Philip Sellers: Chris, I know you just went through this activity, especially looking at those virtual appliances deployed as ovas from one of our customers. You know. What? What does it look like these days? I mean, how many were compatible, how many weren't compatible? As you've been kind of working with customers.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Yeah, this this particular customer had several that were obviously previously deployed on vmware, and it really made sense to now migrate the customer away from vmware onto a Hv. They were looking to take care of some of that goodness. Obviously the

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the stack and the nutanix ecosystem is built for Ahv, going forward really flexible in extending your use cases. And some of those were legacy in the sense that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: it was really focused on. Hey, yeah, in the past. Everything's built exclusively for vmware. Now, a lot of those 3rd party integrations do have specific notes calling out other Hypervisors. And that's to me. Obviously the way the the It community and the the world is of it is going is, hey? Look! We don't need to put all our eggs in the Vmware basket, necessarily in the sense that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the flexibility for small to medium businesses to not get locked into

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: a vmware renewal is really key in the sense that they need to have options. And I think that that's where. Because Nutanix has the forethought to. Hey! Look, Mr. Customer, we are giving you alternatives, and we were talking about it before we started moves a fantastic tool for that. So being able to offset those previously required

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: vmware ovas to now, hey, we're blessed and certified and highly capable of using Ahv moving forward. That's a blessing to a lot of teams as they look to move off of vmware.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I agree. And and you know, ova, the format really doesn't make a difference. Nutanix can accept. That is generally what's inside of that disk that matters and so we're seeing a lot of very specific releases in the native Kvm formats

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Philip Sellers: from a lot of vendors, too. And so it may be that we can't migrate the ova, but we can certainly redeploy and then move the data along with the ova. And so we're taking that approach in in some cases. But yeah, to your point, we're seeing a lot more

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Philip Sellers: Kvm specific. And just as a reminder ahv from Nutanix is based on open source. Kvm, which means, you know, anything that supports there is supported inside of Ahv for the most part. So you see a lot of those notes now, like Chris said.

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Philip Sellers: You know we're kind of going a little out of order, but we've got a blog post here. It's called migration to HP. Brownfield considerations. It's written by Brian, sir, a senior technical marketing engineer at Nutanix. So shout out to Brian, thanks for providing us something to discuss today. You can find this out@nutanix.com slash, blog.

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Philip Sellers: And I'm actually gonna take it in a little bit of a reverse order. We talked kind of the reasons why. But, Chris, you mentioned move, and you know I mentioned Easy Button. Those 2 things are synonymous to me. So from a nutanix. Move perspective?

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Philip Sellers: that's probably the easy button for customers to get migrated right.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely from my time at Nutanix. I was able to help several customers help themselves. Actually, we would go through, set up, move with the customer as a 1st opportunity for their cluster migration and in their in their environment. It just made sense to walk them through it so that then they could

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: continue the process as they continue moving workloads in different phases, the tools set up perfectly so that you can integrate with your existing vmware solution. Obviously, you provide it credentials to vcenter. It will then go through and inventory all of the vms that are in your vmware cluster, and then also sync it up with the target. Ahv cluster

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the benefits of the process. I can talk you guys through it. It's being able to take workloads and schedule those they don't have to immediately migrate the benefit is, think about those guys that you mentioned at the top of our podcast of, hey, yeah, if you have to work nights and weekends, we understand.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: But the benefit here is you can schedule these replication jobs for the nutanix move tool during the work week. So that as you're working on these vmware vms, they continue to sync up in the background and create ahv vms on the back end.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Same IP scope. Obviously the Hvvm. Is a skeleton and becomes the the final solution whenever you do the cut over. But initially, it's a great opportunity to keep those bulk vms that Andy mentioned the the Linux vms, the windows, vms keep those in sync for a period of time, so that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: you can schedule with a business, maybe a downtime window, and in that window it's a smaller window, because you don't have to rebuild Philip like you mentioned. So really the key there, and I'll let Andy jump in. Here is the flexibility of the tool being able to schedule 100 vms at a time is fantastic.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: and then cutting those over in stages or phases as you see fit as a business, so that you have your applications synced up accordingly. And it just is a fantastic tool with a lot of forethought from Nutanix of Hey.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: We know migrations are tough. We know that that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: folks don't want to have to deal with that. It's sometimes easier in their minds to say, well, we'll just pay the

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the higher fees, and that type thing to stay on vmware. Well, no, Nutanix has got a solution for you that makes sense, and that's really key to the easy button. As you mentioned, Philip.

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Andy Greene: Yeah. And and one thing I'd add, you know, I think we were talking about vmware right now. But this could also be hyper-v to Nutanix. Any of the the Vmware cloud tools like Vmc. Native aws workloads native azure vms, so move is is very full featured as far as being able to ingest those workloads into Nutanix and and give you that successful migration path. I like to call it an easy button sometimes.

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Philip Sellers: And that's not all. It's also inclusive of files. And so you've got Netapp, or you've got windows, file shares it's a great way to migrate data unstructured data into nutanix files. Platform.

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Philip Sellers: You know it. It is full feature, and I think that's the the key.

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Philip Sellers: As we're advising customers. There's a lot of fear around the migration services and around. How to make that happen.

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Philip Sellers: The the key here, I think, is that there are great tools available at no cost.

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Philip Sellers: They're not good enough. They're great tools, and they're full featured.

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Philip Sellers: That combined is what really makes it the easy button. Keep talking about.

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Philip Sellers: That piece of it really helps us to get the job done for customers of all sizes. 100 vms is a lot in one fell swoop. I mean, you could think of grouping these by applications, how you're gonna test it. And so it's a lot of strategy that can go into how you make those migrations happen. And as Andy pointed out earlier.

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Philip Sellers: not all vms necessarily fall into the bucket of move. You know, domain controllers and things that have their own resiliency. We may rebuild obs, and things may be redeployed.

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Philip Sellers: but at the end of the day this does give us an a very robust tool set for most of the virtual machines that exist in Iowa.

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Philip Sellers: That, I think, is is the key. Chris, you mentioned. This.

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Philip Sellers: Oftentimes the approach we take with customers is, teach a man to fish. What is those? What did those services? Engagements typically look like when we go in with a customer.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: To me. I think that really the focus is identify the workloads that are suited and and segment off the ones that need special attention like, we've talked about the domain controllers, the database servers, etc. Obviously there are specialty tools for those.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: But in this case, to me it's identifying your workloads with also any dependencies that's really key, so that you can move, we'll say an application server, a database server, and a web server together, having those similar to your disaster, recovery plans of migrating workloads and powering these up at the same time. Move's got a fantastic feature built in, and it's really a safety net

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: in the sense that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: part of the final process in the replication of move is, whenever you're ready to cut over the you execute the the command to

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: migrate the systems. What it does is it powers off the source? Vm. And then replicates the last amount of changes over which, obviously, if it had been keeping up throughout the week is a real small change window, so that short downtime is a benefit to

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: folks that have to plan around business outages and have those downtime windows. But the convenience there is you can actually go ahead and test. And that's 1 of the things that you mentioned is, hey? What does engagement look like whenever we help customers stand up this move appliance. It's really key to get their confidence in the system. So I encourage them to

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: stand up a test vm, even, or if they've got one that's in Dev, or I know that specifically, we've worked with a few customers that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: they got comfortable because they saw it in action before it was prime time, necessarily, and got a chance to see the Vm. Cut over. We even talked about timing it so that they can have a good understanding of that next power up, so that they don't sweat it and say, Oh, my gosh! It's not powering on

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the power on is honestly just like an ha event to the point where

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the Nic is disabled on the source. Vm, so that you actually do have a failback. If you end up testing quickly. The Ahv vm. And something's wrong, you can power it off and just revert back to the original. I think that that's a big safety net feature that's included with move. But really the engagement consists of reassuring the customer.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: The workloads are grouped together as well as performing that test migration to show them. Hey, this is what it looks like from start to finish, so that you can see the Vm. In action, and I know that I've got some nutanix buddies who do lab work that actually go through

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: on site with customers and and do, Demos to show them. So ask your local Nutanix reps your Nutanix teams, hey? Can I see this in action? Or, better yet, you, as a customer, can test it out through test drive.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I think that's really a key on the Nutanix website is being able to have. And a lot of techies are hands on. The proof is in, hey? Let me see it, touch it, feel it so that I get that comfort level that I can share back with my management team to know that this migration is going to be successful.

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Philip Sellers: Absolutely. And you know it's proven we've we've done thousands and thousands of vms now. You know, Andy mentioned.

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Philip Sellers: you know, during 6 years at Nutanix he saw Ahv mature and grow. We've just celebrated the 10th anniversary of Ahv. You know. It's a very mature hypervisor, full featured as well so from a risk, mitigation standpoint, and from a you know, outcome standpoint.

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Philip Sellers: We have a lot of proof that this is a

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Philip Sellers: well. It's an easy button. We'll keep saying it that way. You know, one of you is gonna have to start repeating. That was easy. So Brian also talks a lot in this blog post about what to do with existing infrastructure. And that's a really big topic as well. So getting to Nutanix in a Brownfield situation pretty simple. We've got the easy button called Move, and all of our other tools in the toolbox.

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Philip Sellers: But what do we do about existing infrastructure? That's been a topic that hasn't traditionally been something viable. There's a couple of big announcements here. And the 1st involves support for visa and ready nodes. So vmware, like Nutanix, has these pre-certified

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Philip Sellers: hardware skews. They call them vmware Vsan ready nodes, and this means it was ready to run the full vmware stack vmware Vsphere, Vsan, and any of the other things on top of the hardware.

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Philip Sellers: In a pretty large support statement, Nutanix can now repurpose existing Vsan ready nodes by integrating them in with Nci nutanix cloud infrastructure, and HP. Hypervisor.

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Philip Sellers: What's the benefit there? Besides, the obvious guys.

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Andy Greene: I think the big thing here is just validation from Nutanix. Nutanix has always had a very tightly controlled hardware compatibility, compatibility list. Some of that was making sure that their clients got the performance that they were expecting. But also they did, you know, really extensive testing on things like the the SSD. And the Nvme. Drives to make sure that the Nutanix software wouldn't wear those out prematurely. For example.

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Andy Greene: You know, with this announcement it really just gives those clients who purchased a Vsan ready node. It gives them a migration path that allows them to repurpose. That previously purchased hardware gives them a smooth transition from Vmware over to Nutanix, and it also ensures that they'll get the performance and the longevity that they're expecting out of the hardware.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Yeah, definitely echo that I've definitely talked with buddies of mine from Nutanix, who've got customers that are looking to specifically and have been for a few years now, honestly looking for ways to repurpose their Vsan ready nodes. And I know that Nutanix has a process that's obviously again, like Andy mentioned is rigorous in the sense that we want to make sure that we give customers the best experience.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: and really, that's a key in the sense that it's those

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: again deemed Vsan ready nodes. But in this case it's also vxrail. That's something to me that customers in the past have been interested in. And I really feel like that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Zintegra can help with those type situations. We really feel like that. We've got the experience here. You can tell that we've got time in the seat. And Andy, obviously tons of time at Nutanix. Same for me and Philip and I have both been customers. So

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: through our I would say, gray hairs and experience. We've definitely seen it and done it, and are looking to help folks in those journeys. And I think that that's really part of it, too, is

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: knowing that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: nutanix is built for the long run of being able to not only provide that flexible path forward for the next 5 years, but also the next 10 years. And I think that that's the the model that we're seeing in that. Yes, it started out. Andy, as you mentioned, a real tightly grouped server validation process to now extending that outward a little more

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: to the sense that, hey, they're being more flexible because businesses are having to be more flexible. Because if you, if you wanted to move to Nutanix in the past, you had to invest in all new gear, and that was really a tough time in my my history of coordinating. Okay, when are servers up for refresh or eol renewal, etcetera?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And when's the backend saying up for renewal? What aligns with your magic? 8 ball for all of those to be perfectly symmetric, so that you can move to that new flexible infrastructure. And I think that that's where Nutanix is providing a solution now to help with those.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I'll say, maybe not misaligned, but alternately aligned. Eol refresh calendars, or where you've previously made an investment into

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: both Vsan, and as we mentioned, Vxrail.

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Philip Sellers: Well, I I think that's the the thing there, Chris, is that you know it. It's about reuse and extending that investment for customers. That's the primary goal.

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Philip Sellers: You know the the one thing I will say via Vsan. Ready Node and Vxrail. They're not equal right? And I think a lot of people in the industry assume that they are. But Vxrails are very different architecture than these, and ready nodes. Just to be transparent. There, there's not a direct path for vxrail

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Philip Sellers: and and so what Chris is referring to is, there are migration incentives. There are things we can do to help and try to tap into

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Philip Sellers: that existing investment. But Vsn ready nodes. You've got a very easy migration. It. It taps into a process called foundation, which Nutanix folks are probably very familiar with. But, Andy, can you kind of talk through that foundation process, and what it would look like to move a Vc. And ready node into a Nutanix cluster.

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Andy Greene: Sure. Sure. Yeah. So foundation is another tool that was developed by Nutanix to make it simple, to stand up a nutanix cluster. It's consumable in a handful of different ways. There's a windows app. There's an ova that we can deploy onto your Vm. Environment. But at the end of the day. What it's doing is it's discovering those nutanix nodes.

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Andy Greene: and it's building the nutanix cluster for us, and that means laying down the hypervisor of our choice. Whether it's Ahv or another hypervisor. It's installing the Nutanix software which actually runs as a virtual machine on top of the Hypervisor. And it's building that initial cluster that is then ready for our workload migration. So a typical migration here, we're going to need to move those workloads somewhere else. We could be moving into a Dr. Site.

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Andy Greene: We may have some other vmware infrastructure that we can migrate onto temporarily, or we could possibly, in a worst case scenario. Maybe we have to shut things down and recover the workloads later. But once we get the workloads migrated off, once we have a clean vmware cluster, we can then go through that process of foundationing the cluster, standing it up with the Nutanix software, with the Nutanix platform on top of it.

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Andy Greene: And then we use tools like move to migrate those workloads back onto the cluster for us. So if we've moved them to another vmware infrastructure, we're going to use move to sync that vmware infrastructure to the new nutanix cluster. Keep those 2 environments in sync as we do. Our cut over which Chris mentioned earlier, is basically just powering off the Vm. On the Vmware side, sending the final changes across the wire and then powering it up on the Ahv side.

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Philip Sellers: So essentially, it's a brain transplant. At the end of the day.

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Andy Greene: Minor surgery, minor surgery, laparoscopic home. The same day.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: There you go!

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Philip Sellers: Well, you know that that's an extremely useful thing to have in the toolbox. Right? You know. You know you may have a 10 node cluster. You may have the ability to kind of shut down a portion of that that was reserved for failover and start your ahv journey, and then incrementally migrate, and then add notes. Take a note out, add a note.

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Philip Sellers: There's lots of ways to do it with a very

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Philip Sellers: cost effective way. You know, if if it's better for you, from a timeline perspective to deploy new notes and then add notes to it. You've got a lot of different methodologies, and that's 1 of the beautiful things about Hci in general is the way that we grow it.

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Philip Sellers: is a hallmark of of Hci. Add a node, add performance and capacity. So you know, that comes into play as we talk about migrations and hardware.

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Philip Sellers: the big one that has always tripped us up. And Chris mentioned this earlier is refresh around the storage. And so in a traditional vmware environment, we talk about external storage. That's been a no go for a long time with Nutanix, but we saw it that next

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Philip Sellers: last year in Barcelona an announcement for support for Dell's power flex software defined storage platform or scale out platform this year. That became Ga. In may@nutanix.next in DC.

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Philip Sellers: And so, as we look at Reuse, there's a new strategy emerging from nutanix around traditional shared storage systems and being able to use those, you know, Chris, could you tell us a little bit about this power flex announcement.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely. And I think that the approaches is continued with the way that Nutanix is providing a full stack solution. It's just separating and dividing it up into in this case

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: a compute component, and then, like we mentioned back in external storage. And that's where the announcement for the dell power flex, and then, of course, future state. Other external vendors are really coming into play. The Hv component of that or the nutanix component of that will continue to manage the compute of the system and be able to

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: talk with the back end storage. Again, the integration with the storage vendors is basically a moving from a 1.0 to a continued 2.0 process. As you move through the different vendor stack, obviously starting out with power flex pure has been mentioned for the future, and

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: basically Nutanix is paving the way forward so that other vendors can see this path, and customers in turn can recognize and reuse their their storage of choice, and still have the goodness of Nutanix. Being able to run the stack. And that's really where the communication lies. Is that the simplicity of the Nutanix solution as a whole

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: is always top notch, and then, being able to tie that in with the customer preferred back end storage is really the best of both worlds. The existing customers will attest to the fact that the last 10 plus years of Ahv has been growth and

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: moving ahv to a 1st class citizen. I remember days in the past. Andy and I both were there when hey? It was right at that 47, 48% of all new customers are in Ahv. Now, it's tremendously higher in the sense that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: you find all of the customers singing the praises of Ahv as they've been able to migrate off of vmware. And I think that this just affords potential customers another solution with those backend capabilities really having that flexibility of repurpose and reuse as we've themed some of these topics so far today.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And and you might wonder, okay, so

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Philip Sellers: Chris is talking about Nutanix being in control of things. Does that mean there's no Cvm, is there no Aos? And the answer is, no the elegance of the solution here is that the Cvm. Still in place?

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Philip Sellers: Fee, still talking to the Cvm. It didn't have to learn anything new. So it's not a 1 dot. Oh, release.

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Philip Sellers: We're talking about something that has, you know, millions of hours of runtime across a large install base, now being added for support with an external storage array. So because the Cbn is still there, you're able to run everything else inside of the Nutanix portfolio on these

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Philip Sellers: new

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Philip Sellers: what we call nutanix cloud infrastructure, compute nodes in Cic with external storage, as the blog post calls it. And so you get the ability to talk to the external storage. But it's all facilitated still by the Cvm. Meaning all the goodness, all of the easiness, simplicity of the platform stays in place.

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Philip Sellers: The other part here is

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Philip Sellers: that we have a different way to buy new Tnx. The Ncic skew is different, because again, you're pairing it up with a

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Philip Sellers: external storage vendor. I I talked to one of my friends over at Butanix, who said, this is the closest thing to traditional vsphere on the market available to customers as a drop in replacement. So if you're running compatible storage and you're looking for something to replace vsphere. You're not a Vsan person. This is an alternative platform for you as as time goes on.

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Philip Sellers: So, as Chris mentioned today, it's power flex that is Ga. Available for the 15 G. And 16 G

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Philip Sellers: compute nodes. There's compatibility

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Philip Sellers: you've got the ability to install the software or excuse me, the storage data client, the Sdc.

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Philip Sellers: Into Aos to allow it to communicate with power flex. It's a pretty easy reuse path, and the support is is validated end to end by both Dell and Nutanix through their partnership.

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Philip Sellers: you know it's not here in the blog post. But Chris mentioned a little bit of the future this year, at that. Next we also talked about pure storage.

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Philip Sellers: I want to mention that because I know there's a large addressable customer base who's ready for external storage support. Ncic. As a package for buying Nutanix along with pure storage support, opens up a tremendous market

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Philip Sellers: based on what we've been told.

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Philip Sellers: It's going to be IP based storage across any external storage support in the future. No support for fiber channels planned. But we've got a lot to look forward to. So as as you think about addressable markets. Andy, I'm curious how you feel about the pure announcement from that next, and and where the future kind of holds.

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Andy Greene: Yeah, I I'm excited about it. You know.

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Andy Greene: when when I think about nutanix, it's always been an entire ecosystem, which was inclusive of that Nutanix file system which was a really, you know, it is a really amazing scale out file system. But during my time at Nutanix I competed quite a bit with pure.

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Andy Greene: I think, pure as a company. It's a highly performant file system. They really push the boundaries of traditional 3 tier infrastructure. So to me. This is a really good example of 2 top tier companies coming together to give their clients that flexibility and that freedom of choice that I think Chris really touched on earlier?

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Andy Greene: You know, it's it's

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Andy Greene: the software software defined data center coming together with 2 really great companies. And so you know, if if you are a pure client, if you're very, very happy with the the performance and the manageability of that solution, this just opens some doors to you that weren't open prior to the announcement.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And it's interesting. This is a roadmap. As Chris said. You can kind of take out your crystal ball and see what's going to come next, and so I know that there's a roadmap beyond pure for other storage arrays for other vendors beyond that. But I I think it's a smart one. I I know that we have a lot of joint customers that are both pure and

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Philip Sellers: well, maybe not nutanix today, but certainly looking at alternatives to vmware. So I'm happy about this one as much as I am about all of the reuse news that's coming out of Nutanix over the last 2 years.

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Philip Sellers: As we said, at the top of the web. Podcast we, we definitely have a lot of customers interested in alternative platforms, thanks to Broadcom's acquisition of vmware and all of the changes there.

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Philip Sellers: I think that's a big part of the undercurrent for everything we've talked about today for migrations for hardware we use from those vmware installations. We've got answers, and and Nutanix has got answers. And so that's the great thing for you from a company. Nutanix has always been about choice

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Philip Sellers: and about simplicity. You're seeing those things live out as these continued announcements come out so Andy Chris, I want to say, thanks for spending some time talking about migrations and hardware reuse. I think it's really tact tactical topic for a lot of our customers. So I appreciate you guys both being.

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Andy Greene: Thanks for having us.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely. Yeah. We'd love to help customers throughout the process.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah 100%. I think that's the under so that's our heart. Like Chris Andy and I, we're we're all people who just kind of thrive on helping other people. So if you need help, please do reach out you can reach me@philiponel.sellers at integra.com.

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Philip Sellers: You can go to zintegra.com and find the contact. Us section that'll get routed to the appropriate folks. But at the end of the day. We're here to help and so appreciate. You guys being here, appreciate you listening. And until the next, podcast

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Philip Sellers: I hope, you stay safe, get some rest, and hope that your it stays favorable, so I'll talk to you soon.