Nutanix Weekly: Migration Myth-Busting - Why Moving from VMware Isn’t as Scary as You Think

In the enterprise technology world, that maxim could easily be rewritten as: The only constant in IT is change. Platforms evolve, licensing models shift, and infrastructure decisions that felt solid five years ago suddenly need rethinking. For many organizations, that reality now includes re-evaluating their virtualization strategy and, in some cases, making the move from VMware to a different hypervisor.

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/why-moving-from-vmware-isnt-as-scary-as-you-think by Nicholas Holian

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra 

Transcript

0:03 - Speaker 3
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly. One of the many podcasts here at XenTegra. We like to call it content with context because we find the best content on the web and we add our real world context to the story. I can't do this alone. I am your host, Phil Sellers. And so I have to bring along reinforcements, have to bring along help. And so this episode, I've got two of the best, my team members here. At XenTegra, part of the Modern Data Center. I've got Andy Green, a solutions architect with us. And I've got Chris Calhoun, a solutions architect with us. Both these guys are pretty unique. They've been customers. They've worked at vendors. Both of them spent some time with Nutanix, a number of years actually each. So I'm really happy to have you guys on my team. But why don't we just take a quick minute and talk a little bit about kind of your stories and share kind of how did you get to XenTegra? I'll throw it to Chris first. What did your path look like, Because it wasn't a direct path to working here with us. You've had a couple of left turns and right turns in your career, haven't you?

1:19 - Speaker 2
That's exactly right. I'd say, unexpectedly, very happy to be here. But I started out in education as a teacher. So I taught for about nine or so years in the local school system here in Gaston County, and got interested in technology because, hey, he's the guy that will give up some of his planning time to help you fix a problem. So one of the county IT guys gave me some CBT nuggets, if you remember those training CDs, And that kind of spurred my interest along with some nights and weekends at New Horizons Computer Learning Center. Got certified, got to Compass Group on the customer side, was there for like 15 years. That's where I picked up Nutanix, Cohesity, that kind of thing. So then opportunity opened itself at Nutanix, spent five plus years there. And I'm here now for one year, so definitely happy to be here today. And I'm glad that this topic is a highlight of our discussion today, because I think it's very appropriate for IT guys, those that are possibly concerned in myth-busting migrations, is definitely something that we need to talk about today.

2:53 - Speaker 3
Yeah, I agree. So, fun fact, I spent a little bit of time teaching too. I bet you didn't know that.

3:00 - Speaker 2
No, I didn't.

3:01 - Speaker 3
Yeah, I taught adult education classes. My computer technology teacher in high school recruited me to help her with some adult education classes at night around computer technology. So, I've done a little bit of teaching myself.

3:18 - Speaker 2
Oh, I didn't know that.

3:21 - Speaker 3
So, yeah. Turned technologist, turned vendor, sales engineer, now a solutions architect here with us. In earlier episodes, you'll listen for me to ask how Chris is doing. And it's always just a cheery and sunny, doing really well. So I'm happy to have you around and have you here to be able to talk to folks. We've also got Andy Green. You've also had kind of a number of different roles over the last few years that led you to us. How did you get here?

4:01 - Speaker 1
Yeah, so great, great question. For the most part, for the entirety of my IT career, I worked on the vendor side of the house prior to coming to XenTegra. So like a lot of people, I started out doing support for IBM servers back in the early 2000s. It was a really good time. To be working with technology and servers because there was just a tremendous amount of change happening. Through that role, I got some really good experience working with their fiber channel storage arrays. And that was at that early time when VMware was really just starting to break out and that shared storage became incredibly important in the data center. So it was a really good time to be working with servers, working with storage and seeing the early iterations of virtualization for Intel servers as well. From there, my career took more of took a little bit of a turn and more of a project management type of role. So I helped bring a lot of servers to market. I helped build pre sales configuration tools. Basically all of the things that were needed to announce a new server and bring it to market. So I was working with those teams in around 2014 time period when Lenovo bought that server business from IBM. And that so I ended up over at Lenovo by way of the purchase of the System X and system storage brands from IBM. From there I decided I was ready for a career change. I worked as a inside account executive for a year. That was my first sales type role. And during that time period, Lenovo forged a partnership with Nutanix and Nutanix was a company that I was very aware of at that point, but I was really interested in the technology. I had Read pretty much the entirety of the Nutanix Bible, you know, Nutanixbible.com, and I saw that it was a really game-changing technology, and I wanted to be a part of that. So I went over to Nutanix as a systems engineer. It gave me that opportunity to really lean on some of those technical skills that I developed earlier in my career, was a really great fit for me, and I spent six and a half really good years with Nutanix. From there, I jumped ship, went over to Cohesity for a couple of years. I worked on data protection and cyber recovery with my clients here in the Carolinas, and that was another great experience. But in the end, during my work both at Nutanix and Cohesity, I was working with the XenTegra teams, and what I saw here was company that was really passionate about what they were doing. We had some really great client executives and I liked the passion that they brought to the business and their interest in really connecting clients with the right technology and adding a lot of value to the traditional sales process. So I started having some conversations with Philip and came over and it's just been a fantastic fit. Being able to leverage the Nutanix skills, the backup and recovery and cyber resilience skills, all of that combined has just made this role a really good fit for me. So I'm very happy to be here and glad to be a part of the podcast today.

7:23 - Speaker 3
Yeah, it's great to have you here. And it's great that you've had experience inside of the vendors. I mean, both of you guys working at Nutanix has been great because you bring forward so and a deep knowledge of the platform. And even though you've got that deep knowledge, I think it's important to also point out that you guys are still learning. I'm still learning because every day at Nutanix, they're releasing something new. They're moving things forward. So we get to continue that journey together with them. And the things we talk about here, sometimes we're preparing ahead of time and learning as we're presenting it back out and talking about it here on the podcast. So it's a never-ending journey, and that's one of the things I really love about this job, this career, is the ability for us to continue to advance things over time. I think if it was the Groundhog's Day and we were doing the same thing day in and day out, I would be very, very bored and wouldn't last long.

8:28 - Speaker 2
Yeah, for sure. I think lifelong learners is definitely a common phrase that I like to use in this role, because you're never going to be up to speed on the latest and greatest, but you can always pick up an extra bit of information and then help evangelize and pass that on to others along the way, too. I definitely think that that's a big part of this role in general.

8:55 - Speaker 3
Well, if you're listening along and going, well, why are we talking about people's careers? Why are we talking about people's background. Well, there is a reason. The content that we're reviewing today is migration myth-busting. Chris alluded to this earlier, but this is a blog post out on Nutanix.com slash blogs, and it poses the question, why moving from VMware isn't as scary as you think? It's written by Nicholas Hollian, worldwide field CTO at Nutanix. So shout out to Nicholas. Thanks for giving us something to talk about today. But I made a point of talking about our career paths and how we got here because that really goes into this blog post and topic. Migrations have been scary in the past. Early in my career, I will say I definitely took migrations very seriously, understanding the risks that came alongside of them, moving and replacing I remember when blade servers first came and you could switch out the hardware and move an OS. You know, it wasn't seamless. We had to inject drivers. We might've had things that didn't boot and we had to fail back. And so it never came without risks. And I think it's a timely topic with so many people looking to migrate away from VMware due to changes with licensing and pricing. Migration's a scary topic. Chris, as you were a customer at Compass Group, how scary were the migrations and stuff that you guys undertook?

10:41 - Speaker 2
I can definitely remember a few integrations with, we'll say, some of our subsidiary companies that we were folding into the mold, whether it was a migration around mailboxes, BlackBerry, if that dates me a little bit, as a past biz admin. So knowing that my role in that was a critical role that had to go smoothly. Of course, there was a lot of planning, a lot of wringing of hands, sweating of, oh my goodness, it's my time. And it was almost a please, oh please, almost a relief if things went well. Not a joyous celebration, it was, whew. And that's the approach that I'd say a lot of IT guys have for change just in general, as far as being either part of it, whether they are a part of a merger type situation, or whether they're responsible for learning new technology, implementing new tech, technology to me I've in the past definitely had to blend my adversity to or adverseness to change as opposed to Okay, let's be flexible and realize that it's not a bad thing Change is good. And that's really one of the the key point of points of emphasis the very first line obviously the only consistent and thing in life has changed. So I think that that's that addresses a lot of IT guys in their careers from either past stories they can tell or nowadays now the future-proofing technology and oh my gosh, we've got to make a decision. What route should we go? What factors do we have to consider? So I think that that's all a part of our discussion today, you know, so I think that that's going to be real helpful and enlightening and hopefully relaxing some of the engineers that listen to the podcast?

12:54 - Speaker 3
Yeah, as you're talking about this, it's like our experience, our collective experience is kind of like farmer's insurance. We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two. And part of what we try to do is help our customers not stumble over that thing or two we've seen and keep them from experiencing the same pain that we might have experienced in our careers. The blog post here really starts off with a perfect quote, the only constant in life is change. And so we talked about that. In general is always changing. And so the only constant in IT is change. That's also said here in the blog post. And that's 100% true, especially where we find ourselves today. We're in an intense period of change. Because of the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. So let's set up the myth busting here. And we're going to walk through these one by one. But, you know, we're going to go through some of the most common myths about migration. And, you know, there are things that that are risky, there are things that may seem more risky. And so the goal would be to educate everybody about what we've seen, how things work, And maybe at the end of this, you'll feel better about if Nutanix is the right platform for you, the migration piece is not going to be something that's going to break you. So Andy, I'm going to have you lead off with myth number one. What's the first myth?

14:33 - Speaker 1
Migration means all or nothing.

14:39 - Speaker 3
I've been through some of the where we didn't have a choice and all or nothing was the thing. What are some of the ways that Nutanix gives us that it's not all or nothing?

14:52 - Speaker 1
Yeah, you know, I think there are many different reasons that might drive us towards a new platform. And, you know, one of those really common one is just aligning with planned hardware refresh cycles. You know, it's great if we have everything coming for refresh at the same time, maybe all of the hosts, the storage, the hypervisor, it's all co-termed and it all comes up for refresh at the same time. But even when it doesn't, there can still be opportunity there. And one thing that we've seen many times over is maybe you have some hosts that are due for retirement this year. We can retire those hosts and we can move those workloads onto Nutanix. And as you retire more hosts, we can migrate additional workloads. The Nutanix platform makes it very easy to scale. So every time we add a node, we're giving you the compute, the memory and the storage that you need to add those additional workloads. So over time, we can start to evacuate some of those older hosts. And when we get to that point that the storage is up for refresh, typically the clients have had such a great experience with Nutanix that they're ready to go all in and migrate everything. But you know, there's some other strategies that we can use there. Obviously we want to look for existing or planned patching or maintenance windows to reduce downtime. In some cases we're seeing the clients have gear that we can can reuse. Nutanix does have a pretty tightly controlled hardware compatibility list, but for the most part, all of the servers that we're seeing out on the market, they're all using largely the same parts, and so in some cases, In some cases we can repurpose some of those existing hosts. We can retire it from the existing infrastructure. You know, redeploy it as a Nutanix node as part of a Nutanix cluster, and then over time we can start to make that shift from the previous infrastructure into the new. So you know a lot of different options there, and then I think the last one I would say is just as you have new applications spinning up, bring the new workloads. If you're looking for a change, if you're ready to try a new platform, a new application can be a great time to stand up a small cluster and get your foot in the door.

17:13 - Speaker 3
Yeah, we talk about, you know, a lot of times. We don't necessarily create boundaries in our clusters based on technology reasons. Sometimes it's a licensing reason, so maybe you take a subset that's maybe your Linux servers, or maybe you take a subset that's your Citrix and VDI and you repurpose around the application. I think that's a great, great recommendation. Swing gear, being able to do things in phases. Anytime you have the ability to not make it a big bang, you mitigate risk. And that's one of the great things about the Nutanix strategy is you buy yourself a lot of independence if you're standing that parallel infrastructure for your migration. So Chris, I'm going to throw to you, what is myth number two?

18:09 - Speaker 2
Here's where, obviously, it comes down to specifics around your environment. And this is the second myth. Everything must be recertified. And of course, that's a very daunting task if it were true. That's the thing. Must is the key word there. The point that it makes through this myth is talking about the fact that, of course, some of the key phrases, and I'm air quoting here, an application early on was VMware certified. Well, that meant at the time, taking it from a physical application running an individual physical server purpose built for that application to now what Andy was talking about the shared back-end storage the virtualization platform that's when it was VMware certified but one of the key points to what it makes here is this it's not at that level where the VMware certified part pretty much happened and got validated and the the head nod of approval it was at at the OS level where the application's running. If the application runs on Windows, it's going to run on Windows whenever you migrate to Nutanix. The hypervisor, which is the underlying goodness from VMware to Nutanix, that would be changing. But the core application itself with the underlying operating system won't change. So Windows to Windows, Linux to Linux, for example. That's really one of the key factors as a takeaway that I think as engineers, we have to help educate our upper level management because they sometimes hear that everything must be recertified. So I think that that's where, again, this session today will help you relate back to your management team of, hey, let's reassure you that we're replatforming. That's not going to mean a total rewrite of the application. It's the underlying, underpinning foundation of the virtualization layer, but not the core application. And I think that that's really the part that is really key. Here's as a quick aside, we just finished working with a customer who was moving from VMware to Nutanix AHV. I specifically call out that because in the past they were a Nutanix customer on VMware, but Phillip and I took a list of about, we'll say 15 or so troubled VMs that the customer was concerned with because they were either appliances or they were worried about the air quotes, ooh, this was only certified on VMware at the time. Well, we've moved past that in the years and several applications that had been only VMware, that's the only platform of choice if you're going to virtualize anything. Well, that has kind of, those restrictions have kind of lessened and we've successfully migrated that customer and those 15 VMs that were the troubled kids successfully either got redeployed if it was an image-based appliance on Nutanix AHV, or it got migrated over. So the worry about, oh my gosh, we've got that one weird system, or we've got three or five weird systems, don't let that hold up your future technology plans for, ooh, I don't want to mess with this one VM. It's scary. Don't let it be scary. Take that out of the frame and understand that your recertification is only validating that, can this application successfully run on AHV? And we'll get to it, and we've talked about it before. Nutanix Move can migrate that system. You can always fail back. So there are always plans involved, and Nutanix does a good job, as we've always said, of making the difficult simple to the end user. So that's kind of part of this reassurance today. I almost think of it as an engineer therapy session. You know, don't give up on Nutanix early and just be comfortable with VMware because, hey, that's what I've done for 10, 15 years. I met the last five years of my career. I don't want to be involved in any type of change. Guys, this is the way the future. We're not Nostradamus and predicting the future or I'm not rubbing my shiny bald head. But I'm telling you, migrations from as a customer from ESX to Nutanix are smooth, easy, and they're not the pitfall to be worried about. These myths, we're busting them, bust them, bazinga, wide open.

23:33 - Speaker 3
Chris, I love that. So listening to today's podcast, look for your therapy bill in the email very soon payable to my Venmo. But yeah, no, you called out some amazing things right there. So one, let's talk about certification. Certification has changed significantly in the last few years. And so almost every application we run into is AHV super certified and certification really goes down to not a a technical certification, not a technical can it run, but it goes down to supportability, right? Is your software vendor going to support you on this platform? And the answer is universally yes. There's only a handful of things, notably Cisco Call Center, that don't carry that certification of support. And outside of that one application that comes to mind, you're seeing healthcare vendors, electronic medical records, sorts of PAC systems, imaging systems, ERPs, across the board, they're endorsing and saying AHV is a certified platform. And so you can move safely and with confidence because the industry has embraced this. And that's a change over the last, I would say three to five years. Myth number three.

24:58 - Speaker 2
Oh, go ahead. To add on that. I just remembered I had a customer, you mentioning Cisco. Cisco ICE happens to be AHV supported, approved, validated about we'll say two plus years ago. With that functionality that allowed a specific customer of mine to move directly to AHV with no doubt, no question. And it's like you said, it's just that validation of they need to see that it's supported and then they're fine. So it's more of a blow from a supportability as you mentioned, Philip. And I think that that's really the key. Sorry, I just needed to add that because to me, that was a big win for the customer. It was a huge relief that their technology was gonna be supported going forward. And this wasn't gonna be a showstopper.

25:52 - Speaker 3
Rolling into myth number three, cost comparisons are apples to apples. This is a huge one because That's one of the easy ways to try and justify other scenarios. So as we dig into this one, Andy, I'll go to you. What do we need to make sure when we start looking at cost comparisons?

26:18 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I think the key thing here is just that these types of comparisons tend to be flawed from the start. It's a pretty common scenario. A client might get a renewal quote for their VCF licensing and they're looking for something comparable from Nutanix. But what we find is when we start to really dig into the features that they need, Nutanix has many different licensing levels and licensing models that can be very favorable depending on the features that are needed. So rather than having that single quote that's almost an all or nothing type of package, we can really customize that and pair it it down to just the features that are relevant to the client. And when we do that, you know, in a lot of cases, we start to see a very dramatic shift in the pricing model there. So, you know, I think just the key thing there is when we're right sizing that solution to just the client's requirements, it just gives us that flexibility, that freedom to align the costs more closely with the value that they're seeking and avoiding paying for features that we're never going to use.

27:27 - Speaker 3
Yeah, so two key points there, right? VMware sells VCF. That's largely the only thing you can buy, and it is a all or nothing kind of bundle. Nutanix offers levels where you can right size it to your needs, but they also sell it in different configurations. So there is the per core costs, which is very similar to VCF, but then there is There's an edge per VM licensing model for edge deployments up to 25 VMs. There's also an EUC. So when you're running this, you can pay by the user or by the concurrent VM for users. And so you've got a couple of different really great options that give you choice, which has been eliminated from the VMware portfolio. And so that is an advantage for customers at the end of the day. That's a huge part of it. The other major thing to make sure that you're looking at is not to compare just your cost of what vSphere used to cost you, because guess what? That product's no longer available. You're going to be forced into VCF, which is a full stack. And if you're looking at just the cost of a hypervisor compared to a full HCI stack, they're going to be different. Apples and oranges. And so many customers are still looking at what they paid traditionally for VMware versus what they're paying for a full stack HCI offering. The bottom line is VMware is going to force you down that path anyway. And so make sure that you're getting an apples to apples comparison. But yeah, I agree with everything you just said, Andy. And this is a tough one because they're very different. Models, you know, HCI has a very different procurement model. And we've talked about that on past podcasts too. You're buying what you need today with the ability to easily scale up as opposed to buying for what you need in six years and having to, you know, depreciate that capital purchase and buy more really than what you need today. So, um, that's another thing I think that, uh, folks need to look at when they're talking about total cost comparisons between alternative solutions. All right, Chris, you're up next with myth number four.

30:00 - Speaker 2
All righty, perfect time for educational background for both of us. Myth number four, you'll have to retrain everyone from scratch. So obviously to me, this is not a foreign language.

30:16 - Speaker 3
You're right. And I'm going to jump in for just a minute, because I want to do a quick poll over both of you guys. When we sell Nutanix HCI, how long does it normally take for us to train somebody? What do we normally do?

30:32 - Speaker 2
Interestingly enough, we even say, teach them how to fish. So throughout the process, even during some of the migrations, and I'll answer the poll, but I also want to throw in this. So whenever you got your first smartphone, you didn't Read the manual. It's not like you had to figure out a highly in-depth new operating model. It's some of the similar common infrastructure with just different terms, categories, tags, vCenter, Prism Central, the same technology and overarching management is done the same way. The create VM's update VM's. You know all of that's part of the same thing, so really key to the way things are done within Nutanix.

31:27 - Speaker 3
You can't see it, but I'm pointing at my watch for Chris to give me a number. How much time does it take? How much time? Sorry I got excited.

31:39 - Speaker 2
Andy, how much time?

31:44 - Speaker 1
You know, so so I've I've seen the clients eyes light up many times just doing simple things like demos, right? We get into a demo. They've never seen Nutanix is hypervisor before. They're coming from that VM Ware background. They're expecting maybe a certain level of complexity, and when we show them how easy it is to create VMS, replicate, update, delete, you know how little time you're going to spend managing the storage when we show them how easy it is to scale the platform with one click. How easy it is to patch with one-click, I'm sorry, one-click expansion for scaling and one-click upgrades for patching everything from the hardware all the way up to the hypervisor, you know, their eyes really light up and they can see that this is something they can do. So, you know, I think you guys are hitting on the right point. It's bringing that iPhone-like simplicity to the data center. And in a lot of cases, all it takes is a demo and these people people realize this is something that I can take on. This isn't a scary beast. I don't need a long training class. And I'm not telling you not to get training because we're always going to pass on a tremendous amount of knowledge through any type of training that we do. But I've seen the people's eyes light up and they see the simplicity in the product. And I think that's really key here.

33:05 - Speaker 3
So what was your number, Andy? Four hours? You think four hours? I think 15 minutes. Honest to God.

33:17 - Speaker 2
You know what? During that demo that Andy's talking about, if the gears start turning, it's, okay, wow, I can make my job easier with a similar platform, with an easier to Read consumable interface, and Even some of the built-in technology, we call it the if this then that part of it, the X-Play, Cross-Play, whichever one you call it, it gives you back nights and weekends because it's automation built into the platform that as an engineer day-to-day, makes your life easier. So I would say an hour is my number. It took us forever. None of us.

34:03 - Speaker 3
None of us. Agreed though. So Andy, I can understand four hours. If we're going to go through the whole portfolio and we're going to show and do a deep dive of how it does data balancing and how everything works under the hood. I can certainly see four hours. I think 15 minutes to an hour, like you said, during a demo, most people are going to rock it. They're going to understand. Really, that's the extent of retraining. If you've got someone that's coming from a VMware background, they understand the basic concepts of attaching a VM to a network, deploying, resizing virtual hardware. None of that changes. Matter of fact, it's just in a better user interface now. And so really understanding the constructs of the menu and where to find things within about 15 minutes to an hour, I think most administrators will be able to get their job done. For whoever's having to manage and lifecycle and things like that, yeah, we can go into some more things. But honestly, it's a highly consistent user interface. It's very approachable. I love the iPhone analogy. That's a great way to talk about this, because nobody really trained us how to use that. My 70-year-old mom can use her iPhone very effectively. That's a testament to how intuitive a user interface can be. So I totally agree with everything you guys both just said. And I'm glad we had a little bit of fun polling the panelists today.

35:49 - Speaker 1
I'll share one thing, and I don't mind saying this at all. Well, in my early days as a Nutanix SE, doing demos every single day, multiple demos a day, I can't tell you how many times a client or a prospect asked me, well, how do I do such and such? And my go-to answer for that very quickly became, I don't know, but I bet we can figure it out. And over and over again, myself and the client were able to very, very quickly figure out exactly how to do the things were asking. So, you know, just having that confidence level of knowing that I'm not going to sit here digging through menus and searching KB articles for the next two or three hours, to be able to have that confidence to do that live on a demo with a client, you know, and that's a big part of how I learned the platform and, you know, how I grew as an SE as well. So, yeah, it really is that simple.

36:51 - Speaker 3
Well, and there's one other aspect here that that our author does talk about, and that's that you're not going at this alone. You know, you've got partners and partners in the partner community, and that's really the role that we play here from XenTegra. We've done, I would argue, close to a million migrations. That's my number. I'm sticking to it because we've helped lots of lots of clients do their migrations at this point and be successful in this. But we're not alone in that. Nutanix has given us great tools in order to be able to do migration. So, Chris, I'm going to throw to you. Let's talk a little bit about Nutanix Move and some of that tooling and how does that work to help us?

37:40 - Speaker 2
And one thing I want to point out, too, you said we're not alone. Seeing the eyes light up of these engineers, You know, like Andy, you mentioned, hey, ooh, that that's how it is. And it's that simple. That to me is the empowerment that as lifelong learners in the engineering slash IT world, we know, hey, how do we discover more? And I think Nutanix does a fantastic job of that empowerment. We, of course, help as partners. We can help with training specifically around that in preparing for a Nutanix migration. As well as boot camps, lunch and learns. We've got all kinds of events and stuff around that. So I think that to your point, Phil, we'll talk about that, but specifically around Nutanix Move, and I want to do a quick story here. Whenever I was with Nutanix, one of my best customers, I was able to sit down with them in an afternoon and show them how to use Nutanix Move. They then were basically then responsible for migration of all of their workloads from warehouse distribution centers from a big name business in North Carolina. And they comfortably said, oh, yeah, we know how to do Nutanix Move. We've got it set up. We're ready to go. Let's just go ahead and move on to the next PO because we're ready to conquer the next distribution center. I think it really helps when the tooling itself from Nutanix that is included free really helps in the process. Not to go into any of the technical details, but Nutanix Move connects to both sides. Basically, your VMware environment and your target Nutanix AHV environment, and you inventory the systems that you have from their VMware side and put together a strategy of, hey, look, because this application has four specific VMs, we need to run those in sequence, in the sense that those need to be grouped together. Well, perfect. Create those logical specific tribal knowledge sequence that you have that your business needs, and you obviously know your business better as engineers, create those, and then, as Andy mentioned, use your downtime for patches for scheduled maintenance. Move applications in small chunks so that this process is not a daunting task. That's really the key to some of this is make sure that you consume small chunks during your migration, if you can afford it, and it doesn't need to be one big bang cut over, but that helps you as an IT engineer make sure that the application is tested thoroughly, as well as making sure that your users go in, validate, yes, the application's moved over, check, let's move on to the next one. Then you've created a repeatable process, and we would love to sit down with you and walk through that. Some of our service engineers are fantastic at helping map out those interdependencies, and Nutanix does well with that as well. I've had several strategy sessions with customers where we've said, okay, let's tackle this, and almost, if there's any football fans here, you know, most NFL teams, most college teams, script out, we'll say the first team plays that they want to run per game so that they know exactly the sequence of events. That's part of what we do to help customers. Nutanix Move is a fantastic tool to do that. And it's even becoming even more expansive in the sense that it'll help with file shares. And I think even the latest release does even more than that. I think that there was an announcement made on that release just recently, too. So I'll quit back but Nutanix Move, I couldn't emphasize how great of software tooling and how a relief it is to see that they've accounted for that as part of the migration.

42:17 - Speaker 3
So to me, Nutanix Move is a lot like VMware Converter was back in the days where we were moving from physical to virtual in the very same way. This makes a platform move very, very approachable, orchestrated easy. You know, to quote Staples. To quote Staples, that was easy. So, you know, it's one of those things. Andy, you know, the role that we play as partners, you know, there's a lot of resources that both our company and Nutanix put out there available to customers. Can you talk a little bit about some of those resources and how they help a customer when it comes to migrating and feeling comfortable.

43:03 - Speaker 1
Sure, sure, yeah. So you know here it's XenTegra. We do a lot of Nutanix workshops. We do some webcasts as well. I would encourage everybody out there to go to our events page. Zintegra.com forward slash events. You'll see you may find events in your area. We also have the ability to do demos. We have a demo environment. We can always hop in there and off the platform, answer any questions that you might have, and really deep dive into some of those topics that you might be a little bit unsure about. From there, Nutanix has some tools that are available as well. They have Nutanix University, which has some online training that's going to be available. They also have Nutanix Test Drive, which gives you the ability to basically take an instance of a Nutanix cluster for a test drive and deploy some workloads. Many different flavors of that, whether you want to focus on databases or anything else. So there can be some good options out there on the Nutanix test drive site. And then, you know, I think the last thing that I would mention is if, you know, if we ever need to do any type of further POC testing or anything like that, we can certainly work with your Nutanix account teams and do our best to make that happen as well.

44:24 - Speaker 3
Yeah, I think when we talk about POCs, one of the things that we also have available to us through the Nutanix sales teams is something known as a hosted POC or an HPOC. And so we can get those spun up on demand. So if your team wanted to be able to look at and demo things and upload and test a real cluster, we have the ability to do that in a HPOC. So those are very easy and approachable things that go along with the other resources. We love doing workshops. We love doing this one-on-one with a company, or we love doing this for our community as planned events. Anything that you may need, you can always reach out and request, even if it's not something on a regularly scheduled event basis. So there's a lot of flexibility when it comes to learning and enablement Nutanix that we can offer and so can your Nutanix sales team. So we work together on those sorts of things. Another great plug is the fact that we offer conference passes at a huge discount to Nutanix.next. That's one of the great resources. It's their annual large conference and so they talk about all of their newest announcements and roadmap and other technical enablement during the week. This past year it was or this year it was in Washington DC. And so we would love to help customers get to dot next. We took 30 customers with us this year. I'd love to double that and take 60 customers next year. So lots of different pathways to help you feel more comfortable and help you plan. As Chris pointed out earlier, we'll work through the nitty gritty of your applications and figure out what's compatible and what may be a problem or any potential issues. As Andy said, you know, we've got lots of different ways to be able to show off the technology to you and make it more approachable, help your team learn. Truly believe that this is an approachable, intuitive system and that you can be successful with it. So I think all of these myths are effectively busted today. As we close out, any final thoughts, Chris or Andy?

46:58 - Speaker 2
I'm humming the theme to Ghostbusters.

47:04 - Speaker 3
That's random.

47:05 - Speaker 2
Well, Mythbusters, Ghostbusters.

47:07 - Speaker 2
Oh, Ghostbusters.

47:08 - Speaker 3
OK, I got it. I got it.

47:10 - Unidentified Speaker
Who you going to call?

47:14 - Speaker 3
Andy, you gotta follow that.

47:18 - Speaker 1
How do I follow that? You know that the blog post is about how change isn't scary and and change is a natural part of growth and opportunity. Embracing change opens doors for us. It leads to fresh perspectives and possibilities. And you know, from from stone tools to smartphones, every shift has felt big, led to progress. And I think that's what's really important here. So this blog post, it's talking about change, but what I think it's really talking about is risk. And what we're saying here is that risk that you're concerned about is minimized. It's been addressed. There are thousands of customers who have already been through it. And it's not the type of risk that you may be perceiving. So change doesn't have to be scary. And in this case, especially with the risk having been minimized, I think it's a non-issue for us.

48:17 - Speaker 3
Yeah, I think it's a great way to frame it. I spent seven years in insurance and we talked a lot about risk with my business associates in the company. So we did a lot of mitigation of risk with all the different mergers and acquisitions and migrations that we handled as a team. So we'd love to help you mitigate your risks too, So reach out info at zentegra.com. If you don't have someone directly that you know at XenTegra, please reach out info at zentegra.com.

48:51 - Unidentified Speaker
And we're always here to help.

48:53 - Unidentified Speaker
We'd love to hear from you.

48:55 - Unidentified Speaker
I'll say again, thank you to Andy and Chris.

48:59 - Unidentified Speaker
Happy Workiversary to Chris Calhoun celebrating one year with us.

49:04 - Unidentified Speaker
Happy that both of you guys are here and helping our community clients achieve greatness.

49:09 - Unidentified Speaker
So thanks to everybody for listening and we will catch you on the next episode.

49:15 - Unidentified Speaker
Have a great day.