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All around the world thousands of customers trust Nutanix with their critical infrastructure, be that for core banking, financial markets, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and Government. Nutanix has built cloud technology that is capable of providing robust high availability and predictable performance both on-prem, and in public cloud environments. Nutanix has proven suitable for not just mission critical and business critical environments, but also life critical environments. This is one of the reasons why it was an obvious choice for SAP to work with Nutanix. SAP systems process (in some form) approximately 76% of the worlds GDP, and they are the leading ERP software maker. In Nutanix’s latest certification for SAP HANA Scale Out we produced a very impressive performance benchmark, to add to the simplicity, scalability and availability we have bought to SAP HANA solutions for a while now.
The first SAP Certification for Netweaver was in 2016 (a first for an HCI vendor) and two years later Nutanix became the first vendor to pass the new SAP HANA HCI Certification, which Nutanix helped develop jointly with SAP. Therefore it seems only fitting that now in 2020, Nutanix is the first vendor of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure to have passed the SAP HANA Scale-Out Certification, and published an impressive BWH benchmark jointly with our development partner Lenovo to go with it.
Everyone that works with SAP knows how seriously they take their certification processes and how strict the criteria and SLA’s are that need to be met. All of the results for the certification had to be directly compared to bare metal solutions. Nutanix with AHV proved extremely capable for both Scale Up HANA, and now for Scale Out HANA, due to our unique data locality.
With Nutanix Data Locality we can provide consistent and predictable performance as nodes are scaled out in a SAP HANA environment. This prevents the traditional bottlenecks that exist with three tier storage systems. Every node has dedicated local storage resources that are pooled across the cluster and grow performance and capacity linearly as the environment grows. The Nutanix SAP HANA Scale Out Solutions is certified for up to 6 nodes x 4.5TB (6TB physical RAM per node) for 27TB of RAM total. If any customers have larger needs for scale out BWH solutions we’d be happy to talk to you about your requirements.
Final Word
With Nutanix world leading support and direct integration into SAP, customers can have confidence in deploying SAP solutions on top of Nutanix infrastructure. There are a lot more exciting developments on our roadmap that will be announced in the future. If you have any projects that require SAP and you need a highly available, scalable, predictable, and consistent platform, you should talk to Nutanix.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2020 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
In the rapidly changing work from home world you need agile applications and infrastructures. RedHat has built a great containerized platform for agile applications in OpenShift. To get the most out of the OpenShift platform you need a great scalable and highly available infrastructure. This is where Nutanix comes in and the combination of the two is a cloud you control with the application flexibility you need, no matter where it’s hosted.
Nutanix provides an on premises or cloud based linearly scalable infrastructure platform that is suitable for running any application. Nutanix AOS software and AHV Hypervisor can group together industry leading server technology to create a scale out cluster of resources. Performance scales as you scale node numbers. Availability is assured by the underlying infrastructure software, which ensures no single points of failure. The actual deployment can be in your datacenter, a public cloud, or the hosted environment of your choice. Deployment of the infrastructure takes minutes, then you can quickly get RedHat OpenShift up and running.
Unlike many public cloud environments that only provide 99.5% availability in their SLA’s, Nutanix AOS software can provide 99.999% or above availability, as measured across the global fleet of customer clusters, which is depicted above. If you wish to deploy containerized applications on top of such an scalable and available infrastructure, you could get above 6 nine’s of availability, which is great for many types of critical applications. Smart applications, combined with smart infrastructure, you get significantly higher availability, to go along with your scalable performance.
If you’d like to see how to get RedHat OpenShift up and running in your environment, one of my colleagues, Marcel, has written up the steps here – https://ntnx.nl/marcel-kleinenutanix-com/red-hat-openshift-on-nutanix/. I recommend you check out this article and give it a try.
Final Word
You can architect and deploy a responsive, cost effective, and worry free enterprise environment, suitable for even the most critical apps, and deploy in minutes. You can deploy this environment wherever you choose, public cloud, in your datacenter, in a hosted environment. All while achieving consistent and predictable SLA’s. No need to compromise when you want agility, availability, and scale. RedHat OpenShift, Nutanix AOS and Nutanix AHV are a powerful combination for the next generation of apps to power your business.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2020 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
If you have an application that needs very high service levels for availability (99.999%), 24/7/365, including maintenance and patching, then OS Clustering with shared storage is a proven solution. However it can be very complex to set up and maintain Fibre-channel, iSCSI or direct attached shared SCSI solutions. In some cases complex configurations are required not just in the hardware, but also the Operating System of the Guests. If you add in virtualization to the mix, the complexity level can increase more, with the need for physical mode raw device maps. Ironically, increased complexity can decrease overall availability, especially with an increase in the probability of human error. So how do we increase availability, decrease complexity, and provide a simple solution for OS Clustering with shared storage?
Nutanix AOS 5.17 with AHV has the answer. Nutanix AHV allows shared storage for Guest OS Clustering without any complex back end storage support or configuration, unlike other hypervisors from leading vendors, which still require Fibre-channel storage if you wish to use virtual disks. From Nutanix AOS 5.17 onwards you are able to configure a shared volume group and directly attach it to 2 or more VM’s and set up Guest Clustering without any complex in guest OS storage configuration at all. There is no complex storage back end, as that is all provided automatically by Nutanix AOS, and no in guest storage configuration, that might ordinarily be required if using iSCSI. This makes the use of Guest Clustering incredibly simple, as well as being very easy to automate, and significantly less difficult to support and troubleshoot.
The process for creating a Guest OS Cluster has 3 main steps:
Here is an example of how the Volume Group might look in the storage section of Prism for AHV:
While it’s possible to have up to 256 vDisks or Volumes within a Volume Group it is recommended to have 32 or less. If you need more Volumes you can create more Volume Groups.
When you attach a Volume Group to VM’s they will be listed in the Volume Group page within the Storage section of Nutanix Prism Element as follows:
If you wish to have a mixed virtual + physical cluster you can choose to enable external client access to the Volume Group. Any physical / external clients can then use iSCSI Initiator to connect to the clusters Target Data Services IP (DSIP) and mount the volumes.
In the example above I created a 4 node Windows 2016 Cluster, which will host SQL Server 2016 as the primary application. The VM’s are listed below, along with an AD Domain Controller:
After the Failover Cluster Manager components and tools are installed you can configure the Failover Cluster. Note: as part of the cluster creation a verification wizard is executed to ensure compliance with the strict rules needed to form a cluster, including shared storage tests for SCSI fencing and persistent reservations. The nodes in this case were displayed as follows within Failover Cluster Manager:
The next step is to install SQL Server on the cluster nodes and assign all the necessary dependent resources, which would look like the following:
I installed a second SQL Server instance in the same Failover Cluster so I could do comparisons between different configurations. You can see that in the image below:
After I created the cluster I did a series of tests including using tools such as HammerDB and Benchmark Factory for Databases. During the tests I performed live migrations to ensure the cluster didn’t blink in spite of the load, and it worked flawlessly.
Final Word
Nutanix AOS 5.17 and AHV makes creating guest clusters simple and quick and supports both Linux and Windows Guest OS types. You can now configure your fav clustering solutions without the traditional complexity and that means it’s way easier to automate. A Nutanix AHV cluster can now support any number of cluster nodes supported by the OS vendors. The next step in the evolution of this will be when AHV supports Metro Cluster across sites, along with volumes, which will allow for geo distributed guest clusters with greatly reduced complexity compared to the traditional implementations. The cluster example in this article with Windows 2016 and SQL Server 2016 was created just by following the standard Microsoft Documentation and directly attaching a Nutanix Volume Group on AHV directly to the 4 Windows VM’s that would form the cluster. That’s it, no special tuning or complexity needed.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2020 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
HammerDB is a very popular benchmark tool for testing multiple different database engines, including Oracle, SQL Server and PostgreSQL. This is a brief article to bring your attention to some ways you may improve your results and get more valid benchmark data.
We do a lot of testing with HammerDB at Nutanix. We run multiple database engines through HammerDB for each release of software we release. One of the great things about running databases on Nutanix is that once you find out how much performance you get from a given configuration of a node or database, you can scale it linearly and get the same experience. This fact was demonstrated by a test that Gary Little (Performance Engineering at Nutanix) did some time ago and published in his article SuperScalin’: How I learned to stop worrying and love SQL Server on Nutanix – Recommended Reading. Over the years we’ve found some things when using HammerDB that can improve consistency and reliability of test results.
Sometimes SQL Server might only use a single NUMA node due to the way connections and transactions are assigned in the engine. Gary describes the problem and solution in his article SQL Server uses only one NUMA Node with HammerDB. The solution is a slight modification to how the HammerDB scripts execute.
Another issue we’ve frequently run into when testing large SQL Server databases that needs lots of cores and memory is that not all the cores get used. Often you might find only 20 CPU’s are being used by the SQL Engine, even though you are using Enterprise edition. This is due to the ISO and installer being used not being the Core Edition of SQL Server Enterprise. You need Core Edition to allow more than 20 CPU’s to be used by the database engine.
Another common issue that we have discovered and Gary has documented in his article HammerDB: Avoiding Bottlenecks In Client, is settings in the actual HammerDB client. Specifically around how the client logs data. Check out Gary’s article for the settings you should uncheck before running a test.
Other basic issues we’ve found is the system under test not being sized properly for SQL Server, or the VM’s running SQL Server not being properly aligned to the NUMA nodes and configurations of the hardware being tested. an 8 vCPU VM isn’t optimal if running on a 12 CPU socket, whereas a 6 vCPU VM would be better. We have found that right sizing the VM’s produces far better results. In this case, 8 vCPU’s might produce less transactions per minute and less new orders per minute and higher response times than if 6 vCPU’s was used. On an 18 core socket, 9 vCPU’s or 6 vCPU’s are also good options. Some people find it difficult to use an odd number of vCPU’s, but the scheduler works fine.
Final Word
Benchmarking SQL Server with HammerDB can help determine what performance you might reasonably expect from a platform running different types of databases and show how a platform scales, but it isn’t exactly the same as your real world workloads. The best way of determining how your workloads will perform is by testing them on a the platform with test cases you have valid comparisons for and under similar conditions. Always account for maintenance tasks, such as backups, stats update, reindex etc and allow headroom for growth. I hope the above help you and wish you all the best benchmarking with HammerDB.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2020 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Some vendors in the storage, hyper-converged, and cloud industries may be playing Russian Roulette with their customers’ data. Solutions are not created equally, some turn off basic data integrity features such as data checksum by default, or when there are performance problems. Some don’t have background consistency checks and scrubbing to protect against silent data corruption or latent sector errors. Others might use consumer grade devices that may have a higher risk of error and higher failure rate. In the age of software defined solutions, the customer has become the storage platform architect. There is enough rope to hang yourself (your data and your platform availability) any number of different ways. Which is why having a software foundation and integrated solution that has been properly validated from end to end, and that contains data integrity and enterprise data protection features at it’s core, should be the highest priority. Return of data, in the form it was originally written, at any scale, while protecting against known data and device risks, is of upmost importance. How important is performance (IOPS, Latency and Throughput) if you can’t even read back the data you originally wrote? Here are the top 10 questions you can ask potential vendors to find out if they really have protecting your data as their top priority.
Before we get started with the questions, it’s always good to have some science and evidence to back things up. Here is one paper – An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack. Another paper – Characterizing Private Clouds: A Large-Scale Empirical Analysis of Enterprise Clusters. Both papers cover large scale studies. Any study across a small population of devices or a very small sample size is going to be invalid. Any conclusions from something like a 30 drive study isn’t going to be valid when you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of devices.
Questions to ask your potential solution vendor:
There are plenty more questions that could be asked, but the 10 questions above cover the most common areas of risk in terms of data integrity, data protection and data loss prevention, and that are not always protected against, at least not by default, with some systems.
Final Word
From a Nutanix point of view, as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, we take data integrity seriously and it’s our top priority. We protect against all of the areas highlighted in the questions above and we have a paper that explains the Infrastructure Resiliency of Nutanix Solutions, which compliments the research paper on enterprise clusters. We also have many hundreds of thousands of devices in production that are proactively monitored from which we can draw real world data, and a very thorough device qualification and QA process, which limits risk. We use similar high standards across all hardware platforms that our software supports. Our software is built based on a philosophy that hardware will eventually fail, so we must deal with these failures gracefully. Your data deserves better protection!
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2018 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
If you are a talented architect or administrator and you’d like to take your skills across multiple hypervisors and enterprise and public clouds to a new level then the Nutanix NPX Certification might be the way to do it. Nutanix NPX Solutions Design Bootcamps, which are free of charge, might be the best way to find out. You can find a list of available bootcamp locations on Eventbrite Here. The spaces are very limited and you need to have the Nutanix NPP certification (being a Nutanix Customer, Partner or Solution Integrator is an advantage) or related knowledge first before attending, but the only costs are for your travel and accommodation if there isn’t a local bootcamp in your city. If you know there are a group of interested people that meet the minimum requirements, then the NPX program may be able to schedule a bootcamp for you. Please contact NPX at Nutanix dot com and enquire about a bootcamp near you. Check out the Eventbrite Link to find out more.
For more NPX Related Blogs and Info on the Current Group of NPX Architects, check out the following:
Rene van den Bedem’s Blog – https://vcdx133.com/category/npx/
Magnus Andersson’s Blog – http://vcdx56.com/npx/ including the Meet the NPX’s
Nutanix Platform Expert Community Site – http://next.nutanix.com/t5/Nutanix-Platform-Expert-NPX/bd-p/NutanixPlatformExpert
Request Nutanix Platform Expert Preparation Guide – https://go.nutanix.com/npx-application.html
I recently had the pleasure of attending SAP & ASUG SapphireNow conference in Orlando Florida, where the audience learned that SAP systems now have up to 76% of world GDP running through them. I had many questions about sizing SAP for virtualized environments, which also comes up on a daily basis in the work my team and I do at Nutanix. I realized that nobody has really published anything on this topic since 2013 when Vas Mira from VMware wrote SAP on VMware Design and Sizing Example, which is also still relevant today. But given the changes the IT industry has been through, and the rise of hyper-converged infrastructure (such as Nutanix), it is about time we did a brief review, so you can easily size and successfully deploy your SAP environments virtualized. This article will take you through some of the basic sizing guidelines, including specific considerations for hyper-converged environments.
Before we get into sizing, why would you want to virtualize SAP systems anyway? Some of the most common reasons are as follows:
I have written about these and other aspects in the article covering Nutanix becoming SAP Netweaver certified 2 years ago and there are more details below.
Nutanix: First Hyperconverged Vendor with SAP Certified Platform
However to illustrate some of these advantages it makes it easier to understand if you can see it in action. Here are two quick videos that show some of these benefits with live running SAP systems. The first video covers infrastructure maintenance and upgrades without any SAP application impact.
This second video covers rapid cloning of SAP systems, which only takes just over a minute and doesn’t consume additional storage capacity due to smart modern storage techniques. This allows higher quality releases to get to production faster, with less defects, as they can be more rapidly and accurately tested. It also removes the infrastructure from being a bottleneck to SAP system testing.
SAP Sizing for Virtualized Environments
To keep the sizing examples and process simple there are a number of assumptions. The guidelines don’t apply to every situation, or every SAP product. But they can be used as a general guideline to get a sense of how much infrastructure may be required and how VM’s may be sized if an SAP system were to be virtualized. For new SAP environments it is recommended that qualified system integrators are engaged to ensure proper sizing based on actual business requirements, which may involve a QuickSizer exercise, which can then feed into later virtualization sizing. Where you have an existing physical SAP environment you can use SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) from SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmarks to help. We will use SAPS in the examples here.
When considering virtualizing an SAP system it is important to consider the following:
What are SAPS?
SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) is a hardware-independent unit of measurement that describes the performance of a system configuration in the SAP environment. It is derived from the Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark, where 100 SAPS is defined as 2,000 fully business processed order line items per hour. In technical terms, this throughput is achieved by processing 6,000 dialog steps (screen changes), 2,000 postings per hour in the SD Benchmark, or 2,400 SAP transactions.
Because the benchmark is hardware-independent it can be used to calculate sizing from Unix systems to X86 when considering a system platform migration. It is also useful when considering non-SAP applications because it provides a relative performance metric between dissimilar systems. It is widely used by many different system vendors and provides consistency in the method of measuring performance.
SAPS benchmarks are available for 2 tier and 3 tier application configurations from the following location:
Nutanix has an SAP certified SD 2 Tier Benchmark that can be referenced for sizing.
Certified and published benchmarks are always on supported platforms from certified and supported SAP system vendors. This means that SAP customers can rely on the support of both SAP and the vendor publishing the benchmark for their critical systems.
Benefits of using SAPS include:
Using SAPS for a Simplified Sizing Calculation
For arguments sake, lets use the Nutanix Certified 2 Tier benchmark for sizing an SAP production system that needs 140,000 SAPS @ 65% utilization.
Firstly, we need to discount the benchmark SAPS value by 10% as it was done on bare metal to allow for a virtualized SAPS number. This suggests that at 100% utilization virtualized the hardware platform (8150-G5) can support 94K SAPS.
To get the SAPS per core we divide the value by the number of cores, in this case 44. This gives us 2140 SAPS per Core at 100% utilization.
To get the SAPS per core at 65% utilization, we need to multiple the SAPS per core by 0.65. This gives us ~1400 SAPS per core (SAPS / Cores, in this case 44 cores per server) at 65% utilization. Note: These numbers used have been selected to make the calculations easy.
If our SAP system requires 140K SAPS and we get 1400 SAPS per core, we know that we’ll need 100 CPU cores. We also know from this we will require 800GB RAM (8GB per CPU Core). Remember, this is a production instance, so we assume 1 vCPU = 1 core. Based on 1400 SAPS per core, we can calculate how many SAPS the NX8150-G5 can do at 65% utilization, which is ~61K SAPS. However we need to reduce this by the resources that will be consumed by the storage controller, which is 4 cores. This leaves us with 56K SAPS at 65% utilization per NX8150-G5. Immediately we can tell that we will need 3 x NX8150-G5 to cover the workload (140K / 56K and round it to nearest whole number), and at least 1 for failover and maintenance capacity (N+1 design), so we would use 4 x NX8150’s for the environment.
Now, we can allocate the resources between app servers and database servers based on the above calculations. Assuming the split of 70/30 between app servers and database we will use 70 CPU cores for app servers and 30 CPU cores for database. The Database server will be configured with 240GB RAM at least (probably 256GB). App servers could be configured with 4 vCPU and 32GB RAM, and to cover the requirements we would deploy 18 app server VMs (72 cores in total). ASCS with 1 vCPU, 8GB RAM, and other AD or utility servers will also be supported in the environment. Why do we split apps into multiple instances over multiple VMs? Because it helps in getting better performance out of your virtual environment by scheduling compute resources more efficiently and even for SAP, having multiple smaller instances instead of 1 large application instance helps in better CPU context switching in the work processes and eventually, lower compute overheads. You can refer to SAP Note 9942 for a detailed explanation on this.
With 512GB RAM per NX8150-G5 node in this environment it would have sufficient resources for the current workload and room for additional growth, while being able to allow for non-disruptive maintenance and recover in the event of component failures.
From an IO perspective, assuming this is an OLTP environment, the Database will require 90% of the IOPS at 0.6 x SAPS, which is ~76K IOPS, which is easily achievable from the proposed configuration.
Remember that the above sizing is only an example for 1 SAP Netweaver based product production instance requiring 140K SAPS to operate. Typical SAP environments have a 3-system landscape (Dev, QA, Production) with their respective workload profiles, a mandatory 1 Solution Manager instance at a minimum and other SAP and non-SAP products to support the SAP environment ecosystem.
Some Sizing Gotchas
For SAP QuickSizer, the SAPS are already adjusted to 65% utilization. So you don’t need to reduce the SAPS per server based on the benchmarks. Don’t make the mistake a lot of people do and double discount. It will mean your utilization from your system will be extremely low and you will not have an optimal ROI.
SAP EarlyWatch Alert Reports show actual system utilization and system metrics. They are one of the most useful tools for sizing new platforms for existing environments. If SAP EarlyWatch Alert Reports are not available you can use ST03N, ST06 and DBACOCKPIT transactions in the SAP system to find out the system metrics. Some systems, especially SAP JAVA based systems will require additional tools and information, to size them.
With better information, your sizing can be more accurate, and therefore you may be able to size for less physical resources, and provide a better TCO and ROI. The lesser the information, the more conservative the sizing needs to be. Virtualize but without compromise, this is required for critical systems and may be different to how dev/test systems have been handled in the past.
At least some non-prod systems will require 100% of prod resources to allow for accurate reproduction of performance expected in the prod systems. Usually this is QA or Perf environment. Other dev, test and training environments may not require the same level of resources. Once you know the resources or relative resources per landscape you can calculate the total systems required. My experience has shown there can be between 2 and 13 landscapes per product (where a landscape is an environment, such as dev, test, QA, training, support, prod etc).
Going from Non-Unicode to Unicode system will require more resources, assume at least 1.5x the resources in terms of storage capacity, CPU and RAM.
Additional Resources
VMware SAP Best Practices Guide
Nutanix is a SAP Global Technology Partner
SAP on Nutanix Support / Certification OSS Notes:
1122387 – Linux: SAP Support in Virtualized Environments
Nutanix SAP Resources Web Page
Virtualizing SAP on Nutanix Tech Note
Final Word
SAP has supported virtualization for production systems since 2007 and most customers are choosing to virtualize their systems to yield some of the benefits explained in this article. It is critically important however that the design and implementation of the virtualized environment is done such that it is verified and tested against the business requirements, including performance, availability, failure scenarios, and that resources are not over allocated and cause unnecessary support incidents. Virtualize without compromise, and when in doubt, seek assistance from your vendor’s SAP teams. Thanks to Kasim Hansia from Nutanix for his constant support with all things SAP & Databases over the years that we’ve been working together, and to our entire SAP engineering team at Nutanix that help our customers implement successful solutions for the critical applications all over the globe.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2017 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
That sort of thing has happened to me too. BTW, one day you should do a how to perf test article.
— Michael White (@mwVme) January 5, 2017
This all started from a tweet in response to some test results that I had written about in my article Disable Windows Disk Write Cache for Data Integrity and Better Performance. Michael White suggested I write something up about how to perf test. Thanks for the inspiration Michael. So this is it, a simple 101 introduction to performance testing. I’m pretty sure it’s not exactly what you will expect. Just like the outcomes of the tests in my previous article. I utilize these same techniques in my job at Nutanix when performance testing new application workloads
Performance testing can be a lot of fun. It can also be very tedious, and sometimes frustrating. There are high’s and lows. You can break things, and spend hours figuring out what went wrong. Like professional test driving for a car company, you often do hundreds or thousands of test iterations of very similar configurations to prove or disprove a theory, or to measure differences in configurations to find the optimal combination. This could be seen as mundane. For example, in my article VMware vSphere 5.5 Virtual Network Adapter Performance I performed over 2,000 (two thousand) individual combinations of tests to get the results, each combination run multiple times. But overall it is very similar to performing scientific experiments in other fields. If you are not familiar with the scientific method, check out here and here.
Before we get into the how of performance testing, lets first look at what it is and what makes it different from others types of testing. Broadly in IT there are two different types of testing, functional testing, where you are checking that a system performs the functions it was designed to perform in the way it was designed to perform them ( a red screen is red ), and non-functional testing, which is where performance comes into it. A non functional test might be performed to prove that a system can perform a function a certain number of times over a given period with the same result, or to see the maximum number of times something can be performed in a given time period. Rather than the colour of a screen or text in an error message.
Often performance tests will try and find the limit (before response time degrades or the system breaks), or headroom available in a particular system, or the response time under a defined load, or be designed to find the optimal configuration. In all cases, they are measured against requirements, and a baseline or control. There are quite a few types of performance testing, such as benchmark testing, load testing, soak testing, stress testing, unit performance testing, integration performance testing, spike testing, headroom testing, failure performance testing.
What follows is quite a simplified and basic description of some of the high level areas that are important. There has been quite a bit written on the topic over time and for different types of systems and applications. Such as this article about hyperconverged performance.
Step 1: The Question, Objective, or Success Criteria
Before you start anything you need to decide what question are you looking to answer or what is the objectives of your test. What are you trying to learn from the testing? For example, in Disable Windows Disk Write Cache for Data Integrity and Better Performance, I was trying to find out what the impact to performance was when turning off the disk write cache in Windows. If you are testing an application your objective might be to prove if the application can meet your business performance requirements such as x load over y time, with z response time. You might ask what is the maximum for x value I can expect for this particular configuration before response time is impacted? I particularly like answering questions like, where does this system break, to the point that it can no longer process transactions, or what happens when you subject a system to 10x expected load. I also like questions such as what happens under heavy load if a particular component malfunctions or fails?
If you are performing benchmark testing with defined industry benchmarks then others will have most likely defined the questions you need to answer. Such as how many transactions per second and what system response time did you receive from a certain configuration and under a load factor of a certain number of virtual users for a sustained period of time. There are many different types of benchmarks, some of the most useful from from the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) for database type workloads, and Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) for many other types of workload. Many vendors also specify their own performance tests, such as SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) 2 Tier Benchmark.
Step 2: The hypothesis or expected result
Once you know what question, now you should define what you expect, what do you think will happen, or what do you require as the result? With the example I used earlier regarding disk write cache, I could have expected write performance to reduce when cache is disabled. After all, the idea of caching is to increase performance, such as IO’s per second (IOPS) and to reduce write latency / response time. Another example might be that you expect a certain number of transactions per second at a certain response time from an application that is being used concurrently by a certain number of real users, and a given transaction mix. Just as with the questions the expected results or hypothesis can get fairly complicated. Often you can use prior research done by others to form the hypothesis or expected results or as a guide line as to what you should expect, such as reviewing the published results on the TPC.org or SAP web site if you are performing a benchmark.
Step 3 A: Testing Part A – Baseline or Control
Regardless of what you are testing you need to have a point to measure from. This is true in system performance testing as in other scientific experiments. There is a baseline or a control that can be compared to the thing that is being changed. Such as in a medical trial, there is usually a placebo that contains nothing of the drug being tested, and then there is a real drug. In system performance testing we would usually have a simple standard configuration installed that meets the functional requirements and test that to determine what the baseline results are,. Alternatively we may have one system configured as per the current standard, and then another system that gets modified over time that we run continuous tests against and then compare to the original. Your baseline or control system should not be modified during the testing period, in case you need to re-run a baseline test and collect more information.
Lets say you have an existing system based on a certain version of an application, you are planning to upgrade to a new version. You could perform a standard set of tests based on your business requirements against a non-production, but similarly configured system, as your current production system and measure the results. This becomes the baseline or control. Then you upgrade that non-production system to the next version of the system and perform the same tests again. After this you can compare the results to find out what the differences are, and see if they meet your requirements.
Chapter 11 in the book I co-authored titled Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware: Doing IT Right (VMware Press 2014), focused on baselining, which is an important part of virtualizing any applications to ensure you achieve acceptable business outcomes.
Step 3 B: Testing Part B – System Under Test and Performance Test Iterations
Now that you have your baseline you can perform multiple iterative tests on the system under test, which just means the system you are testing. In order to have a valid result the tests must be repeatable. This means that each configuration or system modification needs multiple tests in order to have a valid result. You may do 3 or 5 identical tests of the same configuration before making a change and repeating the tests. Between each iteration you should keep the modifications between test runs to a minimum so you can easily tell what setting has resulted in which change. It is not always possible due to time constraints to just make a single change between test runs, but that is ideal. Otherwise how do you determine which configuration change made the difference? If you are testing many combinations the number of test iterations can easily reach into the thousands. In the testing of the disk write cache setting I had a very defined test and only a single parameter to change between each test, however I had multiple types of IO (read and write) to test, and different patterns and sizes. The combinations can easily increase exponentially, so you need to decide what are the most important tests. The important thing to remember here is that you need to have a repeatable test and multiple consistent results (3 – 5) before your test could be considered valid and before you should move on to change configurations. I usually do 3 per iteration.
Step 4: Monitoring and Analyzing Results
There are a lot of metrics that you could measure for every system under test that can help with analyzing the results. Depending on the progress of the testing you might want to dial up or down the detail and frequency of metrics collection and increase or decrease the metrics that are monitored. Performance testing can generate a lot of data for every test iteration, so being selective about which metrics to monitor, and only selecting the most important or most relevant ones is critical for success. You don’t want too few that you miss important information, or too many that you can’t see the relevant data points. The granularity of data points, i.e. number of metrics, and frequency of collection will determine how much capacity is required for monitoring data collection.
One of the problems with monitoring is that is can impact results and it can impact performance. You need to try and keep it as light weight as possible. You also need to keep the monitoring consistent between the baseline and the system under test, else the results will become impossible to compare accurately.
Once you have the data you can start to analyze the results. Analyzing the results between test runs can take almost as long as the testing itself, it can also take your testing plan in different directions depends on the results. If you find a result that is very unexpected you may have to repeat a test with more data collection, or perform some troubleshooting. If everything has gone according to plan however you can compare the results to the baseline and determine the differences and then compare to the requirements and determine if it is a success of not. If your test was just designed to see how fast something goes with a certain configuration you might have an easy result.
In the IO testing I was doing with disk write cache, I was primarily measuring IOPS and latency of different IO sizes and patterns with disk cache enabled and disabled. So there was no defined pass or fail result, it was just designed to find out what the difference was. However I got quite an unexpected result. The performance was better with disk write cache disabled, than it was with it enabled. Based on this data I performed more iterations to validate that the results weren’t a fluke or a coincidence.
With more complex system testing you may need to run tests at different user loads, or up to the point of system saturation, to see what the maximum number of users the system can support, at what transactions per second, and what the response times are. If you are measuring to a set of business non-functional requirements, then you will know what the minimum is the system needs to achieve in order to be determined a success. Usually when considering migrations, the baseline of the existing system is the starting point and you are usually trying to achieve x percent improvement over the existing system. It is important to have an accurate baseline so you can say for sure you have achieved the desired outcome as performance to end users can be quite subjective. But you also need to know you’re measuring the things that are the most important to ensure a good end user experience.
Step 5: Drawing Conclusions, Communicating Results and Further Research
You’ve done the testing, you’ve crunched the results, now it’s time to draw conclusions, communicate the results and identify areas of further research. In terms of drawing conclusions, I’ll take the graph below as an example, the conclusion you might draw in this case is that the performance of the solution increases almost linearly as you add workload and add resources, in a predictable and consistent manner. Depending on your goals, this could be good or bad, and the amount at which it increases could also be good or bad. It’s just an example and needs to be interpreted in combination with question / hypothesis or success criteria, the baseline / control, and the requirements. Your conclusion might be that the system configuration tested did not have the resources required to meet the business requirements, or that it was over engineered and actually performed well beyond expected results and could be configured with less resources.
To communicate these results you can use many methods, but this is the time when graphs and pictures paint a thousand words (maybe tables for the very detail oriented). In answer to the question what is the performance and scaleability of IO for a defined number of Database VM’s on a defined number of servers you might draw a graph like the following (from Nutanix Performance with Oracle SLOB on All Flash Nodes) :
The type of communication and graphs you use will depend on the type of testing you did. You might want to show differences in system metrics are user numbers increase, under different types of hardware for the same tests, in a slide deck presentation, in a video, in a blog, or in a system performance report that documents all of the tests you performed and their results relevant to the stakeholders who are to read the report. Whatever method is used it should be concise, and relate back to the objectives.
Then you might want to propose some further research, such as changing hardware configuration, using a different platform, putting some different patches on the system or using a different version of the system software. One of the goals of the future testing might be to determine how few systems of a newer generation you need, knowing full well compute power is increasing over time, you may need half as many assets to run the same workload in the future.
Final Word
It would be very easy to write a book on performance testing, and there are thousands of resources already available on the topic. The aim of this article is to give a broad brush overview. By using a scientific approach to performance testing you can gain reliable and accurate results that can achieve business outcomes and provide assurance when things change that they can still meet the requirements. Updating baseline tests between versions and keeping good records are all part of the process of performance testing and constant system improvement. Even though the thousands of iterations of tests and small modifications between tests can be mundane, you can get some very exciting and sometimes unexpected results. I wish you successful testing and welcome all your comments.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
After a lot of hard work and hundreds of hours of preparation the journey to VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification is finally complete for Nick Bowie from VMware and Nutanix partner ViFX. Nick was the first candidate to submit and defend a VCDX design based on Nutanix technology and has become only the 2nd VCDX in New Zealand. It’s a great achievement, and it was great to be able to help Nick with his journey and to have one more VCDX in such a small country. I caught up with Nick to ask him a few questions about his experience and where to from here. Hopefully this will be useful for other candidates.
Firstly I’d like to congratulate Nick on his achievement. VCDX is the pinnacle of VMware certifications. It is a solution architecture certification that encompasses many supporting technologies and you need to be expert in multiple areas to a great level of depth, as well as being able to translate business requirements into a successful solution.
Here is what Nick had to say about his VCDX experience:
Q: What does it feel like to be only the 2nd VCDX in New Zealand, and the only one working for a NZ based VMware partner?
A: It’s pretty intense 
I told you I’d do it!
Q: What made you decide to pursue VCDX?
A: This was a personal goal of mine for quite some time. Back in 2009, I had the opportunity to focus on VMware virtualisation when I was selected to work on the virtualisation stream of a data centre migration project, bringing in ESXi 3.5 and SRM into the mission-critical space of the company I worked for. This really turned my professional life around and gave me a career direction. It re-ignited my interest in technology and fuelled my desire to reach that expert level. Once I started working at ViFX it changed from a possibility to a reality – the team here are truly excellent and inspiring.
Author: I think I remember this project :).
Q: How long did it take you to prepare for VCDX, including background experience and the actual VCDX process itself?
A: If I count starting at the VCP5-DCV – a long time! I achieved VCAP5-DCA in July 2013, and shortly after joining ViFX I achieved the VCAP5-DCD certification in December the same year. Joining ViFX was a key contributor, as I gained a lot of exposure after coming out of the customer role and started delivering solutions. The project I chose to base the VCDX submission on began around March 2014, and ran longer than expected, so I held back on submitting for the 2014 October round. Without the opportunity to defend at PEX I had everything prepared for the April submission/June defence round. After submitting my application I took a quick segue and achieved VCP-NV, but once I found out I had passed the application phase I immediately joined a study group with fellow candidates for proper focus. We got together three nights a week between Monday-Friday for an hour at a time, and at least once a weekend for two hours right up until the defence.
Q: What are some of the key factors that you think helped you succeed at VCDX on your first attempt?
A: Easily number one was having an understanding and patient wife 
Up until the document submission I had a few looks as I sat down to work on design tweaks late into the night, but once I had the invitation to defend she gave me the time to give it my all. I also think patience on my part had a lot to do with it, taking my time to really work on the document set and not rushing it for an earlier defence opportunity. The project it was based on had some challenges, which really helped validate my design decision process and the conclusions I had come to. I also can’t ignore the guidance I had from my mentor, Josh Odgers. He gave nothing away directly, but would give me a nudge here or there that would each evolve into 20-or-so more pages worth of detail once I realised what more was needed. That process helped immensely.
Q: Was your employer supportive and how do you think it will change your role now that you have VCDX?
A: ViFX were immensely supportive. I had let it be known that I wanted to achieve this when I started, and with a particular project in mind and they gave me the opportunity to do so. I’m not sure what may change with regards to my role (it’s only been a week!), but I hope it will help further differentiate us in the market. We have some serious talent here – I suspect we’ll have NZ’s 3rd VCDX soon enough.
Q: How did you choose your design and was there anything unique about it that you think helped you succeed?
A: One of the reasons I wanted to work for ViFX was that they saw the future in Hyper Converged Infrastructure early on, and the architecture and deviation from what I had previously managed really caught my interest. When I first saw Steven Poitras build up a Nutanix infrastructure in 15 minutes, I asked myself “why aren’t we doing this?”, so it was definitely a technology set I was excited about. Outside of pilot/POC’s, it was my first real Nutanix and large-scale Horizon View design, which might seem like I was biting off more than I could chew – I could have selected a BC/DR or vBCA Oracle re-platforming project, but I felt particularly invested in this one and the platform selection made if quite different. I started the whole process with the VCDX framework in mind and this really helped. I recommend anyone looking to undertake this challenge similarly considers beginning a design with the goal in mind rather than taking an older design and retro-fitting it to the mould as some have blogged about, as although I had some re-work to do it didn’t result in large-scale changes and continuity errors.
Q: You are the first VCDX to successfully defend a design based on Nutanix technology, how do you think that impacted the defence?
A: Not having exposure to the VCDX scoring rubric, I’m not sure I can say. I’ll say this though: the panellists seriously did their homework and I don’t think the design being on Nutanix made the defence process any easier! In the end, understanding all the constraints and risks I had meant my decisions were the right ones to deliver to the requirements. That would be true regardless of the platform type.
Q: If you had to do this all over again, what if anything would you do differently and what advice would you give to other candidates?
A: I’m not sure I would do anything differently. Even though it was stressful at times, I was successful on my first attempt and learned a lot in the process. My advice would be this: Understand the framework and understand the blueprint. If you have the opportunity to start a design with this in mind, regardless of ‘scale’ or perceived complexity, it will make the whole process smoother. Care about the customer outcome and the results will be in your favour.
Q: After a well-deserved break, what’s next for you?
A: I’m finding it hard to wind down after the experience The family is definitely appreciative of my new-found free time. I’ve still got a lot to learn I’ll keep working hard, learning and applying myself.
Q: Was going through VCDX worth it and how did your company respond when they heard the news?
A: Absolutely! Shortly after I received the congratulatory email (and pinched myself a couple of times to make sure it was real), I let the team know and immediately received excited phone calls from the company Directors and team mates who were all immensely proud.
Author: Not to mention the congratulations you got from the rest of the country as well, myself included. Well done!
Q: Are you going to attempt the Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX), and what are your thoughts about its value?
A: Eventually, yes 
There are some very compelling capabilities on display through the infrastructure automation that Nutanix have worked hard on, both through the Acropolis hypervisor and the ability to support a multi-hypervisor, distributed platform. The structure of the NPX is pretty daunting, and I’ve got a lot of learning to do before I’ll be ready. But that’s great for me – if I’m not learning something I get bored As to its value: with the prolific acceleration of cloud platform adoption, we as architects have the requirement to broaden our knowledge beyond the vSphere hypervisor to meet the requirements of particular use-cases. So displaying expertise across multiple hypervisors will definitely be of value.
Final Word
It’s great to have another VCDX from New Zealand and I’m looking forward to many more. I and the rest of the VCDX community are happy to help anyone interested in achieving this certification as it raises the bar for enterprise architecture expertise and allows better solutions to be delivered to customers. In a world where end to end business solutions are complex regardless of the underlying platform chosen, you need experience architects to drive the solutions design. VCDX helps build better outcomes for customers and better loyalty and revenue for partners. With the Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) Certification you can now achieve an expert level certification across multiple hypervisors and application runtimes, building the swiss army knife of enterprise architecture for a hybrid cloud software defined datacenter world.
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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2015 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
The week before the Nutanix .Next inaugural user conference got underway I was joined in Miami by a number of the most talented industry veterans I have had the pleasure to work with to work 12 hour days (including the weekend) to bootstrap the Nutanix Platform Expert Certification. This event is the kick start to a certification program that we at Nutanix hope will set a unique benchmark for enterprise architecture expertise in the hybrid cloud / multi-hypervisor / multi-application runtime world. The NPX Design Review (NDR) is a multi phase in person peer defence comprising a design reivew / defence (90 minutes), a troubleshooting scenario (30 minutes) and a design scenario (60 minutes) with 10 minute breaks in between. The NDR examination panel is comprised of 3 or more experienced NPX certified examiners and a moderator. In my case my examiners include no less than 2 x Double VCDX and all others had at least VCDX, in addition to a lot of experience with Nutanix and traditional enterprise architecture. The process was very tough, but at the same time very worthwhile, and it is really just the start of the journey. This article will cover some of the background and some of the goals of the program, my journey, and how we plan to help partners and customers achieve the certification so they can more effectively simplify their environment and migrate into a more web scale / hybrid cloud / multi-hypervisor / multi-runtime world.
Where it all began…
The journey to NPX started in January 2015 when a group of top Nutanix engineers, educators, architects, and field facing experts got together with a PhD psychometrician, that is an expert in creating expert level certifications, to create a certification we wanted to address the needs of a changing IT environment. This new environment is not just multi-hypervisor, but multi-cloud, multi application runtime environment, and things like containers and devops may be part of the mix (i.e. a firm grounding in the present with an eye on the near and medium term future). The NPX program was built from the ground up and with the aim of certifying world class enterprise architects who could work in diversified data center environments for global 2000 organizations. Keeping the interests and requirements of customers at the forefront was the most important criteria for us while laying the groundwork for the program.
If you’re wondering to yourself ‘Nutanix is so simple, why does anyone even need NPX?’ then you should read the article by Mark Brunstad (@MarkBrunstad) on this exact topic. While you’re at it I’d recommend you check out the initial NPX announcement, check out the NPX Community Site and the NPP Community Site (NPP is the only hard pre-req).
As Mark Brunstad says “Infrastructure design at the X-level is an incredibly demanding art. It requires a superbly skilled technologist who can capture the essence of a business enterprise and create the foundation for its success. If you aspire to be NPX this should be your primary goal.”
Getting prepared…
At the time we created NPX I didn’t know much at all about KVM or Hyper-V, I knew about containers, but didn’t know much about Docker, Rocket or any of the related tech. Without knowing at least one of these alternative hypervisors to at least the same level required of VMware vSphere for VCDX-DCV I was not going to be successful at passing NPX. So I was set on a path to learn an alternative hypervisor and come up with a NPX level design in 5 months, like my fellow bootstrap candidates, while having a grueling schedule including travel already planned.
I decided to develop a design on a new hypervisor and cover off the troubleshooting and design scenarios on VMware vSphere. For my design I could have gone either way with Hyper-V or Acropolis/KVM, but given the equipment I had available, and being on the alpha for Nutanix Community Edition, I thought KVM would be a better shot (I plan to also learn Hyper-V in more depth having only used it as part of the Nutanix Support Specialist training). I used Nutanix CE to test components of my design, which was useful as I could run it on a desktop (Dell Precision 5810 Tower in my case) without changing my performance lab. At the time it wasn’t supported to be nested on ESXi, but that has now changed. Instrumental in my preparations was sitting through a Linux Foundation course on KVM and internal training on Acropolis, in addition to sitting on the Nutanix Support Specialist (NSS) training beta. This also made me realize how hard KVM is without having a distributed and simplified management platform such as Acropolis.
Wholly fictitious designs are not permitted in the NPX program, so it was fortunate I had a real world design that I could use as the basis of my new design. The even better news is that it was for a web scale application and was in a mission critical environment. This allowed me to demonstrate a lot of skills, especially as it was a migration from traditional Unix to Linux. This is where knowing the ins and outs in detail of a traditional architecture and how to build a rock solid low risk migration plan comes in handy. Current state assessments, operational readiness and solid migration planning are all key elements of a successful NPX and the NDR itself.
If your documentation is not up to standard you will not be invited to the NDR, it’s just that simple. So you need to have a world class design package submitted that covers all of the key blueprint areas. To get hold of the blueprint register on the NPX page here, it’s free, and the certification NDR is free (apart from you having to fund travel).
Working in a team is allowed (as is the case with other expert level certifications). But you must all defend the entire design package as if it was your own, and you must know the back story to do that. The back story is the behind the scenes information that went into creating the design, such as the meetings, the conversations with customers etc, that helped justify the design. Most of these are hopefully documented in the design package itself, including the design decisions.
I created a design with a team so that we could divide the effort among our group and get all of the work done on time (we were all very busy with our day jobs as well). We all got together to review the documents and cover the key decisions in detail that supported the design. If you are working in a team make sure all the members are committed and can put in the necessary effort, if not, identify and deal with that as early as possible. The last thing you want is one member of the team pulling the rest down.
Time for the NPX Design Review with the examiners..
The actual Design Review or Design Defence part of the NDR is very thorough and very tough. This is because you not only have to justify and defend all of the decisions and configurations, knowing all the components of the Nutanix platform, but hardware choice (including hardware supplier), hypervisor choice, and what the impact is of the chosen hypervisor vs the alternative hypervisor that was selected in your NPX application. As with other expert level certifications the blueprint is what you’re being measured against, so read it and understand all of the requirements. You will be defending every component of the blueprint, and you need to cover each one. The examiners will probe to ensure you really understand all aspects of the design and the impacts of various components on other components.
Preparation of your NDR presentation is a key aspect of success during the NDR, as is being able to troubleshoot using a methodical logical process, and start a design on the fly. For the presentation itself I suggest you design it in such a way as you can cover all of the blueprint areas and have appendix slides for all key diagrams and additional information. You need to be as comfortable as possible presenting while under pressure. Even experienced architects can get nervous during the NDR.
As with other well known expert level certifications time goes very quickly and time is your ultimate enemy during the review. Your ability to control time while answering the examiners questions in sufficient detail will be a key to success. You also need to be able to talk through your thought process and show it by drawing on the whiteboard as you go through the scenarios.
Once your design review if over you need to switch gears and troubleshoot and design based on the scenarios provided by the panel on your chosen alternative hypervisor. Your examiners are you customers during the scenario and you are the architect that has to address their requirements. The examiners can provide background details if you ask the right questions. They can also perform any required calculations. There will be one or more slides with information provided for the scenario at the start. Be sure that you understand what is being asked to ensure you make the most of your time.
Upon completion of my time I was asked to leave the room while the examiners completed the assessment and submitted it to the moderator. As this was the bootstrap we would find out the results almost straight away. Even though this was a rather quick process it can still be nerve racking.
The Result: May I have the envelope please…
It was rather fitting that after this process last week, at the FontaineBleau Hotel Miami Beach (Hotel history here), I was awarded NPX #007, as this is the hotel made famous by the James Bond movie Goldfinger, among others. Even though I found out I had passed right after my NDR, we didn’t have numbers assigned until after everyone had completed their reviews. It is an absolute honour to be among the first group of newly minted NPX, especially to have the number of one of my favorite movie characters. I celebrated in true Bond fashion by having a few Vodka Martinis, shaken not stirred.
How we will enable Partners and Customers to be successful with NPX…
Ok, so now we have the program started and we have certified the first group of examiners. The program is now officially GA and there are review dates scheduled for 2015. The next question is how can you, Nutanix Partners and Customers, get involved and be successful? First thing is get NPP, then get the NPX Application (if you haven’t already). In addition to articles like this one we are fully committed to helping Customers and Partners with the journey to NPX, many have already shown an interest. Assistance may include preparation workshops, or mentoring for candidates that have the necessary background to have a good chance of success. Once you have read and understood the NPX application and the requirements make sure you email npx at Nutanix and let us know which NDR you think you’d like to target. We will then look to align the assistance to your requirements.
If you are experienced with VMware vSphere I strongly recommend you go through VCDX. VCDX is a great program and is a good preparation for the in person panel style review of NPX. Many other technology professionals may not have the experience for VCDX and it may not be relevant as they are more familiar with Microsoft Hyper-V or KVM and may include some of the top Citrix or RedHat certified architects. For those cases there are some recommended guidelines in the NPX certification blueprint. You can still go through the program and we absolutely acknowledge prior experience.
Further reading and preparation…
I recommend that you review the other articles by the NPX bootstrap group:
Josh Odgers (@josh_odgers) – Double VCDX #90 / NPX #001 – My NPX Journey
Samir Roshan (@kooltechies) – VCDX #124 / NPX #004 – My NPX story and why one should pursue !!
Magnus Andersson (@magander3) – Double VCDX #56 / NPX #005 – My Nutanix Platform Expert NPX Journey
Final Word
The learning never stops. There is still much I need to learn, especially when it comes to Microsoft Hyper-V. The process is definitely worth it. I’m looking forward to helping many more qualified candidates achieve NPX in the months and years ahead.
Here is a photo that we took just after we have all go out numbers. Unfortunately Bas didn’t make the picture. From left to right Lane Leverett – NPX#002 (@wolfbrthr), Samir Roshan – NPX#004 (@kooltechies), Jon Kohler – NPX#003 (@JonKohler), Josh Odgers – NPX#001 (@josh_odgers), Magnus Andersson – NPX#005 (@magander3), Myself – NPX#007 (@vcdxnz001 and @WebScale007). Missing in this pic Bas Raayman – NPX#006 (@basraayman).
After this I felt I should probably pimp my ride with the following:
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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2015 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.