Getting Started with Nutanix: A Fireside Chat with Two Former Nutanix SEs

Chris Calhoun: Welcome back to Nutanix Weekly and thanks for tuning in. I'm Chris Calhoun, Solutions Architect here at XenTegra. Today we're doing something a little different. No blog posts this time around. Instead, it's just going to be a fireside chat with my teammate Andy Greene. Andy and I both spent years at Nutanix as SEs, and before that, I was even a Nutanix customer myself. Now we both sit on the partner side as solutions architects here at XenTegra. So Between us, we've seen a lot of Nutanix in our days, from my customer side to the vendor side that we both share, and now the partner side. And today we want to talk about what that means for you and what getting started with Nutanix really looks like. Andy, welcome. I really excited today. I know that we typically do Nutanix blogs. But I think it makes sense for us to just sit down and share a little bit about our story, our journey, and some of our experiences so that customers can really understand that we've seen seen a lot of Nutanix in our time.

Andy Greene: Yeah, look looking forward to it. And your journey and mine are are very different. You you mentioned before, you came

Chris Calhoun: Mm-hmm.

Andy Greene: from the client side. I I've been on the vendor side my entire career. So I you know, w it'll be good to compare notes and see where things are the same and where they might differ.

Chris Calhoun: Absolutely. Here's kind of the layout that Andy and I've kind of put together so that we can kind of guide you through our storytelling. We want to give you a little bit of background about our origins, then move on to what's different from the OEM side to the partner side, what changes next, kind of like the voice of the customer, what we're hearing from what's hot. What we're getting asked about these days and then getting started with Nutanix. I think that that's a question a lot of folks have these days as far as, hey, are there alternatives to what we're doing now that may work better in the long term based off of renewals, et cetera? Next, myths and lessons from the field. Anxious to hear and share some more stories with Andy about what we've gone through in the past. And then last of all to wrap up is a lightning round we put together. I don't know how much of a lightning it'll be and I think that we've kind of compared some answers to some of our questions where we may have prepped ahead of time. But we want to make sure that we provide you guys with some good insight. So that's kind of what we'll talk through first.

Andy Greene: Wait, wait, wait. You are are you telling me you prepped for this?

Chris Calhoun: Not sure what you're talking about.

Andy Greene: Ha ha ha ha.

Chris Calhoun: We'll see how it turns out and you guys decide how about that. So yeah, we're looking forward to a good time here. Obviously Phillips not here. Our normal host for this. So this is when the what the engineers and essays play when the manager's away, isn't that the the story that it's told or something like that anyway. So yeah,

Andy Greene: Something like that.

Chris Calhoun: Yeah. All right, well I will jump in. So here's the idea. Back in the day, I was a Nutanix customer when Nutanix was version 5.3, I believe. Andy, you may remember those days. That I think that was our baseline install. And we had no idea as a team what we were doing. In the past we had the siloed infrastructure, dedicated back-end storage. ESX hosts that were obviously directly SAN attached back to the Death Star array for storage. And really the HCI model was some new trendy fad. This was probably maybe eight years ago or so. That's when I began seeing of hey look this integrated solution pretty much works is exactly as planned. You don't have to have those Dedicated I'll call them not super nerds, but guys that are totally tech savvy with every intricacy for ones and zeros around storage. Generalists can, from a virtualization perspective, manage their environment. And that's really one of the big advantages that I saw back in my customer days. The team that called on me as a customer. The S E and I became pretty close and he said, Hey, we've got an opening and I know that in the past you were a high school teacher. Education is is a big part of that and I feel like that you would be good at it. So five years into the role, I loved my time at Nutanix. Circumstances led for me to interact with Phillip Sellers. We would travel on the same plane headed to Nutanix events together. I was sitting close by when Philip was awarded the S E Partner of the Year. I thought, wow, this is a pretty neat guy. And then opportunistic, it worked out so that I would be able to join the XenTegra team and then shortly thereafter, and as I was looking for opportunities, Andy and I synced up. And so we kept in touch with e each other and then it worked out that both of us are now on this XenTegra side working arm in arm trying to help our customers. So I feel like my journey has come full circle. Understanding what as a Nutanix seller it takes to be a good partner. So getting to implement that now is a good thing. So Andy jump in there and share your side.

Andy Greene: Sure, sure. So for for me, you know, I I a lot of time working with IBM and Lenovo, working with their fiber channel storage arrays. I I self-identified as an old school fiber channel sand guy. So you know, around 2014, Nutanix hit my radar. It it was a company I started to hear things about. And a big part of that, you know, so some people out there might know I I've got an older brother who actually went to work for Nutanix around that time frame. So he was an S E, you know, covering accounts here in the Carolinas. And you know, he and I used to have some some really spirited discussions about the topic. And you know, for me, there were a couple of of light bulb moments. You know, one, at one point he he directed me to the Nutanix Bible, which which was online. It was basically, you know, the full transparency. Here is the Nutanix solution, here's how it works, how here's how we do failure handling. So I I went out there, I some time, you know, really just digesting the content that I was seeing. And you know, for me, the there was a light bulb moment where I said, this can be really good for some workloads, for some people, and it can be an actual disruptor for the industry. I I saw that potential in the solution to really just change the way the industry worked. So that was light bulb moment number one, I would say. we s we still had a lot of discussions and I I remember having arguments with him. I I would talk about you know 32 gigabit fiber channel, how it's full duplex, and they would never be able to compete on performance and this and that. You know, he gave me some of the early value prop of of Nutanix, which was centered around you know, getting away from from some of those speeds and feeds. You know. Back in those days, there there was a lot of talk about storage subsystems that could do a million IOPS, you know, a million IOs per second. There were storage performance reports, like storage performance council, the SPC one and two. And you know, I I would grill in why aren't you guys if if you can perform, why why aren't you represented on on these SPC one and two reports and things like that? So we had some really spirited discussions and I I think for me the there was a light bulb moment which really came around to, you know, yes, these storage subsystems can do a million IOPS, but does your VM actually need it? And kind of akin to your car, you know, if the speed limit is seventy miles per hour and you never go over we'll we'll say seventy five miles per hour, why do you need a car that can go two two ten, right?

Chris Calhoun: Mm-hmm.

Andy Greene: So you know, it I I think But some of this was getting away from the industry talk at the time and realizing that you know benchmarks such as how many IOs we can present we can give to a single VM really weren't as relevant as as the amount of focus that we put onto them. So, you know, I had my light bulb moments. I was actually working at Lenovo at the time that Lenovo and Nutanix forged their first partnership. And as part of that, I met a lot of the Nutanix account teams, a lot of the Nutanix sellers, especially those that were in the inside sales office in Durham, North Carolina.

Chris Calhoun: Mm.

Andy Greene: Really liked all of the people that I met there. Personality wise, you know, I I felt like they were they were just really good people who were working hard, good, good work ethic. And by that point, you know, I had largely come around to the technology. And so I think, you know, give it probably three months and after that partnership was forged and I went to work for Nutanix. So at that point I I fully believed in the platform. I thought that it could, you know, really change the way the industry worked. And then later, you know, some of that messaging changed and I saw that Nutanix really could compete in a drag race as well. So you know, all of those things kind of came together that they were They were light bulb moments for me, but it it really solidified that I wanted to be a part of of what Nutanix was doing. And, you know, and I really just enjoyed the time there. I felt like I was working with good people on a platform that really mattered and could bring a lot of value to the clients that I was working with.

Chris Calhoun: Yeah, I definitely think that obviously as evidence from our time and Nutanix success from those days till now, obviously the platform's solid. They've built and extended further. Obviously, nowadays that platform is even used more so for AI workloads and moving beyond HCI. Obviously, those are our early days of die hardcore HCI guys, but it's see seeing the platform extended. And now even more so Nutanix files and some of the storage metrics that you've talked about, Nutanix being the some of the top leaders in those fields, that's really shows the performance and the growth. I know that that's kind of a a different topic from where we we are and where we're starting it from as far as our stories go, but I think that kind of lends itself to a good segue into the next section here, Andy, where it It talks about as dedicated OEM SEs, obviously we focused on one platform. Now from the partner side, how is the this world different for you? From a perspective of obviously a single focus to being more wholesome, well-rounded. Share share with me a little bit more about your thoughts around that.

Andy Greene: Sure. when I was at Nutanix, that there was a lot of freedom of choice around hardware. And and I would talk about that freedom of choice. I I really didn't care if you put the Nutanix software on Nutanix's nodes, which were super micro under the covers. If you wanted, if you had a good relationship and a lot of trust with any of the OEMs out there, the Lenovos, the Dells, HPE, Cisco, those those types of companies, I was very happy to to work with them and put together an equivalent hardware solution and make sure everything worked together. You know, I I feel like on the on this side of the house, b working for a value-added reseller, a big part of what we do is helping with some of that decision making. It it's not just saying, you know, I'll work with any vendor that you want w want to work with. It it is I will work with you and I'll help you make some good decisions around pricing, lead time. You know, I'll I'll do a lot of the legwork and really make sure we get you into the right platform. So I have a stake in in making sure we bring the right hardware to the table. As we get outside of that box, outside of just the hardware that's running that Nutanix software, there are a lot of components that are required to make this work. we need power in the racks, we need network ports, we need to confirm that we've got compatibility with with existing softwares. That might be things like backup, you know, it may be some of the Anytime we're doing a hypervisor change, just you know, making sure that every single workload is is going to be able to carry over or that we've got a plan for that. You've got security and then all of the professional services to tie that together. So, being on the side of the house where I'm working as a reseller, I get to really touch all of those technologies. Microsoft licensing, software updates on the OS side, making sure, you know, all of your your integrations are going to work together and proposing new solutions if if needed to bridge that gap. You know, I can bring in a a pair of network switches if we need to, if we find that we don't have the right network ports or maybe we're ready to make that move from 10 gig networking to 25 gig netw networking. So I think there's a the we have a a much bigger stake in in the end result and making sure that every aspect of the project goes well and that it's going to to ensure success for our clients. Whereas when I was working on the vendor side of the house, it was largely, you know, here are the switch requirements, have at it, right? So

Chris Calhoun: Mm-hmm.

Andy Greene: So I I think it's really just getting deep into the weeds on on everything and making sure that we're putting together a solution that meets all of the business requirements and has the outcomes that we anticipate.

Chris Calhoun: Yeah, I definitely think that you can definitely have tunnel vision focused from an OEM SE of yes, we'll work with anybody, happy to help. Hardware choice, go like you said, go at it. But the idea now is, hey, our job is to help everything work, everything communicate, and actually setting the customer up to be successful for a holistic solution. Not just one component or one part of that solution. You agree with that?

Andy Greene: Definitely. Yes.

Chris Calhoun: Yeah, yeah, no, I think so too. So here's the next part that I wanna us to talk about. And that's the what customers are asking for today. I think that this is where hopefully you'll hear a lot as you're listening to this podcast, you'll hear a lot of interactions that sound like maybe where you are in your refresh cycles. Whether you've got aging hardware, you've got upcoming renewals. I'm working with a customer now who's brand new to Nutanix and the HCI world with some of the acronyms he not familiar with and and how Nutanix works, we'll say behind the scenes and working to get him a good fundamental foundation. So now that he's made that initial purchase, and the whole point was, hey, look, we see an opportunity here. We've got some funding that we need to use in a certain period of time. We know that we don't want to wait around. And this is to me the biggest emphasis for him was we don't want to rate wait around because the VMware renewal is such a short window. You really don't have time to plan for an exit strategy then, because then it's like, wow, do I really want to pay that much for the exact same gear and everything that I've got? Or now that the gear is Totally outrageous in cost. Are there better options? And I think that that's where not only Nutanix comes in, but our hosting solution for that as well could be a viable option. So we've got, from my perspective, some of my clients have specifically asked for. Hey, we've been die-hard on-prem solution. We run Nutanix. We're Citrix customers that run on Nutanix. It's a perfect fit. However, with the price of hardware from pretty much any of those vendors that we've talked about. It's just becoming more advantageous to look at other options. So we are looking at more of a hybrid solution for some of our customers and seeing how they can leverage some of their Azure spin, let's say that hey, we've already got some workloads in in Azure, should we put more? And I'm talking through a healthcare system that Sometimes it for that type of workload it makes sense to remain in a hybrid environment. And we've talked about the window of how you go from step one to evaluating what workloads could be potentially moved to planning out the the AZs and the structure of the environment in Azure, or AWS for that matter, but this p particular customer interested in Azure. So Those are the types of asks that I'm seeing and working on currently. Andy, anything different there or power your customers as far as the curiosity to explore Nutanix or almost evacuate or leave their current solution more of a priority?

Andy Greene: Yeah, the there are there are a lot of things that have changed very rapidly in the last few years. And and I think it has a lot of clients really, you know, reconsidering what's going to be the best option moving forward. So you touched on some key points there. You know, people who have traditionally been on-prem, we we've seen some dramatic increases in hardware pricing. And so, you know, in in a lot of cases we're seeing a shift towards getting away from the those large capital expenses and moving towards more of an operational expense type of model. We've seen you know financing come in and can help with with some of that. Or in other cases, you know, sometimes that can be the driver to say, we don't want to manage our our on-prem data centers anymore. Let's move this into the cloud. And then you know we can have some good conversations around you know doing some type of hybrid cloud model. What is the cloud to you? Is it just the big hyperscalers or could XenTegra's cloud be a good fit here? You know,

Chris Calhoun: Absolutely.

Andy Greene: you touched on the hardware prices. That that's been a particular pain point this year. So, you know, a big part of what I'm doing is working with my clients to try to make sure that we're bringing in vendors that can hit the lead times that they need to hit, because you know, that all of these things have imp implications. If I've got a hypervisor you know. Renewal coming up that I'm trying to avoid and I and I need new hardware to do that. You know, we have to think about all of the timelines. So so I think that's one of the big benefits of working with a company like XenTegra is we're going to take the time to put all of the options on the table, help you with that TCO analysis and make sure that we're making the right decisions for, you know, where those workloads should run and how they should run for the next, say, five to seven years.

Chris Calhoun: Yeah, for sure. And something too that I think that we've gone a good while without mentioning is the word AI. You know, a lot of customers start the conversation with, hey, what can you help me with? And some of that is is tied directly to, hey, how can we use Nutanix for that? Obviously we've had a few podcasts in the past around the AI gateway. Helping to And I remember Marcus's comments around Hayes specifically putting guardrails and limits and structure around that usage. That's definitely something that we can help with as well. So I think that that that's probably a good segue if you if you agree as well of what's the best way to get started with a Nutanix call with us. Reaching out to your locals XenTegra rep, reaching out to us directly, happy to to interact with you. Obviously the podcasts are up and posted. We're on social media, we're on LinkedIn especially. So any platform that you have we probably do as well. But what I'd like to do is to kind of start out and lead in and then Andy you kind of pick up and let's talk about what a go forward or what the right path looks like for customers that hopefully would be interested in, hey, we need to explore. We're in a discovery phase now. Would like to meet to see what's involved and is it something that you guys can help with a reverse timeline. That's what you mentioned Andy was a big key of that hardware delivery. If we do want to be in the data center business and still manage our environment because we may have data restrictions or we've got an edge use case for a remote site data center. Do you have a a small enough Nutanix cluster that could fit that need? So let's walk through that. Here's the idea of what we like to walk through with customers. A discovery call where we talk about the goals that you have. Why are we here today? You reached out because What's keeping you up at night? Is there a concern about your existing hypervisor? And also timelines too. Sometimes XenTegra gets a call when customers in emergency situations, you know, it's like the bat phone. Hey, I that these guys react quickly, they're attentive, they listen, got experienced guys who've been there, seen that, and that's kind of what we're trying to get you to see and understand to prove out. So that discovery call consists of as a homework takeaway, me being the former school teacher, collecting real data about your environment. Nutanix has a fantastic tool called Nutanix Collector, aptly named. And what it does is it runs in your environment, doesn't really have to be installed or anything. It's just basically an executable that you run that captures the data. From your source environment, whether it be ESX in particular, or even a cloud hosting if you're looking to bring that back on-prem. And the good thing about the Nutanix Collector, and RV Tools is another option, RV Tools does a point in time as the capture is running that exact instance, versus Nutanix Collector that can gather data over a week-long period. That's the default where you can pull. Basically the trend analysis. As you can see, the rise fall of workload gets heavier at night when maybe backup jobs or SQL reporting is running, analytics in the environment, something like that. So a good footprint of a week's long gathering would be perfect for us to have real data. That real data gets sent to us. We've got a couple of different means, a secure one drive share that Andy and I have got set up specifically for the customer that we send them the email, the steps to walk through, and click the upload link and it goes right to us. From there, we can import that collector data. And this is where to me Nutanix has done a fantastic job. And obviously Andy and I have seen this in action as Nutanix employees. We've used news Nutanix Sizer. We can use it with our eyes closed. They make advancements to it. Improvements and the tooling is fantastic. What it does is that it actually models the workload of you the customer. So it shows us exactly what a Nutanix cluster would look like. And that gives a storage percentage dial, CPU, RAM, and it does something a little bit further than that too. And it plans on, say for example, the I'll give a quick story. The customer that I was working on out of Florida. Is looking for a new cluster. He's got an older seven year Nutanix cluster and knows that it's it's getting long in the tooth and coming up on end of life in the coming year. So we need to plan for a change. Well in the past that environment was pretty flexible in the sense that he had a hybrid Nutanix cluster which has, Andy as you know, drives that are both solid state And then also in that same chassis drives that are spinning. Obviously, that's where the cheaper savings used to come from before the cost of hardware is just blown the roof off of it. Now those those environments are now more structured to hey with faster, better, stronger, more expensive, we are focusing on all NVMe or all SSD platforms. So that changes the price scope that customers, I remember when I bought this seven years ago what I paid for it. Well, guess what? That will buy you one server now to the four that you bought earlier. But back to my story about the N plus one. The customer workload would technically run off of three servers, but they like the idea of having four servers spread that workload across the full scope of their clustered environment. What that does is it doesn't create any hotspots. So that's one of the advantages to the Nutanix platform. The metadata is spread across all of the actual data drives in the environment. You don't have just one or two super duper, hey, this is my Ray Parity drive. This is my golden ticket. If there's ever any emergency, this is the guy that saves me and rebuilds that data. The rebuild comes from all the all of the drives. So I think that that's a getting into a little bit of the the nuts and bolts as you mentioned about the Nutanix Bible, but it gives a good foundation and helps a customer really realize that what they're doing is really seeing, hey, here's what my workload looks like in a Nutanix cluster. Sometimes as engineers that's kind of hard for them to really see. So Andy, talk to me there about like what you what do you do once you've sized it with a customer and then the typical flow as far as finishing out that series of events, let's say.

Andy Greene: Yeah, well, one key thing I would add is that our clients are involved every step of the way. So,

Chris Calhoun: Absolutely.

Andy Greene: you and I use our expertise. We we put together the solution we would recommend. But the first thing I do after that is I get on the phone with the client and I review all of that. We talk about the workloads and the inputs that we put in, we talk about the hardware that was selected and why. And we look at those estimated utilization levels and talk a little bit about growth and if this is where they want to be. starting on day one. So I think, I our our clients appreciate that they're involved. They they understand what they're what they're getting, what it's going to look like on day one. And they also understand, you know, any any type of growth modeling that they can forecast today gives them that opportunity to go ahead and build it into the sizing so that we know that we've got the platform that's going to meet their their needs both today and in the future. And you know if if the growth is over a large amount of time and is Is significant enough, we can go ahead and model that in. We can build a a building block type approach for them that might say, hey, we've got exactly the right compute, memory, and storage in these nodes. And for year one, you need five of them. Year two, you're gonna be at six, year three, you might be at eight. But those are all things that we can work with the client and make sure that you know we we're aligned to the long-term goals there. From there though, I think there are a number of tools that we can use to give the clients hands-on experience with Nutanix. Nutanix is is great with you know producing those Test Drive pages where you can go out and really get it's really just a good simulation of a Nutanix cluster, but you can run through a lot of the day-to-day tasks that an administrator might do. And they they have those available for everything from just the standard. Platform to the their database lifecycle management tool and others as well. So those can be very good tools just to get some preliminary hands on. We've got a demo environment that we can use or we can lean on the Nutanix account teams to get access to the their hosted POC lab as well. Nutanix has a very large lab. I think there's well in excess of 100 clusters in there. And and we've got the option if if we need to you know reserve one of those for a couple of weeks, get some hands-on, we can test things like like one-click upgrades, expanding the cluster, you know, workload creation, just a lot of the day-to-day things that an an administrator might do. So you know, the end goal of all of that is we just want to make sure that if the client's making a major change, like a platform change, that they they have that confidence. That the workloads are going to run well and that the day-to-day administration is going to be very manageable for them. And for what it's worth, I don't have any concerns around that. I I know when we get in and do that testing that the platform's gonna do all the things that we've promised, but but it's always good to get hands on keyboards and actually see it in action.

Chris Calhoun: Absolutely.

Andy Greene: You know, from there, when when the time comes, you know, we we're going to Typically we'll have our installers engaged, well before the day of the install. We're helping out, making sure all the prerequisites are met, that we've got all the planning documents, basically so that when they come out to do that install, or or in in a lot of cases these days, it's actually a remote install. When the day comes, that install is going to go very smoothly for them. So it's making sure that when they come out that they'll stand up the Nutanix move tool. They'll help with whatever migrations we we've got scoped out as part of that professional services engagement. In a lot of cases, they they might migrate the first five VMs. We'll do some knowledge transfer, make sure the customer has that, that good feeling that they can take the migration from there. And then from there they may take over and migrate the rest of the environment. But we can do a full turnkey migration or or really just you know what whatever level level is suitable.

Chris Calhoun: Absolutely.

Andy Greene: And then you know finally from there it just goes into day two support and managed options. You know, I think Nutanix support is probably the best in the industry right now. You know, I the I I I trust that if there are any issues, when when you open that support ticket, you're going to get great support. But where new where's XenTegra can help out, you know, if there are issues, we'll we'll reach out to your account team. We'll we'll work to get things escalated internally. And then you know, from there a lot of it becomes we've got the platform stood up, we've got everything migrated, things are stable, things are working. What more can we do with the platform? And and that really ties into, you know, getting the full value out of the software that you've purchased.

Chris Calhoun: Yep. Totally agree with that too. And I I think that kinda getting that value is kinda leading into this next section of okay, some customers have apprehension of like, hey, look, I'm not so sure about this type platform. I'm so used to a three tier environment. I'm not sure HCI can scale properly. And I'd I'd baby need sometimes a a heavier, beefier note to start out with so that If I build a cluster that just focuses on this, am I really able to scale or am I stuck? And I think that that's part of the benefits of the the building blocks for Nutanix that I've center around Legos. Legos are different different shape. Oftentimes in the case though, to start out, we as architects will build those common building blocks so that we know how it will continue to grow and progress. As you add a node, you increase your CPU resources, your RAM resources, your storage resources. All of those are a part of that Nutanix experience. I remember for sure my days so that I couldn't stand having to EOL a server. That being a complete refresh, a rebuild of ESX, starting over, joining into the cluster, all of that is actually part of the Nutanix planned environment. So that day two and that admin experience that we've talked about is is fantastic, super easy to manage. I feel like that for customers as they move forward, AHV is tried and true as far as a solid hypervisor solution. We've talked about that. We've celebrated a birthday of a 10-year-old birthday a few years back for AHV. So I don't think that customers have the risks that they had before. Nutanix has Nutanix Move, a tool that will help de-riskify their migration from ESX to AHV. So I think it's a good solid platform. And I feel like that to me that's really addresses some of those concerns that people have about. Hey, I've I've looked at Nutanix in the past, but I wasn't for sure if that was the right solution for us. What other type myths or we'll even flip that over to lessons learned, Andy. What have you experienced as far as not necessarily pushback, but concerns from customers that are worried that maybe Nutanix isn't a good fit? What would you say? And talk to me about any other caveats you think are meaningful in this section.

Andy Greene: the lessons learned on deployment. I I always tell people to double check everything ahead of time. You know, I I've seen n nothing's perfect. I I've seen servers shipped without power cords. I've seen scenarios where the installers come on site and we don't have the right networking cables. You know, th these are all things that can can cause delays or or you know, other issues during the install. And and they're things that we can check ahead of time. So we know that the power cords should be in the box, we know that the rack rails should be there. Let's crack those boxes open and just make sure they're there beforehand. And you know, in the scenarios where we've caught that ahead of time, we can always get you power cables, we can get you network cables very quickly. So they're easy to resolve, but we don't want to have to to worry about them on on the day that we're actually planning to do do the deployment.

Chris Calhoun: Yeah, for sure. Anything else in mind for this? So are we ready to go to the lightning round?

Andy Greene: Hey, let let's do the lightning round. I'm I'm ready to go.

Chris Calhoun: Okay, I'm actually gonna change up my unprepared answer. So here's quick fire. I'll I say ten seconds each, but we'll figure out if it really takes us that long. We probably will go further. Andy, starting out, your favorite Nutanix feature that nobody usually talks about.

Andy Greene: And I've got ten seconds to answer this.

Chris Calhoun: No, you got longer. Go ahead and give us the good answer.

Andy Greene: I'm gonna say X-Play.

Chris Calhoun: Okay.

Andy Greene: This is low-code, no, no code automation. It ties into what we just said about the day two operations. It's not part of your deployment, but it's a way that we can very easily automate some of those day-to-day tasks that you're doing. So you know, once everything's up, it's stable, your workloads are running there, you're comfortable with it. Let's start looking at what you're doing and how we can leverage tools like X-Play to automate and make them easier, faster, quicker, better, however you want to phrase it.

Chris Calhoun: Yep. All right. I'm gonna jump jump in. This is that's one of my favorites too. That's the one that we talked about together. But to me, the built in reporting, that's something that as an admin that I was in my customer days, I love being able to walk in the door at eight o'clock. With my Blackberry in hand. I think it was probably still Blackberry, maybe not. But somebody's gonna fact check and say, Hey, Blackberries running around then, but anyway. The idea is walking in the door and having a report that gives you an analysis of your Nutanix environment. Some of those reports that are pre-canned are centered around resource utilization. I think that the there's a over provisioned VM report. To me, that's one that as an IT admin where I am in charge of making sure the infrastructure runs smoothly. Oftentimes the best course or the easiest course of action is to add more CPU a RAM at the behest of a SQL DVA that's pushing you to. But you can see and prove to the business that yeah it really doesn't need it. But it gives you a heads up that hey look during the day these may be the VMs that you're asked about. Or these may be the VMs, the bully VMs that are taking too much resources. Over provision is one and under provision is even one too. So having those pre-scheduled to arrive in my inbox any time throughout the day I think is super helpful to help me be more prepared. So I think that that's something I would say. And of course that was ten seconds, right?

Andy Greene: To be fair, if you said X-Play, I was going to say microsegmentation. So well, I'll I'll throw that one out there. That

Chris Calhoun: Okay. Keep keep going with that. Yeah, yeah.

Andy Greene: that that's another that's a another very powerful tool. And you know, we we think about network security with with your firewalls and being able to VPN in. It's almost like we're building a building a very hard perimeter around our data center and making it difficult to get in. micro-segmentation is essentially security. It's zero trust networking at the V switch inside of the hypervisor. So if you think about it, for your workloads to talk to the network, they've got to go through that v switch, and that is the perfect place to implement a implement a solution like that. So you know, micro-segmentation and basically just walling off that east-west traffic between your VMs. If a VM doesn't have a good reason to talk to another VM in your network, let's shut that down so that they're not allowed to talk to one another. It's a good way, we we talk about the hardened perimeter of network security. But if something does get into your network, let's stop it from going out, doing those port scans and then infecting everything else in the network. So that was my pivot, if you had called out X-Play for what it's worth.

Chris Calhoun: Gotcha. Well, that's perfect. And I think that that's a good way to finish out that segment. In closing, here's some of the call to actions that I think that we are and we maybe have highlighted along the way. If you want to see what Nutanix looks like, we'd love to help you model that for you collectively with Sizer in your environment. If you want to just kick the tires on your own. Test Drive is a great way to get started. Moving on. At XenTegra we actually host Lunch and Learns. Free steak and talk about Nutanix. That sounds like a great idea. Andy's roadshow is coming to Raleigh soon, November 5th, is that right? So

Andy Greene: November fifth, yes.

Chris Calhoun: So please go to xentegra.com slash events and sign up for that. I plan to be in Tennessee the first second week of November in Knoxville and Nashville tenth and twelfth. And then in Charlotte we have a lunch and learn on December the second. Come have lunch with us, talk shop, enjoy a steak. Would love to see ya. And then last of all, I feel like that to me we always need to plug the Nutanix dot next conference. That's the event that's in Las Vegas coming up in March or into March, first of April, in twenty twenty seven. XenTegra helps customers get there with reduced passes to those conferences. So please reach out. If you happen to know your Nutanix rep, great. If you don't, Philip, Chris, or Andy, those are three names that if you remember those, they'll help you along the way. And we are definitely out of time. But thank you again, Andy. I thought this was good for us to just kind of sit down and share with folks about our backgrounds. Appreciate you coming. Thanks for listening in. Andy, any other final comments? Last word? One word? Two words, three words.

Andy Greene: Last one, you touched on all the Nutanix roadshows we've got coming up. There is one in New York City. That's gonna be coming up on the third, if I remember correctly. So take a look at XenTegra.com/events and would love to see everybody out there.

Chris Calhoun: Absolutely. Again, thank you for joining. Thanks for listening and thanks for just being a part of the family. So have a wonderful day and thanks for your time listening in today.