Over the last few months I’ve given my career a major turn: I’ve decided to no longer think of myself as “just” a “Citrix guy”, but to devote part of my energy to growing my experience and expertise in Nutanix solutions. Maybe a choice I “had to” make, but definitely also one I “wanted to” make.
After an initial (intense) period of study and the bundle of certifications that came with it, I earned the opportunity to join the Nutanix professional services team (as I have been for Citrix for several years, in this case too working as a third-party consultant).
Working with Nutanix services is really pushing me to challenge myself and lets me deal with a growing number of Nutanix installations and of customers who have decided to embrace their solutions.
What I’m seeing is a market (at least in Italy) that is surprisingly lively, perhaps woken up from its slumber after so many years of VMware’s almost unchallenged monopoly in the virtualization space.
In recent years the market seemed frozen in a bubble where VMware was the undisputed king of on-prem installations and where public clouds were the only real alternative. Ever since Broadcom became VMware’s new home, with the licensing changes that followed, the market has been hit by an earthquake and competitors are benefiting enormously; one above all, Nutanix.
The difference compared to other solutions trying to take VMware’s place in companies (Proxmox, XCP-ng, XenServer, Sangfor, etc…) is that Nutanix has already been a truly viable alternative to VMware for a few years; the other solutions I mentioned, although I don’t want to dismiss them, in my opinion don’t yet have the strength to replace VMware in the organizations where I work. Nutanix, on the other hand, has a stable platform and a mature, consistent ecosystem.
The benefits Nutanix brings to companies are many, both those needed to replace VMware (pure virtualization) and those that come from technological innovation.
In my role as a Nutanix consultant, I find myself telling customers about the solutions I can build with Nutanix, and I often see amazement and satisfaction in their eyes when they realize we can help them solve so many small problems or “headaches”.
I’ve designed Nutanix solutions that then replaced VMware installations in very diverse environments, from VDI environments, to classic application server virtualization environments, all the way to clusters dedicated to running mission-critical databases; in every case Nutanix had the “right key” to make the result fully match what the customers wanted, always managing to impress with the simplicity and stability of the proposed solutions.
Seeing VDI environments run perfectly on a Nutanix installation ( to be clear, I always recommend Citrix for this purpose 😛 ) or how easy and painless it is to upgrade a cluster with hundreds of VMs without any service interruption makes customers happy and my job very enjoyable. Solving old problems, like replicating user profiles across different geographic sites with Nutanix Files, or newer ones, like delivering a fully highly available Kubernetes environment, is what makes my working days a joy. After all, I believe being a consultant is a life mission…as well as, of course, a job.
Solutions like Nutanix Files, NDB, Kubernetes support, Flow, etc… make Nutanix an ecosystem of solutions that sets it well apart from the other vendors I mentioned above, turning customers’ environments into true private Clouds. Obviously not every solution is necessary or useful for every customer, but the kind of companies I work for is definitely top tier.
Compared to my experience with Citrix solutions, which I also gained working on the largest installations in Italy and beyond, with Nutanix I now get to deal with many more aspects of the customers’ day-to-day operations. Citrix solves very specific problems; Nutanix covers so many topics that the conversation with customers never ends.
If reading these lines has made you curious and you want to know more, feel free to contact me on social media or through the contact form on this site…I’ll be very happy to help you figure out whether Nutanix could be the right solution for you too!