NKP – Nutanix Kubernetes Platform – Whats All The Noise?

NKP is a centralized, enterprise-grade management solution designed to deploy, secure, and operate Kubernetes clusters across hybrid and multicloud environments (on-prem, public cloud, and edge).

NKP enables organizations to easily overcome Kubernetes Day 2 operational barriers, such as security, observability, reliability, upgradeability, backup and restore, policy management, and governance. This saves time and resources, enabling organizations to operationalize production-ready cloud-native environments in minutes rather than weeks or months.

NKP deployment options include Nutanix, VMware, bare metal servers, and a full range of public cloud, edge and air-gapped environments with or without Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Together with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nutanix Unified Storage and Nutanix Database Service, NKP Full Stack (NKP FS) delivers a consistent cloud-native platform for containers and VMs across public, private and hybrid multiclouds.

NKP Editions

	STARTER	PRO	ULTIMATE
	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Starter The fastest, easiest way to run Kubernetes on Nutanix.	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Pro An enterprise-ready stack ready to take applications in a cluster to production.	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Ultimate True fleet management for clusters running on-premises, in the cloud or anywhere.
What you get	The bare minimum to get started with Kubernetes on Nutanix AHV, including: Unlimited NKP clusters (NCI Pro and Ultimate) Upstream Kubernetes Cluster lifecycle management Air-gapped/dark site Nutanix CSI driver for persistent storage with Volume Groups and Files Storage Role-based access control and single-sign-on Load balancing and ingress services Rocky Linux OS only (provided by Nutanix)	Everything in Starter with platform services required for running modern applications on production, and: AI-ready (NVIDIA GPU Operator support) Bring your own operating system Runs anywhere: Nutanix, VMware, bare metal, AWS, Azure, and GCP Observability stack with dashboards, metrics, logs, and tracing Backup and restore Disaster recovery with NDK (on NCI) Service mesh NKP AI Navigator chatbot Serverless functions	Everything in Pro with the ability to operate at scale hybrid multicloud environments, including: Deploy, manage, and extend EKS and AKS cluster capabilities Kubernetes fleet management Multitenancy with support for dedicated and shared clusters Kubernetes Namespace as a Service GitOps for continuous deployment Centralized observability Cost management Application catalog NKP Insights analytics and anomaly detection Attach and manage CNCF Certified Kubernetes

  

NKP’s ecosystem includes a wide range of tooling and services critical for running Kubernetes in production. From automation and security to networking, observability, and storage, NKP covers all the bases – Readymade solutions, embedded into the ecosystem ready to use at the click of a button.

NKP Architecture

The NKP platform is formed of several key architectural components all tied together to

The management cluster serves as the central hub for NKP operations. It hosts the managers, which are controllers responsible for managing cluster and application operations.

• Cluster Managers are responsible for managing the lifecycle of clusters. The primary controller is the Cluster API controller, which supports the lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters.
• Application Managers handle environment-level integrations such as authentication, authorization, and other tasks.

Nutanix is investing a lot of time and effort into the development of the NKP offering its recognized as a leader (e.g., Forrester Wave Q3 2025), it is positioned as a primary, secure platform for modernizing infrastructure and supporting AI workloads.

Go have a play with NKP on Nutanix ‘free’ test drive website - https://www.nutanix.com/one-platform

Erasure Coding – What is it? Does It Even Work?

Nutanix Erasure Coding (EC-X) is a software-defined, post-process data reduction technology that increases usable storage capacity by replacing traditional replication (RF2/RF3) with parity-based protection. It works best on "write-cold" data (inactive for >7 days), providing significant capacity savings for backups, archives, and file servers. It requires a minimum of 4 nodes.

A typical Nutanix cluster has RF2 enabled by default, this implies 2 copies of data are kept on a Nutanix cluster (one on a local node where the guest VMs are running, and one remote) – therefore this is called RF2.

The layout below has a replication factor 2 (RF2), whose primary copies are local and whose replicas are distributed to other nodes throughout the cluster.

When Curator runs a full scan, it finds write-cold extent groups based on their age. Write-cold data is data that’s unlikely to be modified further. For all workloads other than Objects Storage, Curator considers data that hasn't been written to or overwritten in the last seven days to be write-cold and eligible for encoding. For Objects Storage, the postprocess period is reduced to three days due to the immutable nature of object storage. After the Curator process finds the eligible candidates, Chronos distributes and throttles the encoding tasks

After the system creates the strips and calculates parity, it removes the replica extent groups to save on storage. The following figure shows the environment and storage savings after AOS finishes EC-X.

That’s all the theory but does it actually work in practise on a production cluster……

Well, this week I had to turn on EC-X on a production cluster running over 100 VM workloads  that started to give warnings on low space – I don’t like seeing yellow or red on my clusters!

Below is what the storage stats were displaying in the cluster…..

As you can see from the above screen capture my 5-node cluster I have total space usage at around 64% (28.9 TiB) with RF 2 configured.

Once I had enabled EC-X and let Curator do its thing, the results after a few days speak for themself….

Total space usage is now 49.5% (22.38 TiB) and still dropping.  So far, I’ve managed to reclaim approx. 15% space and this will continue to improve over the coming days.

Thoroughly impressed with this feature from Nutanix.  I am defiantly going to keep this function in the back of my pocket for when I need to ‘magic-up’ some space on clusters that start running low on storage space.

Top 10 (and a bit) Nutanix Command

We’ve recently had a new graduate join our IT Operations department and I was going through one of our regions Nutanix installations and I was asked what are the top 10 commands they should know.  That got me thinking, so I put them wrote them down (there are more then 10) and shared them with our new grad and though I would post them here for you all also…….

ncli - Nutanix Command Line Interface for cluster-wide settings.

acli - Acropolis Command Line Interface for VM management (AHV).

ncc - Nutanix Cluster Check for health monitoring.

 

hosted – output the Nutanix hosts ID

hostips – output the host IP addresses in the cluster

host_upgrade_status – output the host upgrade status during any host hypervisor upgrade activity

nodetool -h 0 ring – output the clusters ring status and how many nodes are pin the Nutanix cluster ring

nodetool – h 0 info – output the node & host details e.g. uptime

nodetool -h 0 leadership – output the master node in the cluster

cvm_shutdown -P now – powers down the cvm your ssh’ed into

lcm_leader – output which CVM is the LCM leader

genesis restart – restart prism on a cvm

genesis status – check prism status

 

acli host.list – list all AHV nodes in the cluster

ncli cluster status – checks the cluster status

cluster status | Grep -v UP – validate if CVM processes are in the UP state

acli vm.list – list all VM’s on the cluster

acli vm.on (vm-name) – turns on a VM

acli vm.on * - turn on all VM’s in the cluster

acli vm.get (vm -name) gets information on the VM

acli vm.snapshot_list – lists all VM’s with a snapshot

 

ncli host edit id=HOST_ID enable-maintenance-mode=true – put a CVM into maintenance mode

ncli host edit id=HOST_ID enable-maintenance-mode=false – take a CVM out of maintenance mode

acli host.enter_maintenance_mode HOST_IP – put a AHV host into maintenance mode

acli host.exit_maintenance_mode HOST_IP – take a host of maintenance mode

Looong January 2026

Silverfort

Been a mega busy week – deployed an on-prem instance of Silverfort (obviously on Nutanix) and got through all the initial configurations and setup – now its over to our SecOps teams to commence defining all the rules and policies.

Deployment onto the Nutanix platform was straight forward - all the components are VM appliances, deployed the VM’s, powered them up and go through the initial configurations – VM name, IP address info etc etc and you have the management server up in about 15mins.

Obviously, I cannot go into too much details into the setup – it’s a security tool 😉

But I’ve been very impressed with its capabilities to secure identity and resources and with such ease… both on-prem (Active Directory) and in the cloud, for us EntraID.

The product has ‘read-only‘ access to the identity platforms but the information it’s able to gather and show you is scary – gives you great insight into the identity landscape for your environment – the SecOps teams have a lot of work for the next several months.

Here is the home page of the product – very fancy!

Nutanix

This week I also joined a webinar ‘Taming Cloud Chaos: The Nutanix Champions Perspective’ – this webinar brought together folk from the NTC community from across the globe to speak about Nutanix NKP and how the product handles real world workloads, developer and how it simplify day-to-day Kubernetes operations.

I strongly encourage you all to go have a listen of the recording and understand how to Transform Kubernetes from Your Biggest Bottleneck into Your Competitive Edge

https://event.nutanix.com/championstechtalknkpemea?utm_medium=organic-social&utm_campaign=701vo00000qh6w6yak&utm_source=nutanixcommunity

 

 

 

Nutanix NDB - Game Changer!

Last year I started looking into Nutanix NDB platform and I was very impressed at what it offered but my DBA's saw it as a threat - they took it as a platform that would make them redundant.  That was not how I viewed it - I saw opportunity to make our DBA's operational life a lot easier..... help automate their daily tasks, a platform to help them reduce all the operational firefighting, shifting from being operational focused to strategically focused.

After a few months I soon won the battle and had the business onside and budgets approved to proceed with introducing a dedicate Nutanix NDB cluster for one of our most business-critical database which was over 5TB in size.  When this database regularly went offline it cost the business millions as it meant hundreds of specialised technical engineers were unable to work and make strategic decisions.  Therefore, the business was keen to get this database onto a more stable and reliable platform where some of these disruptions could be prevented.

I engaged with Nutanix PS – as I wanted to get the install of NDB right from the get go, my reputation was at stake and I needed NDB impress.  After a week on engagement and building out the platform to my specified design, OS templates created, DB templates created and all IT security auditing complete the environment was ready to spin up the first SQL DB server…..

26 minutes is what it took to created a new Windows 2019 server, joined to the domain, in the correct OU, to corporate standards with all the management tool and IT security agents installed and SQL server 2019 installed ready for creating the first DB AND this was all by one DBA.  Speed, efficiency all come to mind!

We’ve had NDB in for nearly a year and I was asked by my IT manager how has our investment into NDB helped.

They say ‘a picture paints a thousand word’ so put it into a diagram…………

What a typical application upgrade looked like.

 

Now with NDB

How we upgrade SQL platforms…..

Busy Start To Year

Been a manic week – considering we’re only just into the second week of the new year.

This week I attended the Nutanix NTC intro call for all those who have been selected to be on the NTC program for 2026.  The NTC program is Nutanix ‘Premier’ community program to bring all the evangelist together to build and foster a great community of likeminded people – this community is lead by a great leader; Angelo Luciani. 

This year’s NTC announcement can be found at the following link: https://next.nutanix.com/community-blog-154/introducing-the-nutanix-technology-champions-for-2026-45110

Angelo – the leader of the community comes with a lot of energy and goes above and beyond to helps promote the community through regular cadence calls and ‘meet-up’ at events.  He gets us all involved at all levels at Nutanix, from building relationship with the c-suite, with the developers and getting us insights into all the cool tech that’s coming from Nutanix – its all under NDA so cannot always shout about it too early 😉

Any ways, looks like its going to be another great year being part of the NTC community – great things planned and looking forward to meeting my great friends at the annual Nutanix. Next 2026 conference; being held in Chicago April this year. 

This week I’ve also been deploying a new identity security platform from Silverfort – obviously on a Nutanix platform 😉.  So far its all been pretty straight forward – deployed a management appliance and x2 node appliance, took a few hours to get the OVA copied in the environment and new VM’s spun up and initial appliance configurations complete; host names, IP addressed and getting all the applicable upgrades complete.  Next week I’ll look to continue to deploy all the necessary agents and get some identity information flowing into the product-this will of course be scary because as I have no idea what’s going on and of course this will create months’ worth of work to remediate all the finding! Wish Me Luck

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Welcome To My Blog!

I’ve been working in IT for over 25 years since I graduated from university with degree in Computer Science in 2001.  I started work initially in the travel industry for a MSP based at London Heathrow, looking after some of the UK’s flagship airlines, working in a paced environment working to 30min ‘fix’ SLA’s for some customer – this was a fantastic experience as it introduced me to dealing with high pressure, intense scenarios and being able to resolve incidents under pressure.

A few years later, I took a BIG leap into London’s finance industry as a contractor.  Working 6-12 month gig’s over a few years. I worked on a few deployments of Citrix Metaframe farms across some the worlds biggest banking institutes, worked on some merger and divesture activities involving work related to Microsoft Active Directory and also got my first taste of virtualisation – VMware GSX server.

Due to my experience working on M&A activities I was approached to work on a recent acquisition for a major energy company, which involved AD integration, new virtualisation environment and Exchange messaging system integrations.  Whilst working on this contract I was offered a permanent job – which I accepted.

I’ve since then worked in the global energy industry across the UK and North America – working for and with some of the major operators.

Over the years I’ve had the privilege of working with many technologies but my ‘core’ areas of expertise have fallen into the infrastructure and security domains – below is a list of a few technologies where I consider myself an SME with certifications to support.

·        Microsoft Active Directory

o   DNS, DHCP, GPO, DFS-r, ADFS & PKI.

o   Quest Active Role Server & Recovery Manager for AD.

·        Microsoft EntraID

o   M365 Administration – SSO & Inc Teams

·        Microsoft Exchange On-Prem and Exchange Online

o   Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange

o   ProofPoint

·        VMware vSphere

·        IT Forensic - eDiscovery

·        Nutanix HCI Technologies, HPC & NDB.

·        Cohesity & Veritas Backup

·        SentinelOne EDR and Identity Protection

·        Datacenter Design and Management

·        SOX Compliance

·        SilverFort

·        CheckPoint Harmony SASE

·        Vendor Management

I’ve built relationship and networks with vendors and peers over the years who I collaborate with regularly and have had the opportunity to speak publicly at events to share my learns.

I’ve obtained many technical certifications over the years from many vendors and specialist IT bodies, some listed below.

·        Microsoft

·        VMware

·        Citrix

·        NetApp

·        ISC2 - CISSP

·        SANS – GIAC

·        Nutanix

·        ITIL

·        TOGAF

I’ve also had the opportunity to attend many conferences over the year, some major conferences listed below.

·        Microsoft MMS & Ignite

·        VMWorld

·        Nutanix .Next

·        Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Conference

Over the past few years, I’ve obtained an accolade from Nutanix to be a part of their Nutanix Technology Champion (NTC) program – this program has provided me the opportunity to speak at several Nutanix .Next conferences across the world - sharing my learnings with fellow Nutanix users from across the global.  I shall cover more of what I do as an NTC in future blogs.

Of recent, I’ve shifted my focus to transition into a more architectural role specialising in Infrastructure and IT Security – bringing together my vast knowledge and experience from over the years to help design, govern and provide technical strategic direction aligned to business goals to drive positive business outcome.