This page will be divided into two sections:
- Meet the NPX’s – The people holding the NPX certification will answer a few questions.
- My NPX journey
Meet the NPX’s
In this section each of the NPX certification holders answers a few questions related to their IT background and NPX.
Important: This is not an official list of NPX’s.
NPX Program Manager
Mark Brunstad created and runs the NPX Program. meet Mark here
Chris Skinner was the NPX Program Manager between 2016 – 2017. Meet Chris here
My NPX Journey
My NPX journey started back in 2014 when i decided to join Nutanix in a split role as a Consultant architect and Solutions & Performance engineer.
A few months ago i wrote a blog post about the announcement of the Nutanix Platform Expert certification (NPX) which can be found here.
For those of you following my blog and knows me are aware of that i have been focusing on one single hypervisor and solutions related to that software vendor the past 10 years. However, since last year i have been focusing on two additional hypervisors as well since the Nutanix solution actually supports the three major hypervisors available including Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and VMware ESXi. This has for sure been a great learning experience and it is actually required for NPX to know more than one hypervisor for being qualified for the NPX certification program.
Based on a project i did beginning of this year i submitted my NPX design end of may 2015 and was accepted for defence basically on my birthday, June 3:) This design and implementation was based on Nutanix, vSphere, vRealize Automation, Horizon View and vRealize Orchestrator.
Since NPX is a multiple hypervisor you need to select another hypervisor for live design and troubleshooting scenario and my selection was not difficult, i selected Nutanix KVM. The design presentation is 90 minutes followed by a 10 min break before troubleshooting for 30 minutes that was also followed by a 10 min break before the last live 60 design scenario session.
I can say that presenting a design infront of a bunch of very very very smart & knowledgable people, all VCDXs, asking you as many questions as possible for 90 minutes and then switch your mind to another hypervisor is not an easy task. Need a cold reboot to completely clean all caches but that was not an option:)
When i completed the last session i staggered out from the room and waited some time while my examiners scored my performance. Called back to the room by the NPX program manager i got an heart attack since the result was delivered like this:
- Examiner said “Sorry”
- My thoughts “Damn, but i’ll give it another try in September”
- Followed by 10 seconds of complete silence from all 4 examiners plus NPX program manager before….
- Examiner said “You pass”
This means i’m the fifth person achieving the NPX level and obviously i get the NPX005 number.
I must say i’m very proud of this achievement and would like to tank everyone i have been interacting with during the past year to achieve the knowledge required for NPX.
The bootstrap session in Miami includes several other people defending as well and i’ll let them all announce their result.
3 NPX related web sites:
- Official Nutanix NPX Web Page
- NPX Official Nutanix blog post about the NPX program here
- Read about the NPX program and submit your application here
- Find NPX on the Nutanix Next Community here
4 pings