I’m really pleased to announce that Nutanix has released a public sizer tool. This tool will help you get an understanding of the number of Nutanix nodes including their specification you need to satisfy the compute (CPU & RAM) and storage requirements for your workload. Use this link to sign up for free access.
Fill in your details, hit submit and wait a few seconds for a confirmation email.

Included in the confirmation email you’ll have a link to the sizer tool and this is what the first screen looks like when accessing the tool. Since it is the first time you access the tool you need to create a new design scenarion so mark the checkbox “Create New Design Scenario” and also give it a name in the text box “New Design Scenarion Name”.

You can create three Design Scenarios in the Nutanix Sizer free version.
Next time you access the sizer you can either continue working with an existing Design Scenario or create a new one.
There are two Workload Types included in the sizer:

• VDI
• Server Virtualization

When you have select the Workload Type and set a Workload Name you’ll have three Server Profile Types with pre-defined VM definitions to select from:

• Small
  
• Medium
  
• Large
  

The field you can edit is the Number of VMs and the maximum value is 25 VMs per Workload.

For the purpose of this blog i have created three workloads, 1 small, 1 medium and 1 large including 25 VMs each and this is the suggested Nutanix configuration.

• Nodes = 3 NX-3050 with 256 GB RAM each. Use this link for more information about the Nutanix Node specifications
• Cluster = 1
• Rack Space = 2U

The other Workload Type is VDI.

For the VDI Workload Type we got three configuration options you can change:

• User Type
  • Task Worker
  • Knowledge Worker
  • Power User
    
• Provision Type
  • View Linked Clones
  • View Full Closes
  • XenDesktop MCS
  • XenDesktop PVS
  • XenDesktop Full Clones
• Number of Users which has a maximum value of 1 000 per Workload specification.

As with all (almost at least) free tools, they come with some limitations and there is another version of the tool available for Nutanix Partners. This version includes additional Workload Types and configuration options such as:

• Workload options:
  • Exchange
  • SQL
• VDI Workload:
  • The fixed configuration options can be changed.
• Server Workload:
  • The fixed configuration options can be changed
  • vCPU per Core can be defined
• For all Workload Types you can specify the following options:
  • Target Cluster
  • Availability Domain
  • N-Plus
  • Container Replication Factor
  • Compression
  • Container Dedupe
  • Inline Dedupe

When the configuration report is finished you will be able to edit the suggested configuration meaning you can change Nutanix Node and the amount of RAM per Nutanix Node. In addition you can export the configuration and the sizer will also give you utilization information for your suggested configuration for the following components:

• CPU
• RAM
• SSD
• HDD

Final word

As you can see the Nutanix sizer is very easy to use and the configuration suggestion(s) you get will be valuable while discussing the next steps in your hyper-converged journey with Nutanix or with your Nutanix partner.

If you haven’t already, sign up here and explore the world of web scale.