From March 23rd to 25th, I attended the Nutanix Consulting Specialist (NCS) Bootcamp. This 3-day class combined the NCS Consultant and NCS Architect course content and covered the skills necessary to deliver professional services engagements based on Nutanix Services toolkits.
I already attended a similar NCS Bootcamp back in 2018 hosted in the (old) Nutanix office in Hoofddorp (The Netherlands). After having successfully completing that class, I was awarded the legacy NCS title. As I am eager to acquire the new NCS-C and NCS-A titles, I jumped to the opportunity to attend this newly formatted NCS Bootcamp in 2020.
Due to the COVID-19 circumstances, the NCS Bootcamp was changed from an in-class to an online format. I was very pleased with this changed approach from Nutanix instead of cancelling the bootcamp altogether.
The NCS Bootcamp Instructor was Chris Lawrence who is a Solutions Architect at Virtigon based in the United Kingdom.
Day 1: Delivering Nutanix Cluster Deployment Service
On the first day of the NCS Bootcamp Chris covered key topics, which are key in starting any new Nutanix cluster deployment: Service Delivery Kits, Hardware Basics & Foundation. It was quite funny to see how Chris performed an actual Foundation process using a NX block “deployed” on his kitchen table!
Day 2: Delivering Data Protection Service
On March 24th we continued the bootcamp covering Nutanix cluster configuration implementations using Best Practices, deploying Prism Central and setting up Data Protection Domains. For the last two topics, we had access to an online Lab environment allowing us to play around creating Remote Sites and Data Protection Domains (a-sync replications).
Day 3: Delivering Workload Migration and Fitcheck Service
The last day on March 25th, was all about the last steps on a Nutanix cluster deployment namely the migration of virtual machines from a legacy environment to Nutanix and performing health checks on an operational Nutanix cluster. There are several ways to migrate VM’s to Nutanix but the most-used tool is Move. Move can migrate from source AWS, ESXi and Hyper-V environments to AHV and ESXi on Nutanix.
My Final Thoughts
I highly recommend the Nutanix Consulting Specialist Bootcamp to any Nutanix consultant or field engineer. Attending this Bootcamp enables you to develop or further increase your skills of delivering Nutanix Enterprise Cloud deployment services for customers. It offers you all the tools needed to be successful at your job. The added benefit of this bootcamp is that you get the chance to interact with your peers and share field experiences. It properly prepares you to take on the NCS-C exam. However, in case you want to pass for the NCS-A exam, following only this bootcamp will not be enough. Ample field experience using the Nutanix Services Toolkits are very much needed to obtain that highly desired NCS-A title.
Thank you, Chris Lawrence!
PS. Special thanks to Martijn Bosschaart for giving all of us a Google Home Mini as a thank you present for attending this online format bootcamp!
One Reply to “Attending the Nutanix Consulting Specialist (NCS) Bootcamp”