I recently went through training with Nutanix professional services for Calm. Nutanix’s answer/acquisition for blueprint-based deployments and automation. It went really well. My company has some specific use-cases for using something “like” Calm for Application/Service/VM provisioning. We have looked into other solutions like vRA, VMware’s flavor. I really like VMware’s products, however, it is a lot more expensive and honestly, a lot more complex to setup. That inst to say Calm is the most straight-forward, yet, but it is much easier.
I am the Dallas/Ft Worth Nutanix User Group(NUG) Champion, which is to say that my company and I host and run the user group for Dallas/Ft Worth. At our last event I demoed Calm. Here was the setup: I had a Blueprint deploy a Windows VM to ESXi, deploy a Jenkins(Linux) configuration(3x VMs) to AHV, and deploy a WordPress AMI to AWS. Then sent myself and the NUG Slack channel a message with the VM names, Public IPs and URLs for accessing the Jenkins build and the public facing WordPress site. All in one Blueprint. It was very cool. Went really well for a live demo.
All in all Calm has been a lot of fun. It is still quite new for Nutanix. I have suggested quite a few enhancements and reported several bugs. Nutanix has been awesome at responding to my suggestions though. Just yesterday I spoke to the Product Manager for Calm with Nutanix. We discussed all my suggestions and talked about the road map. It was great to be taken seriously.
HamsterLog 