There’s no doubt that the likes of Nutanix, and SimpliVity are the standard bearers for a whole raft of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) products which are changing the way that we can think about our infrastructure these days. There’s definitely use cases out there. Maybe you’re finally having your year of VDI, your FC fabric switches might be getting full, perhaps a new requirement needs separate storage or maybe, like me, you’re just HCI curious. If that’s the case, the NPP cert from Nutanix might be just the thing for you.

It’s simple enough to get hold of the Nutanix CE (community edition) release today and there’s documentation readily available on how to install this, so if you are interested enough to do that, then why not take a training course, for free, and sit an online test, for free, to stack some letters after your name? I love the VMware Hands on Labs and I love the fact they are freely available, I love the VCA Certs from VMware, free training that absolutely anyone can take, but those exams are not free any more, unfortunately. Any company that wants to teach people things for free gets it, in my opinion. Every tech company should offer this combination of free training and free certification at a basic level in my opinion, so kudos to Nutanix for this approach.

NPP Course

To take the NPP course,you do need to register on the Nutanix NetExam site and you need a seperate Education portal ID, but that’s a simple email request. After that, you can get right in to the training itself. The course is modular and should take 6 or 7 hours to get through. This takes you from terminology and concepts, through the product range, on to installation and operation. It’s a combination of interactive interface stuff, demo videos and links to the Nutanix website for some additional written content. You need to log on to the Nutanix portal for this, but even then I found that I sometimes had access denied, which was not so good. I also had some occasions where I was not sure that I had clicked on everything in a particular screen, as a range of ways to present content were used. Those gripes aside, the content was presented in a logical fashion, with regular knowledge checks interspersed throughout to help you know when you’re ready to move on. I went through the course in a couple of evenings and then registered for the exam whilst it was all fresh in my mind. 

NPP Exam

The exam was the usual range of multiple choice question types that I’m sure everyone knows well, there’s no reason not to have a go at it if you’ve done the training (which isn’t a mandatory prerequisite by the way) since it’s free and you can do it from your home or office. There’s 50 questions and you have a couple of hours in which to get 40 right to pass. Most of the questions I saw were fair, mostly directly from the course content, only one question of my 50 was nowhere near the course content that I had seen and only one was a bit debatable (although were I a proper customer, I think I’d know the answer). 

So, I passed. Jolly good. Printed out my certificate, stuck the logo on this blog site, it seems I will receive a polo shirt at some point soon as well. Fair play. Clearly I’m not gonna get a job as an SE on the strength of this, although there’s other paid-for courses offered by Nutanix to their customers that you can undertake if that’s your aim, but for me, the NPP was a nice intro into the world of HCI and Nutanix. Recommended.