All Sales and Marketing-related cluster reservations are automatically registered with X-Ray as a Service (XRaaS - xray.corp.nutanix.com). There are many benefits to using XRaaS instead of deploying the traditional X-Ray VM:
There's no need to download and install an X-Ray VM.
You don't need to consider the possible impact of an X-Ray VM on the cluster you're testing, skewing performance results.
You don't need to reserve more than one cluster to perform X-Ray tests, as the source of the test lives elsewhere within the environment. You can follow X-Ray best practices with only one cluster!
Your recent X-Ray activity is automatically saved to be referenced later.
You can associate X-Ray testing with an Account and Opportunity and have it upload the PDF results directly to Salesforce.
There are Performance Reference benchmarks you can reference as a baseline.
And you can search and view thousands of tests run by others in the community, which could avoid the need for you to run X-Ray at all! Why do the same work someone else just did yesterday on the same hardware and AOS version?
Using XRaaS to demonstrate infrastructure performance, scalability, and resiliency can increase the potential to win the Opportunity. Everyone on a reservation can launch XRaaS and run reports against the reserved clusters. Each cluster in the HPOC is discoverable within XRaaS without the need to download and deploy an X-Ray VM.
To reach XRaaS, you can either click the icon beside the reservation share list, as shown in the image below, or navigate to xray.corp.nutanix.com.
Using XRaaS is simple; clusters on the reservation will automatically be discovered as targets to run tests against once they have successfully completed deployment. To see this, go to the Targets page as shown in the example image below.
Note: If your cluster does not appear as a Target after your cluster has finished deploying, you can manually register it as a Target by clicking the "Add Target" button on the Targets page.
It's helpful to link your results back to an Account and Opportunity in Salesforce, both to keep your dashboard results organized and to also upload the results PDF to Salesforce (optional).
Use Case Examples
Customers often want analytical proof that something performs the way it's promised, and XRaaS can quickly help you solidify a deal. From performance benchmarks to application performance to platform performance under failure conditions, XRaaS can be impactful to prove to customer prospects that we stand by the resiliency and performance claims of the Nutanix platform. Depending upon your customers' specific circumstances and concerns, XRaaS offers a variety of tests you can walk your customer through, including some of the following examples.
Data Protection
If your customer is interested in Data Protection and Backups, but is concerned that it may prevent or reduce resource performance for specific high-demand applications. Use the Data Protection section under the Tests tab to show the effects of data protection on application workload performance. Default reports include:
Clone Impact
Replication and Disaster Recovery
Snapshot Impact
Infrastructure and Application Performance
For customers who wish better to understand the performance capabilities of the Nutanix solutions, try working through the following tests with them:
HCI Benchmark
Peak Performance Microbenchmark
HammerDB Database Benchmarking
OLTP Simulator
Infrastructure Resiliency
If customers communicate concerns about our ability to recover from failure events or what their potential performance impact might be, there are several types of tests you can show them, including:
Drive Failure and Data Rebuild
Node Failures
Total Power Loss
Unplanned Site Failovers
Community Resources
The Community tab is also a great place to look for results from testing already performed. Use the filter to narrow down the types of analysis you're looking to display. Community results are a time-saver when you need to quickly show analysis for topics that take a lot of time to set up and run.