Paul Bryant

I'm presently the Global Virtualization Architect at Dell Technologies leading the hybrid cloud and digital transformation initiative. I have 14+ years of technology experience starting as a engineer with 3-2-1 architectures and becoming a SME in the SDDC.

PowerCLI and Content Libraries: Automating Template, ISO, and OVF Management Across Sites

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Introduction Content libraries centralize VM templates, ISO images, OVFs, and scripts, allowing consistent deployments across vCenters and sites. Managing these manually can result in version drift and deployment delays. PowerCLI provides a way to automate content library workflows, ensuring that your libraries are always synchronized and deployment-ready. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Step … Read more

Disaster Recovery as Code: Version-Controlled DR Policies for Nutanix

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Introduction Modern IT landscapes demand agility, transparency, and resilience. Traditional disaster recovery (DR) is often static, hard to audit, and slow to adapt. Enter Disaster Recovery as Code—a new paradigm where DR policies are codified, version-controlled, and delivered through repeatable automation. Leveraging Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) principles, Nutanix admins, architects, and DevOps teams can bring cloud-native agility … Read more

Dynamic VM Network Assignment Using Ansible

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Introduction Virtual machine networking in Nutanix AHV is defined by subnet assignments, bridges (e.g., br0), and VLAN tags. Ansible lets you assign VM NICs dynamically during or after deployment, ensuring proper segmentation for dev, test, and prod workloads. This guide provides a flexible playbook for assigning networks to Nutanix VMs. My Personal Repository on GitHub … Read more

Nutanix CLI and Bash Scripting Best Practices

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Introduction Bash and Nutanix CLI (ncli, acli) scripting is a powerful combo, but power demands responsibility. From production-level safety to logging and parameter handling, this post outlines essential best practices to help you create clean, robust, and maintainable automation scripts for Nutanix environments. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub Diagram: Safe Scripting … Read more

Nutanix Daily Operations Dashboard via Bash

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Introduction Admins often need a quick overview of their Nutanix cluster each morning. Instead of logging into Prism, a Bash dashboard script can collect essential data, health, VM counts, storage use, and alerts, and consolidate it into a timestamped report. This article walks you through building a reliable CLI-driven Nutanix daily report. My Personal Repository … Read more

Nutanix Certificate Monitoring & Renewal via CLI

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Introduction Expired SSL certificates in a Nutanix cluster can block Prism logins, alerting integrations, and API functionality. This article walks you through a Bash-based monitoring script to track certificate expiry and generate alerts before disruptions occur. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub Diagram: SSL Monitoring Flow What It Checks Bash Script: nutanix_cert_check.sh … Read more

Multi-vCenter Management with PowerCLI: Federated Queries and Cross-Site Automation

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Introduction Large enterprises often operate multiple vCenters across geographies or business units. Without a federated interface, managing them can be cumbersome. PowerCLI provides a way to automate configuration, audit, and reporting tasks across all vCenters simultaneously by chaining or parallelizing sessions. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Step 1: Define Multiple vCenter Targets Create … Read more

Air-Gapped DR: Securing Nutanix Replication Against Sophisticated Threats

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Table of Contents 1. Introduction: Why Air-Gapped DR for Nutanix? Modern cyber threats—including ransomware and nation-state actors—have exposed the vulnerability of traditional DR. Air-gapped or semi-air-gapped disaster recovery for Nutanix platforms provides an isolated safety net, breaking the attack chain and ensuring regulatory compliance for the most sensitive workloads. Key Takeaways: 2. Air-Gap Concepts: Definitions … Read more

Automating Snapshot Lifecycle for Nutanix with Ansible

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Introduction Snapshots are critical for backup and recovery, but they must be managed correctly to avoid sprawl. With Ansible, you can automate the full snapshot lifecycle on Nutanix AHV, creating, listing, and deleting snapshots through playbooks. This article shows you how to set up reusable snapshot tasks and schedule them reliably. My Personal Repository on … Read more

Nutanix Credentials Rotation Script with Bash

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Introduction Credential rotation is a fundamental part of security hygiene. For Nutanix environments that rely on ncli, automating service account password updates ensures compliance, reduces risk, and eliminates outages due to expired credentials. This guide walks through scripting secure rotation using Bash. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub Diagram: Credential Rotation Flow … Read more

Nutanix Cluster Expansion with CLI and Bash

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Introduction As workloads grow, Nutanix clusters must scale to meet demand. While Prism simplifies node addition, using ncli and Bash provides automation for site builds, disaster recovery scenarios, and DevOps pipelines. This guide outlines how to script and repeatably expand your Nutanix cluster using CLI tools. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub … Read more

Nutanix User and Role Management via CLI

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Introduction Role-based access control (RBAC) is critical in enterprise datacenter security. Nutanix Prism allows fine-grained user and group role mapping, and this can be fully automated using ncli. In this guide, we create, update, and delete Prism users and assign them appropriate roles using Bash scripts. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub … Read more

Compliance Audits Using PowerCLI: NIST, CIS, and Custom Security Benchmark Validation

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Introduction Maintaining compliance with frameworks like NIST 800-53, CIS Benchmarks, and internal security baselines is a critical responsibility. Manual validation introduces errors and slows down audits. PowerCLI allows you to automate configuration checks and generate exportable reports for compliance validation. In this article, you will: Step 1: Audit Host Services Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostService | Select … Read more

Nutanix Metro: Advanced Deployment, Configuration, and Best Practices for Production Environments

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Table of Contents 1. Introduction to Nutanix Metro Nutanix Metro, also called Nutanix Metro Availability, is a business continuity and disaster recovery solution built into the Nutanix platform. It provides synchronous data replication between two geographically separated Nutanix clusters, ensuring zero data loss and rapid application failover in the event of site outages. Metro is … Read more

Deploying Nutanix AHV VMs with Ansible

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Introduction Once your Ansible control node is configured, deploying a virtual machine on Nutanix AHV is just a few lines of YAML away. This article walks through an enterprise-ready playbook to launch AHV VMs using the Nutanix Ansible collection. We’ll cover options for CPU, memory, networks, and storage, and how to make the playbook reusable. … Read more

Automating Nutanix with Ansible: Foundations, Playbooks, and Best Practices

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Introduction Nutanix and Ansible are a natural fit for enterprise automation. While Nutanix provides powerful APIs and CLI tools, Ansible brings repeatable, version-controlled orchestration to the datacenter. This guide helps you install, authenticate, and run your first playbook using the official Nutanix Ansible collection. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub Step 1: … Read more

Nutanix Emergency VM Rescue Bash Toolkit

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Introduction Every environment faces moments of failure. Whether from guest corruption, misconfigurations, or broken updates, virtual machines sometimes need urgent rescue. This guide offers a pre-built Bash-based emergency toolkit using acli to snapshot VMs, reassign NICs, attach recovery ISOs, and power cycle problematic VMs. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub Diagram: Rescue … Read more

Nutanix Storage Container Management via ncli

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Introduction Storage containers are a foundational part of Nutanix architecture, defining policy boundaries for deduplication, compression, and performance tiers. With ncli, you can automate the creation, resizing, and deletion of containers to match lifecycle events, DR plans, or capacity upgrades. This guide shows how to script it all with Bash. My Personal Repository on GitHub … Read more

Deploying AHV Networks using Bash and acli

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Introduction Proper network segmentation is essential for organizing workloads and securing traffic in Nutanix AHV. With acli and Bash, you can define and deploy VLAN-backed networks at scale, ensuring consistency across environments. This guide automates the creation of virtual networks using a repeatable, script-driven approach. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub Diagram: … Read more

Nutanix VM Snapshot Management with CLI and Bash

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Introduction Snapshots are a key feature in any backup or testing workflow. Managing them at scale, however, requires automation. With Bash and acli, you can script snapshot creation, enforce retention policies, and delete old snapshots, ideal for daily backup routines or testing environments. My Personal Repository on GitHub Nutanix Repository on GitHub Diagram: Snapshot Management … Read more