AHV Virtualization

My team and I was helping a customer troubleshoot a performance problem with their Oracle 11g R2 (11.2.0.4) database today and we noticed that it was taking between 90 seconds and 120 seconds to complete a checkpoint. Anyone who knows anything about Oracle knows that this is an eternity for a database to wait while switching online redo log files and continuing to process transactions. This was causing a lot of performance dissatisfaction for the customer, which is understandable. But it didn’t take long to figure out what the problem was and fix it. Literally changing a single parameter in the database and restarting the instance turbo charged performance by over 10X. First lets cover off some of the symptoms of this problem and give you some background before I give you the parameter we used to address the performance issue. Also note that this had nothing to do with the underlying infrastructure, it was purely a database level setting. This problem wouldn’t happen in O

I have 3 x 3000 series node each with 256GBs of RAM, and 1 cluster. - 7.2TB Total SSD Flash (2.4TBx3 nodes)- 12TB Usable HDD (before de-duplication/compression)-  2.6GHz/20 Cores, 6 Physical CPUs: 60 Total cores-  768GB Total memory We are running pure Acropolis. The monster VM workload is a Progress database that is 7TB in size and has 200GB RAM allocated to it. We are setting this up as a PoC to migrate off a standalone ESXi host with a Violin all flash array. Previously, the VM on VMware was only pushing 12,000 IOPs. What should we be doing to optimize the performance for this VM? Multiple virtual scsi adapters? Also, is there a way to see if the working set is exceeding the node cache capability?

Hi All , As you know that to build a SQL cluster on vmware vsphere 5.5 I need to create RDM disk for both cluster's nodes with physical compitilty , and this will eliminate the vsphere from running vmotion (need to shutdown the host to migrate )since it is not supported. My question is : does nutanix support create a SQL cluster ? and how they will replace the RDM (the physical LUN)? And for licensing :Does nutanix base license support building critical application clusters for free? Regards,

Hello - Is MSCS (clustering VMs across physical hosts) supported on Nutanix? What ESXi/NOS versions support MSCS? How would I then present the shared disks (quorum, etc...) to the VMs? Thanks.

I hope Nutanix has the updates about the functionallity with vSphere 6 !? - Any info about that!?

Hi, On a new install (nx6020) ; during a Storage vMotion, the ESXi CPU increases up to +80% of the total physical CPU ...The Storage vMotion is very long ... A vMotion is ok, no problem, very fast. Any idea ? Info : - Cluster version v4.1.2.1 - RAM CVMs : 32GB I think that there is not enough RAM on CVMs ?... 32GB its a best practices. thks guys ! Sig'

If we only have 2 VMs (1 CVM, another VM running heavy file uploading web application) per Nutanix KVM node, how can we fine tune / optimize storage bandwidth and IO for that web server?

I have running vms in a consistency group within an asynch DR Protection domain. The snapshots are replicating locally and to a remote sign fine. When I manually migrate the Protection Domain to the remote site the vms are coming online fine at the target site, but they are not automatically powering on? I have to right click on them and manually power them on. Is this normal or should the migrate feature power them on, assuming they were online at the original location? Regards, Erik

Also see this post: Accepted-hypervisor-ISOs-for-install-through-foundation Should help you if you are trying to use a recent ESXi 5.5 U2 update.

Next Community,Nutanix has developed a Reference Architecture for designing and deploying Avaya Aura on Nutanix. Aura is a complex Unified Communications and Customer Experience set of applications and a lot of work went into determining the right resources to size Aura on Nutanix. Please use this as a forum to ask any Nutanix and Avaya Aura questions you may have. You can find all of this material here in the Nutanix Aura Reference Architecture: http://go.nutanix.com/virtualizing-avaya-aura-reference-architecture.htmlI also wrote some blog posts about it here: http://bbbburns.com/blog/2015/02/nutanix-and-the-2015-avaya-technology-forum/

New Nutanix install - vSphere 5.5.0 While transfering a 200GB file on a Virtual Host from the C: Drive to the E: drive I'm not getting anything faster than 50mb/s and sometimes down to 25mb/s. Anyone else seeing this type of behavior? Or have a solution to resolve slow speeds?

Chris Brown walks you through setting up Hyper-V and getting you ready to deploy VMs on Nutanix. Let us know what you think.

Next Community, I wanted to share the Nutanix Best Practices Guide for deploying Microsoft Lync on Nutanix. Many thanks to  and Jason Sloan@Jason_D_Sloan for authoring this document. Best Practices Guide with example deployments here: http://go.nutanix.com/bpg-microsoft-lync.html You can also view Derek's personal blog on the subject: http://www.derekseaman.com/2015/01/sizing-microsoft-lync-server-2013-nutanix.html Please feel free to use this community space to ask questions about virtualizing Microsoft Lync on Nutanix.

Its well known that Nutanix is Hypervisor agnostic supporting ESXi, Hyper-V and KVM, but what most people either don’t know, or haven’t considered, is the fact the Nutanix Operating System (NOS) version is not dependant on the hypervisor version. What does this mean? You can run the latest and greatest NOS 4.1.x releases on ESXi 5.0 , ESXi 6.0 or anything in between. In fact, you could run older versions of NOS such as 3.x with vSphere 6.0 as well (although I see no reason you would do this.) Read more here This is a repost from the blog CloudXC by Josh Odgers

I saw a tweet today (shown below) that reminded me of 27th August, 2012. This was the day that VMware published this article, which demonstrates how VMware vSphere (5.1 at that point) could achieve 1 million IOPS in a single VM. Things have undoubtedly gotten better in vSphere 5.5, and even more so with vSphere 6.0, which was recently released. Even though the test setup at the time (3 years ago) required two dedicated all flash arrays for this one VM, it demonstrated clearly that the hypervisor is not a bottleneck to storage. It also clearly demonstrated that even using VMFS and going through multiple layers to the storage and back, isn’t a bottleneck to high performance. vSphere itself adds so little overhead that it’s a great platform for running any workload. This is important, because 3 years on from this test we have all sorts of things running on top of vSphere in the ever increasing capabilities of the platform. Even high performance storage controllers and not ju

If you're interested in running Oracle on the Nutanix platform then you should check out my latest blog article titled Oracle Licensing and Support on Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform - http://longwhiteclouds.com/2014/05/11/oracle-licensing-and-support-on-nutanix-virtual-computing-platform/. We are in the process of publishing a Tech Note on Oracle for Nutanix and also a Best Practice Guide. These should be available on our web site in the next few weeks.

Just wondering if anyone has tried the NOS upgrade interface and had good success or issues. I am looking to do it this weekend, but I don't see any documentation on it. Thanks!

Hello, Is there an official stance on upgrading to/using ESXi 5.5U2 as install media? I see that U1 is specified explicitly on the supported Hypervisor list, is there a target date for U2 certification?

In addition to the video I recorded regarding SQL Server Provisioning with VAAI I've written an article tonight including the scripts I used to clone the VM's, tune the network, and the RunOnce script that ties it all together. I hope this is helpful. http://longwhiteclouds.com/2015/01/27/nutanix-sql-server-db-vaai-clone-performance/

I'e just published a video demonstrating provisioning multiple SQL VM's in just minutes using VAAI Clones on the Nutanix platform. The SQL DB VM's are 435GB in size, but due to VAAI the new clones don't use any additional stroage capacity initially.Nutanix Provisioning SQL Server VM's with VAAI Clones  

We were one of the first guinea pigs to host Exchange 2010 on Nutanix. our cluster consists of a 3451 and a 6220. We have 1 exchange server tied to each of the 3451 nodes, 4 in total. Each server is configured with 4 2 TB databases. 2 active, 2 passive. We noticed recently as we migrated a majority of our users to the new environment that we are getting alarms that we are hitting a threshold of disk space per host. Not sure what we're missing here.

Hi, I have a curios doubt. I read about cloud connect and summarized that it is mainly for backing up the data! And when I connect to a public cloud AWS, a CVM will automatically be created on that platform right! So can I seamlessly offload some of the production workload onto the cloud as well or is it exclusively for backup and restore ? Best, Narayan

Hey there We have a Windows Azure Pack environment deployed on a Nutanix Hyper-V based infrastructure. The infrastructure is build with high availability in mind: Redundant Virtual Machine Manager configuration Redundant SQL Server configuration (using SQL Server AlwaysOn)But we are currently facing an issue setting up a redundant VMM Library Share. Microsoft does not allow using a redundant VMM installation as the Library Server. Instead they recommend to setup a Scale-Out File Server infrastructure as the Library Server and then add your Library Share to it. However, to my current understanding, it is not possible to setup a Cluster Shared Volume on Nutanix Hyper-V - which is a requirement for a Scale-Out File Server. What are the design recommendations from Nutanix in this matter?

Dear, Does any one know when deploying oracle rac in Nutanix Box whether it is following vmware best practice or any special deployment? Regards, Kelvin

Storage DRS is a feature of vSphere 5.0 onwards which aims to reduce the complexity of managing storage capacity and performance for virtual machines running on traditional shared storage. SDRS helps simplify management of Datastores (LUNs / NFS Mounts) by analyzing the available datastores capacity and placing new virtual machines in datastores with the required available capacity. This is called "Initial Placement". SDRS also allows administrators to create rules ("Affinity" & "Anti-Affinity") to ensure specific what VMs should be kept together or apart for performance / capacity reasons and finally, monitor I/O metrics and relocate VMs to different datastores where contention or capacity constraints exist. As it is recommended to have one Large NFS Datastore in a Nutanix environment, the issue of initial placement (which SDRS helps resolve) is natively eliminated as all Virtual machines, regardless of performance or capacity requirements can and sh