5 Essential Tips for Maximizing Your Experience at Nutanix .NEXT for Bloggers
Hi Alona - the answer to your question is no. Larger enterprises that leverage SunGard, Iron Mountain, and or IBM Sterling forest DR facilities lease the hardware, and this hardware is often only available during DR testing and DR events, its a way to lower contract costs and is the primary method used at these sites. What is live at the DR sites mentioned since tape has been dying slowly are slices of leased storage arrays \ appliances that receive replicated data from the primary customer sites, typically backup data from appliances like the EMC data domain. In order to use Nutanix as a replication target you would need to license and build out the destination cluster, this constitutes a live site. So for example, in our case we have an enterprise backup solution that backs up both our VMware and Nutanix clusters, sends those backup to a target appliance that then replicates the backups to the DR site, servers aren’t needed for this, they are only needed to bring the workloads t
Thanks David - I appreciate your responses. In closing, HCI is great when rapid expansion is called for, you get to expand compute and storage simultaneously without concern of a storage front end. But this is hardly the best of the benefits HCI brings to the table in my opinion. I would argue its the pre-canned automation, consolidation into a single stack, with its operational efficiencies that make it easier to manage. I will point out a few things from our own infrastructure which is a hybrid mix of HCI and traditional w centralized array: 1. many organizations don’t need to expand and are in fact reducing their footprint. HCI doesn’t provide the flexibility to reduce a footprint without a bit of challenge, if you have moved a large # of workloads to the cloud and no longer require the compute power you can’t just pull a couple of nodes away without addressing the reduction is storage that would accompany a compute reduction. #2, we run over 50 hypervisor nodes with ab
Hi David - thanks for your replies. As for separating storage from VM traffic, well, this means 2 more 10GB ports per node (Now you need 4 upstream ports for each host), and if you do the math on the cost of switching and datacenter hardware required for scaling HCI you soon see that this model falls apart from a cost perspective. You might avoid an array in this stack but the lack of network consolidation, along with a need to license for each node, catches up fast as you expand.
Thanks David - this makes sense, why bring it down completely when it can still run in critical mode… you just have to get the work done in a timely manner just in case. :) So a good architecture that leverages storage heavy nodes would include a JBOD that allows for more than 1 server to connect and divi up the disk appropriately between the 2 storage heavy nodes..
Hi @Alona I do actually mean storage heavy, not storage only, but now that you bring this option up…. With Nutanix VMs are written 2x within the cluster for HA, so correct me If I’m wrong but the purpose of storage node is to house more of the secondary copies is it not? So what I’m looking for is an understanding of how to bring down the storage heavy node, or the storage only node, for maintenance, when there isn’t enough local disk capacity within the cluster to house the secondary copies stored on the storage node. For storage only nodes you state that you wouldn’t want just a single instance, so that makes sense to a degree, especially if you have some VMs that has a very large disk requirement that would eat up all the storage on a single node, after all the cluster requires 2 copies of these VMs. What I’m looking for is the “how does this work” .. I want to understand whether during a maintenance event all the VMs continue to have HA capability within the cluster, and I
I read that understanding Nutanix is supposed to be easy, per marketing, but I’m having trouble locating a resource that spells out what Nutanix services are actually dependent on Prism Central. Would you mind detailing this? Maybe there aren’t any and having Prism Central Pro is just a nice to have solution. However, I’m not concerned with nice to have, but rather the “must have prism pro to do x” … I’m not talking about anything already included in Prism Element or Starter, which I believe are the same from what i read except that prism central starter does give a single pane of glass for management of multiple clusters. Example, if all I’m concerned with is replication, do I actually need Prism Central Pro for this or can I replicate between clusters without it. The Nutanix licensing feature matrix does show you what you can do with the different tiers, but it doesn’t state whether or not you need Prism Pro to do it. (Maybe I’m not finding the right resource).. This is
What about the rest of the settings? And this post is from a VMware guru… not good…. who QAs this guy?
After an evaluation of performance counters I’m chalking this up to a false alert created by our monitoring system. It happens.. and its always a pain in the a** when it does because it creates wasted work cycles. Thanks to those who provided some assistance in looking into this.
Hi Alona - what would I do here, remove the alert or change the threshold from 98% to 100%? I think the point here is that the alert was triggered indicating a 98% disk IO for the CVM, in a cluster that is for the most part not highly consolidated, although that doesn’t mean much because it only takes a couple of heavy hitters to be disruptive in a shared infrastructure. I think what is more pertinent here is guidance from Nutanix that either A) high IO from the CVS is normal and not to worry about, or B) this is an anomaly that requires investigation into operations within the cluster. This Nutanix Zenpack, per Zenoss documentation, was “supposedly” developed in conjunction with Nutanix Engineering. So on one hand we have an alert being triggered by this integration and on the other its not triggered in Nutanix prism. Perhaps this disconnect is nothing more than a false alert? Very possible.. If I had a dollar for every false alert from a monitoring system over the years I
Hi Alona - yes we are using a 3rd party monitoring system with a specific integration with Nutanix, the company is Zenoss and the integration is done with the Nutanix Zenpack. There isn’t an alert in prism showing this. I have no idea to what extent Zenoss worked with Nutanix to produce this “Zenpack” or how they are arriving at conclusion that the CVM exceeded 98% disk IO… I could understand it better if it was based on throughput since disk IO itself is highly variable.
In my case the issue was about the white-listing of IP addresses.
Thanks for paying attention to this. My comments:“vCenter remote console: 443, 902, 903 from both the user host and vCenter”What is this being listed at all? What does accessing a vCenter remote console for a VM, which can also be opened on a vSphere host without vCenter, have anything to do with accessing Nutanix and securing Nutanix CVMs behind a firewall? Next, an explanation of what the ports are for, and traffic flow details, which in some cases you have loosely defined. My advise: Try a table format, and have all Nutanix products in the list in an organized fashion, this way there is a single resource for all ports needed for all Nutanix services. Thanks
OK, forget I even posted this. in the NCC output there is actually a link to the KB that describes this reboot check... it fails if you have rebooted the CVMs within the last 60 minutes.. the only word to describe this is bizarre..
Note, I am going to leave this post unanswered until I see good documentation pertaining to all ports in use by Nutanix CVMs which includes both incoming and outgoing details. No offense to Nutanix engineering but I'm about sick and tired of piece-meal documentation that is scattered about from vendors that are getting wealthy on the sale of products that leave engineers and architects in a constant state of searching around for the required details they seek, often to come up short.
Hi Richard - I have seen the KB you presented already, it states the following: "Use these firewall requirements to configure rules in your external firewall to allow Nutanix Remote Support, Pulse, SMTP, 1-click upgrades, and LCM updates." I am looking for the documentation that shows the complete listing of all ports in use by the product and not a subset based on specific services.
Thanks Jason - much appreciated. I have worked with VMware FC storage for over 25 years, brand new to nutanix and WOW I feel like I have to learn all over again.. fun fun.. sadly the one thing I find that remains true after all these years is that documentation rarely presents us all the architectural answers to our questions and is still focused on basic configuration in most cases, so I appreciate the assistance with the understanding of the greater architecture. I will have more questions over the next few weeks so I hope I don't annoy you guys too much :)
OK, This is very helpful, it appears as though I have a boat load of options: [list=1] [*]Although I have the CVM cluster locked down behind a firewall, I can always open it for communication to our proxy server, which is then allowed outbound only [*]Instead of HTTP proxy from the cluster, I can use PC for Pulse, and can use it in the following ways: [/list] [list=1] [*]PC can use pulse via NAT to reach Nutanix [*]PC can use HTTP proxy to reach Nutanix [*]PC can use SMTP [/list] Please confirm I have this correct. I am wondering how SMTP would work since I don't see any specific configuration option in Pulse to use SMTP, but then again there isn't an option to select HTTP proxy either. But FYI I did define a HTTP proxy and I can see in the UI that Pulse is connected successfully. I am going to change this to PC though, I prefer to use PC for all outbound communications rather than the cluster itself, but have questions as to whether it is really more secure and what operations
Damn I accidentally hit best answer on my reply, sorry Shridar. This portal doesn't offer me a way to fix it. I sent a note to the moderator about it so they can fix it.
Thanks Shridar - in the link it states that it will re-trigger if scanned again, so I guess the thing to do if one is genuinely unsure if an issue was properly resolved is run a new NCC check.
I resolved this issue by upgrading to the newer version per a recent advisory. I am now at 5.10.6. I don't assume that there was a bug for which the new version contained a resolution, the release notes don't indicate any issue, so what I believe is that we had some other problems in AOS that was simply put back to normal after the upgrade.
Hi bbeavis - that for this, I was wondering about this but the reality is the Zenoss Zenpack for Nutanix is not polling the devices, it is connecting to the APIs, which is why the error is popping up about not being authorized for the APIs. One thing strikes me, the very first bit of instructions for connecting Zenoss to Nutanix is "you must expose the v1 and v2 APIs" .. I don't see anything in Nutanix documentation that points to any configurations that would need to be made to "expose the APIs" And I have tried both local account I created and the nutanix account, but both accounts bring the same error back. I am now beginning to believe this is some other communication error that is being mis-interpreted. However, there is no firewall blocking the traffic between the devices. We were able to make a sucessful connection to Prism Central but we aren't ready to go live with it yet so we are first connecting to Prism E. Also, connecting to the cluster IP provides redunda
Thanks, I'm not trying to code anything, I'm trying to connect an out of the box 3rd party tool developed for monitoring Nutanix infrastructure in partnership with Nutanix.. something as simply as entering the username and pw is failing, and the error message would have one believe this is a rights issue, I tried both the new local account I created as well as the nutanix account, neither account would allow me to connect to prism. The documentation for the Nutanix Zenpack for Zenoss simply states enter the username, pw and IP to connect.. and also something about exposing v1 and v2 APis... so far my experiences with this product are less than desirable and I'm trying to remain positive..
No replies needed here, The answer is simple. The Dell payload doesn't include the VMware Ethernet driver although it is included in the Dell VMware custom image, you just need to keep it in sync using VMware Update Manager or ESXCLI so that your firmware and driver are at the recommended combination per the VMware HCL IO devices.
I have the same problem, only there isn't a firewall blocking communications and the message I'm receiving after the process errors out is as follows: Error: Failed to process server response. Possible reason includes version mismatch between NCLI and Prism Gateway server. What is the Prism Gateway server? I am unfamiliar with this. Please advise.
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