Topics started by Kiran Surya

7 Topics

Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
Kiran SuryaNutanix Employee
posted in Files Storage

Quick and handy command reference for checking Nutanix Files

Nutanix Files, formerly known as AFS, is the company’s File Server and File Sharing solution on a Nutanix cluster.  By provisioning Nutanix Files within the Nutanix cluster, we have essentially eliminated the need to deploy a dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution for Windows/SMB file services.  Nutanix Files operates as a clustered, distributed File server driven by a set of File server VMs commonly referred to as FSVMs.   A customer or user new to Nutanix Files and its orchestration could feel intimidated by the plethora of possibilities and intricacies in managing the Nutanix Files infrastructure.  Let me try to help you make a start by providing you some commands to get a jumpstart in handling this product.  I will use the following conventions to differentiate between running a command at the CVM layer as against running the command inside a FSVM:nutanix@CVM:$ nutanix@FSVM:$ Here we go:  List the FSVMs and their IP addresses --- a few alternatives as well:nutanix@CVM:$

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2 years ago
Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
Kiran SuryaNutanix Employee
posted in How It works

Disk space taken up by every VM, and all VMs in total, in the Nutanix AHV cluster

Nutanix customers using AHV as their Hypervisor often run into disk space issues on their cluster and need to evaluate how much disk space is being consumed by each entity.  And one of the more important factors that needs to be considered is how much space is being taken up by each VM.  There needs to be an easy way of running one single command and get a listing of the space consumed by each VM, so that at one glance you can figure out which are the VMs that can be removed from the cluster right away in order to get some space reclamation.  As a bonus I have also included the command string that will add up all these numbers and give you the grand total of how much disk space has been consumed by all these VMs put together.I have come up with the following string manipulation to be able to get those numbers:nutanix@CVM:$ for Q in `acli vm.list | awk '{print $1}'`;do echo -n "$Q "; acli vm.get "$Q" | grep vmdisk_size | awk '{sum+=$2} END {print sum}' | awk '{ byte =$1 /1024/1024/10

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Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
3 years ago
Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
Kiran SuryaNutanix Employee
posted in How It works

Memory allocation and distribution on the AHV Hypervisor

Memory allocation and distribution on the AHV Hypervisor is always a tricky equation and not very easy or straight forward to calculate.  I decided to dig deep into this aspect, and the findings were quite intricate.I ran the following command from the Acropolis Master and gathered information for Host 10.21.46.243:$ links http:0:2030 Let us refer to the data obtained for this Host on this listing:Host IP: 10.21.46.243CPUs: 88CPUs used: 37.58CPU free: 50.42Memory: 515822 MB say 512 GBMemory used: 261104 MB say 261 GBMemory Reserved: 0 MBMemory free: 254718 MB say 255 GBPlease note that the output we obtain by running # cat /proc/meminfo on the Host hypervisor will show small numbers for MemFree and MemAvailable fields (less than 0.2%of the Total RAM on the Host): [root@NTNX-16SM76360147-A ~]# cat /proc/meminfo | head -3MemTotal:       528210648 kBMemFree:         1891960 kBMemAvailable:    2619508 kB[root@NTNX-16SM76360147-A ~]#This is because Memory allocations are made in advance by

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Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
3 years ago
Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
Kiran SuryaNutanix Employee
posted in How It works

Improving database performance by spreading VMDKs across SCSI Controllers

Nutanix infrastructure customers often suffer performance issues on their database, and call in to Nutanix Technical Support to help them resolve them.  One aspect I have observed with database customers, and which impacts their performance, is the placement of the VMDKs on SCSI Controllers.  Assuming that there are four VMDKs serving the database VM, they might have configured the four VMDKs as follows.  This is an extract from the ESXi Host which the VM is running on:[root@esxasrk63u35:/vmfs/volumes/9f254e88-e3c751d/pqrsd00][root@esxasrk63u35:/vmfs/volumes/9f254e88-e3c751d/pqrsd00] cat pqrsd00.vmx | grep vmdk -A3scsi0:0.fileName = "pqrsd00.vmdk"sched.scsi0:0.shares = "normal"sched.scsi0:0.throughputCap = "off"scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"--scsi0:1.fileName = "pqrsd00_1.vmdk"sched.scsi0:1.shares = "normal"sched.scsi0:1.throughputCap = "off"scsi0:1.present = "TRUE"--scsi0:2.fileName = "pqrsd00_2.vmdk"sched.scsi0:2.shares = "normal"sched.scsi0:2.throughputCap = "off"scsi0:2.present = "TRUE"-

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Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
3 years ago
Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
Kiran SuryaNutanix Employee
posted in How It works

Intricate NTP commands rarely used but very handy

NTP i.e. Network Time Protocol is a critical component of the Nutanix cluster and is crucial in keeping up hardware, processes, services and applications running with time synchronization across one another.  Inconsistencies in time synchronization could lead to undesirable consequences, not to mention the potential disastrous impact it could have on databases and real time applications through operational failures.  The downside of a poor NTP scenario could be data loss, hard to detect security breaches, even leading to legal liabilities, and loss of credibility.  NTP alerts are generated when you run the NCC Health checks, and are typically shown as below:Detailed information for check_ntp:Node 172.24.0.143:FAIL: The hypervisor is not synchronizing with any NTP server. This might occur if none of the configured NTP servers are available or you are currently experiencing network instability determined by the high offset/high jitter.Node 172.24.0.144:FAIL: NTP leader is not synchronizi

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Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
3 years ago
Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
Kiran SuryaNutanix Employee
posted in How It works

SATADOM upgrade hit by APD/VMCP issue

While doing LifeCycle Manager (LCM) upgrades, Nutanix infrastructure customers could encounter failures on the SATADOM upgrade on a ESXi Host, with the message:"Operation failed. Reason: Lcm prechecks detected 2 issues that would cause upgrade failures.Check 'test_hypervisor_config' failed with 'Failure reason: APD/VMCP feature is enabled on cluster, Please disable, Please refer KB 6470'Check 'test_min_phoenix_version' failed with 'Failure reason: APD/VMCP feature is enabled on cluster, Please disable, Please refer KB 6470' You can try disabling the APD using the following command on the Host:# esxcfg-advcfg -s 0 /Misc/APDHandlingEnable From experience I can tell you that this does not always resolve the issue.  It may be necessary, on certain occasions, to access the VMware vCenter, through possibly the vSphere Web Client, and do the following:Access the Hosts pageClick on the Host in questionClick on ManageGo to Advanced System SettingsSearch for “APD”Modify Misc.APDHandlingEnable an

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Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
3 years ago
Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
Kiran SuryaNutanix Employee
posted in How It works

Print the size of a VM in Bytes, KiloBytes, MegaBytes and GigaBytes

Nutanix customers using AHV as their Hypervisor often need to evaluate resources being used/consumed on their infrastructure.  One of those factors involved is in calculating how much space has been consumed by one or more Virtual Machines.  It is possible to get granular in this scenario and be able to calculate the amount of space taken up by a VM.  Depending on their environment, it should be possible or feasible for one to print out the space usage in terms of Bytes, KiloBytes, MegaBytes or GigaBytes.I have developed the following string manipulation to be able to get those numbers.  Here is a sample from one of the checks I performed:nutanix@NTNX-20FM6L56789-A-CVM:172.31.1.11:~$nutanix@NTNX-20FM6L56789-A-CVM:172.31.1.11:~$ acli vm.list | grep 120-Windows-Invent120-Windows-Invent 99021293-4ea5-440a-a894-846ed07de132nutanix@NTNX-20FM6L56789-A-CVM:172.31.1.11:~$nutanix@NTNX-20FM6L56789-A-CVM:172.31.1.11:~$ acli vm.get 120-Windows-Invent | grep vmdisk_size | awk '

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Kiran Surya
Nutanix Employee
3 years ago

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