5 Essential Tips for Maximizing Your Experience at Nutanix .NEXT for Bloggers
One of the mistakes I made recently was not understanding my daily snapshots, retention and expiration well enough when I created protection domain to keep local snapshots. First, I took a shortcut to creating daily snapshots by selecting Repeat Weekly with every day selected. The docs are a bit light on details so I assumed this would be treated like a daily snapshot. This can casue a problem with many snapshots to keep. I selected 7 so I would have a running weeks worth. Actually, it keeps 7 weeks worth of weekly/daily snapshots. When my free space decrease to a warning state then critical state, I started looking at VM usage but found it increased only a couple TB which meant I was missing about 40TB! While it wasn't clear the snapshots were consuming massive storage, it was clear it was not what I planned. So, I deleted a bunch of snapshots after changing to daily snapshots and keeping the last 14. This helped free a lot of space but there was still some space miss
Typically, I create two containers on my clusters. Why? Some background first. I assembled a mostly self service instance of VMware vCenter on top of Nutanix. Users can deploy OVAs and have access to VMs in their resource pools and folders. I group users by team and create resource pools and folders with specific access levels. We give access to AD users to either the folder or both the folder and resource pool depending on if they can create VMs (or deploy an OVA). Most users just get VM Console Access but some do get more of a power user privilege. Because users can't follow process or procedures, we often get thick provisioned VM. While thick provisioned VMs don't actually get created in their full size instead Nutanix reserved (Explicit Reserved) the space even though the vdisk is thin provisioned on storage. In the past, this was not obvious and was not well reflected in free logical space. So, I create two containers. Periodically, I use VMware storage vMotion to
This isn't really installation and configuration but it was related to my protection domain snapshot issue. So, when I ran low on free space, the metadata increased becasue there were still tons of blocks out there to keep track of. So, this combination of low space and threshold breaking metasada size exceeds the preconfigured (metadata) size limit before kicking off automation actions. I don't really understand these failsafe actions fully but both inline compression and deduplication fingerprinting (I use only performance tier dedup but my true love is compression) are disabled. I am not so sure about compression but I can see deduplication fingerprinting adding to metadata. The kicker, to me, is that space conservation via deduplication and compression is more important when I am low on space. The recovery from these automatic actions is to free space then call support to re-enable the disabled features. I am waiting for an answer why they do not automatically re-enable
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