5 Essential Tips for Maximizing Your Experience at Nutanix .NEXT for Bloggers
Xi Epoch generates live application maps to provide instantaneous visibility into your application health without any code instrumentation. Epoch provides visibility into the interactions between components in distributed architectures, without dependency on specific language or framework implementation. As a result, operations team can quickly ensure reliability and availability of any application in any cloud environment. The picture below is showing two different Kubernetes Clusters, Docker Enterprise and Nutanix Karbon. The collectors are deployed as daemon sets so they can be deployed to any Kubernetes cluster to start monitoring your applications. Epoch collectors can be run in both containerized as well as non-containerized environments. Only one collector is needed per host (VM or bare metal OS). Below is YugaDB running Cassandra commands and Epoch is able to look at the traffic and report on how fast commands are happening and even give the most requested queries.
We have a new blog post that recently went live: Nutanix Releases New Kubernetes CSI–Based Driver CSI is an open and independent interface specification that describes or specifies how third-party storage providers can provide storage operations for Container orchestration systems. CSI makes installing new volume plugins as easy as deploying a pod, and enables third-party storage providers to develop their plugins without needing to add code to the core Kubernetes code base. The CSI Driver for Kubernetes leverages Nutanix Volumes (formerly known as ABS) to provide scalable and persistent storage for stateful applications. It was authored by a great team of folks Subodh Mathur (Engineering), Denis Guyadeen (PM), Dwayne Lessner (TME) and Christophe Jauffret (Architect) Continue the conversation from the article on this thread and let us know what you think!
The Flow Gateway VM (FGW) for Nutanix Cloud Clusters In Azure(NC2) is the Lynch pin to having a your own Supercloud. The FGW is responsible for all VM traffic going north and south from the Nutanix cluster in Azure. This virtual machine allows outside communication from both cloud and on-premises services to the workloads running on the Azure NC2 Cluster. The Flow Gateway VM connecting Azure and on-prem services to the Nutanix Cluster deployed in Azure.Once Prism Central is automatically deployed from the cluster creation process, the FGW deploys into the same VNET that Prism Central is using. The FGW is a native Azure VM. The VM has two network interface cards(NICs) attached to it, one for internal traffic and one for external traffic. The external NIC where the floating IP's are configured for workloads that may need away outside clients connecting into running workloads on the cluster. The default installation will configure 50 floating IP's on the external NIC. These floating I
I had made a short video on auto scaling Nutanix cluster in AWS using new Nutanix Playbooks. Playbooks offer a visual way to start automating actions in your hybrid cloud. Due to making the video short, I didn't spend a lot of time talking about options that you could set. Prism central has a lot of alerts that you can use to trigger the action that you want to take. If you don't see the right “Alert” you can customize one of the existing ones to meet your needs and will be a user defined alert. In my example I was using a critical memory capacity over 80% capacity on adding nodes. If your clusters are typically higher than 10 nodes you might try using a higher percentage based on one node is going to be a lower percentage of memory overall. Likewise you could be more aggressive with picking a lower memory percentage. One thing that you'll want to set as well is the “trigger alert if condition persists for". I didn't have it set so I could easily record the demo but I think it would be
Why a Grizzly bear? Why not? Awhile ago I created a video showing how you could easily save lots of money by saving dollars on the EC2 costs by using hibernate. Nutanix Clusters is the only on-prem vendor offering this for customers that want to lift and shift to the public cloud or use the public cloud for DR. I want to share the code snippet and how to create an API user in the Clusters portal.You can first get familiar with hibernate here: To create an API user to make the call:Go to the Clusters portal Under Organization go to usersGo to the user optionCreate an API userAdd an API user You can limit the scope of the user to a single cluster. Once you have a API user you can use the below script to make an API call or add a script to a VM.#!/usr/local/bin/pythonimport hashlibimport hmacimport timeimport requestsimport base64# Client credentials#client_id from the user from the clusters portalclient_id = "*********.img.cloud-internal.nutanix.com" #client_secret password from the
I make no bones about it, bare-metal nodes in AWS is pricey. The questions becomes if we want to save money and have DR with AWS, how do keep the number of nodes small until we failover?In AWS all the Nutanix rules still apply. We need a minimum of a three-node cluster to get started. If we have enough storage capacity, we can keep accepting replications from an on-prem cluster and not worry about CPU and memory constraints. You could also use your on-prem AHV supported backup software to backup directly to S3. Then when you have an outage, you could quickly build a Nutanix Cluster in AWS and start restoring the data to that cluster.DR on the skinnyI was a asked to automate the process of adding nodes to a small Nutanix Cluster in AWS and then start a failover using Leap (DR runbooks) and X-play(automates actions based of events and alerts) in Prism Central (PC). The below video is what I came up with. The code to add a node via API from the Cluster portal is listed here:https://gith
Nutanix’s support for bare-metal is getting close. Please take a look at some of the foundational components for networking in Azure.NCM (Nutanix Clusters on Azure) utilizes Flow Networking to create an overlay network in Azure to ease administration for Nutanix administrators and reduce networking constraints across Cloud vendors. Flow Networking is used to abstract the Azure native network by creating overlay virtual networks. On the one hand this abstracts the underlying network in Azure, while at the same time, it allows the network substrate (and its associated features and functionalities) to be consistent with the customer’s on-premise Nutanix deployments.You will be able to create new virtual networks (called Virtual Private Clouds or VPCs) within Nutanix, subnets in any address range, including those from the RFC1918 (private) address space and define DHCP, NAT, routing, and security policy right from the familiar Prism Central interface.Flow networking can mask or reduce Cl
Hi Nutanix Community and fellow lurkers!If your just getting started with AWS, we have made some videos to go along with the documentation to make the process even easier. I would appreciate any feedback on what else should be added based on your own experience. In the next week we will add a fourth video showing up to setup your VPN on the AWS side.
One of the biggest changes with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure compared to it's AWS counterpart is the requirement for Flow virtual networking. Flow virtual networking provides an overlay in Azure to provide secure communication between multiple tenants you may be hosting on the Nutanix cluster and also provides north and southbound connectivity. North and southbound connectivity is provided through the Flow gateway virtual machine (FVGW). Workloads running on the cluster can either go through a network address translation (NAT) path or a routed path not using a NAT. Which path your virtual machines take in and out of the NC2 Cluster will depend on how other services need to talk to the running virtual machines on NC2.The FVGW Is a native Azure VM that gets deployed when the first cluster is created. The FVGM has both and internal and external network interface cards(NIC). Traffic from your Azure Nutanix cluster is directed towards the FVGM’s Internal NIC And then eventually rou
Prism Central in Azure provides the control plane for Flow Virtual Networking. The subnet for Prism Central is delegated to Microsoft.BareMetal/AzureHostedService, so you can use native Azure networking to distribute IP addresses for Prism Central.Once you deploy Prism Central, the Flow Virtual Networking Gateway (FGW) VM deploys into the same VNet that Prism Central uses. The FGW allows communication between the guest VMs using the VPCs and the native Azure services. Using the FGW, guest VMs have parity with native Azure VMs for elements such as:User-defined routes: You can create custom or user-defined (static) routes in Azure to override Azure’s default system routes or to add routes to a subnet’s route table. In Azure, you create a route table, then associate the route table to zero or more virtual network subnets. Load balancer deployment: You can balance services offered by guest VMs with the Azure-native load balancer. Network security groups: You can write stateful firewall pol
I would like to take full blame for people thinking self healing solves all problems with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2). The self-healing is pretty awesome for bad nics, hard drives and nodes but there are some instances where the portal can’t take action.Status checks on AWS are performed every minute, returning a pass or a fail status in the Cloud Portal. If all checks pass, the overall status of the instance is OK. If one or more checks fail, the overall status is impaired.There are two types of status checks, system status checks, and instance status checks. System status checks monitor the AWS systems on which instance runs. Instance status checks monitor the software and network configuration of individual instances. Notification Center in the Clusters PortalThe Clusters portal has an notification service that keeps track of all informational, warnings and critical alerts. Like most Cloud based services there is no support for SNMP in the portal but does have the ability to send
Flow Virtual Networking Gateway VM High Availability When you initially deploy your first cluster, you can create two to four FGW VMs vs only one prior. The resiliency change is a big deal but getting traffic in and out of the cluster became a lot easier for Azure/Nutanix admins. The addition of the Azure Route servers along with the deployment of BGP VMS means that User Defined routes don’t need to be created. Anytime manual operations can be removed from a design, it means a win for the customer.Prior to AOS 6.7, if you deployed only one gateway VM, the NC2 portal redeployed a new FGW VM with an identical configuration when it detected that the original VM was down. Because this process invoked various Azure APIs, it took about 5 minutes before the new FGW VM was ready to forward traffic, which affected the north-south traffic flow.To reduce this downtime, NC2 on Azure uses an active-active configuration. This setup provides a flexible scale-out configuration when you need more traff
Hybrid Cloud extended network between Azure and private datacenterThis is just one possible scenario that you could use create a Layer 2 stretch network in your hybrid cloud environment. The goal is to understand this scenario and to have a place to ask questions. The plan is to introduce additional scenarios to drive understanding. This scenario is using AOS 6.6. The scenario will mostly likely change with newer AOS releases. We have an Azure environment on the top the below diagram and private datacenter below the Azure environment. We want to understand what happens if the VMs running on Nutanix in Azure failback/migration to the private datacenter while using layer 2 stretch. After the failover, how will the native Azure VMs in Step 4 reach the VMs that failed/migrated. The VMs running the NC2 cluster in Azure are using a routed path to get access. The means we have ability to route on-prem an native Azures services to the VMs running on the NC2 cluster. Step 1 – L2We have a setup
Stop the Man in the Middle Attacks.Whether you're replicating to the cloud or to a remote branch site you may not control the networking stack and to end. When you don't control the networking stack end to end or you're in an environment that simply doesn't have a firewall you can use Nutanix Native DR encryption between your Nutanix clusters. The feature is fully supported for both PD and Nutanix DR(PC) based replication.Changes will persistent after reboots of the CVMs and upon upgrades.AOS needs to be on 6.1 or higher.DR with Encryption will use 14119,14108 as additional ports that need to open bi-directional when all of the CVMS. *** Note you need to run the below steps on each cluster.To enable this featureSSH to the CVM Change the folder to bin - all the python commands need to ran from the bin directory cd bin Run the script. For PD based Replication python onwire_encryption_tool.py --enable <remote_cluster_vip> For PC/Nutanix DR Replication Enure your Prism Centrals
AOS 6.7 has added more options for securing your cluster in AWS. We will take a look at the existing options and dive into the new feaure in AOS 6.7.You can use AWS security groups and network access control lists to secure your cluster relative to other AWS or on-premises resources. Nutanix automatically creates three security groups to limit traffic to the cluster:Internal management: Allows all internal traffic between all CVMs and all AHV hosts (EC2 bare-metal hosts). Don’t edit this group without approval from Nutanix Support. User management: Allows users to access Prism Element and some other services running on the CVM. UVM: Allows UVMs to talk to each other. By default, all UVMs on all subnets can talk to each other, but you can edit the policy to lock down more traffic. You could alternatively use Flow Network Security to prevent east-west traffic. With AWS security groups, you can limit access to the AWS CVMs, AHV host, and UVMs only from your on-premises management network
when you play to many video games as a child Check out this new hibernate video for AWS.
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