“In just two weeks we had a Nutanix cluster up and ready for new business in the AWS public cloud. As well as meeting our immediate deadline, this allowed us to still meet geographic constraints and other regulatory requirements. Plus it can run all our workloads unchanged and be managed remotely along side other on-premises private cloud deployments”. Don’t let supply chain headache’s get you down when you need control and choice for your business systems and projects. Nutanix Hybrid Multi-Cloud Platform, with One Click operations and built-in automation, allows any workload at any scale to run in any cloud (including your private cloud) with your choice of financial model, be it capex or opex, giving you maximum choice and maximum control. Workload mobility with consistent management has never been this easy. Build a solid foundation for digital transformation with the industry’s best technical support to back it all up.

The COVID pandemic years have presented many curve balls to organisations of all shapes and sizes. Now more than ever it’s important to have infrastructure that supports ever changing business objectives and provides agility and flexibility at short notice. With Nutanix Hybrid Multi-Cloud Platform workloads can be moved between clouds, including private clouds, with a few simple operations, without the need to refactor the applications. Traditional applications are supported along side K8’s and modern cloud native applications and big data. Organisations can take advantage of new revenue opportunities by scaling infrastructure rapidly and aligning costs to allow profitable growth, all while maintaining consistent and simple management across all platforms.

Benefit from decreasing costs with predictable performance and easy management and troubleshooting, while reducing risk of downtime across all of your cloud platforms. Linear scalability with predictable performance removes some of the question marks about how applications will behave regardless of the cloud they are running in. While cloud hardware might be transient in some cases, smart infrastructure software can protect your data and applications even in the situation of maintenance and failure. Spend less time troubleshooting and more time innovating and differentiating against the competition.

Business initiative being more successful than planned? Needing additional capacity earlier than planned? Wanting to allow for a seasonable peak in demand? No problem. Scale out infrastructure in a few minutes or on demand automatically with supported cloud providers. Fractional consumption of IT resources regardless if they are local, hosted or cloud based. Use existing cloud accounts and access existing cloud credits and all native services directly (on same VPC) from the local cloud provider. No need to set up brand new cloud accounts with the Nutanix Hybrid Multi-Cloud Platform!

A hosted bare metal cloud, such as Equinix, could form part of an integrated multi-cloud strategy and allow for multiple geographic technology hosting solutions to support any sort of business projects on demand. Network connectivity, resiliency and access is key for a global multi-cloud strategy, and Nutanix partners, including Equinix, can provide the stable onramp and interconnection between all the clouds.

Final Word

Ultimate flexibility and choice is available across hybrid clouds, all backed up by legendary industry leading support with a 90+ NPS. Nutanix has the solutions and partner ecosystems to handle the toughest business challenges and deliver consistently high quality results. Nutanix is the enterprise easy button for hybrid multi-cloud technology solutions. If Nutanix can save you time and money, while offering you ultimate flexibility, what would you rather be investing those spare resources in?

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2022 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud, or all of the above? That is the question many organisations are asking. Do you refactor your apps or lift and shift? What about data security and data soverinty? Do you need a combination of things to support a complex business environment? It’s not likely a one size fits all situation. Nutanix Cloud Platform on Equinix Metal could be a great onramp to a Hybrid Multi-Cloud world.

Nutanix Cloud Platform on Equinix Metal hybrid multi-cloud platform solution that spans private and multiple public clouds, with a unified management plane, complete license portability, and seamless application migration across the multiple cloud environments. It enables complete freedom to run applications, without the need to refactor, on any platform with unified infrastructure management, leveraging existing cloud accounts and existing credits (if any).

Equinix Metal is built on top of Equinix Fabric. This enables Equinix to provide some of the best direct cloud network connectivity and peering as it operates datacenters at the heart of peering locations and close to public cloud resources. This adds simplified network connectivity onto a simplified hybrid multi-cloud experience.

Just because you need a mix of private, public, or hybrid multi-cloud doesn’t mean you have to be in the business of managing data centers and all the components that come along with them. Nutanix and Equinix can help manage globally diverse business needs with or without customer owned data centres. Deploy when you want, where you want, how you want, and in the type of cloud you want. Scale on demand and as needed.

Final Word

Take your licenses and cloud accounts whereever you go. Migrate your VM’s, files, and data among on-premises datacentres, clouds, without re-architecting, without re-factoring, to deliver the best experience. Hybrid Multi-cloud on your terms. Check out how a global retailer embraced hybrid multi-cloud and download the Nutanix Cloud Platform on Equinix metal Solutions Brief and contact Nutnix or Equinix to get started!

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2022 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Managing large databases is hard. Having changes go through a dynamic environment to production with thorough testing is also hard. When you have a 100TB+ production system, keeping non-production copies up to date is even harder still. Most companies can’t afford to keep exact copies of production due to the size and scale, so compromise the non-production environments. This is no longer necessary. Nutanix Era solves this acute database management problem, and many others!

Nutanix Era is a Database-as-a-Service Solution that solves many of the acute problems facing businesses and DBA’s today when managing large number of databases, or large databases, which impact productivity, reliability, availability and performance.

One of the biggest benefits for customers that have large databases is the ability to take a complete clone of the production system and make multiple copies for non-production uses. Any number of clones can be created without impacting storage capacity requirements, this is due to using native Nutanix API’s in the cloning process. The following 9 minute video shows an example of a 100TB Production Oracle RAC DB being refreshed to 10 clones, for use in testing and development. The clones don’t take up any additional space until the moment data is changed. I hope you like the Jazz music :).

If you like what you see and you’d like to get some hands on experience with Nutanix Era, please take a look at the Nutanix Era Test Drive – Available Online from the comfort of wherever you are.

Recently version 2.0 of Era was released, including the following enhancements.

Hybrid Cloud Flexibility and Multi-cluster Management

With Era 2.0 we have extended our database platform capabilities across clusters and hybrid cloud. This provides our customers the flexibility to build and manage databases on their own terms, giving them the freedom to develop and deploy databases of their choice in the environment they want.

Expanding Database Engine Portfolio with SAP HANA

SAP/HANA has joined Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, & MariaDB in the portfolio of database engines supported by Nutanix Era. SAP/HANA customers can now leverage Era’s 1-click capabilities to create an end-to-end sandbox environment on the Nutanix HCI platform.

Extended Choice and Support with PostgreSQL

With Era 2.0, PostgreSQL admins can now take full advantage of all Era capabilities, including patching and in-place restore. In addition, Nutanix will now provide 24×7 support for PostgreSQL databases provisioned by Era, allowing customers to call our support number with any issues.  

Enhancing Service Model Delivery with HCL Partnership

For customers seeking fully-managed database services, Nutanix has partnered with global technology company HCL, to offer a joint solution called SKALE DB powered by HCL and Nutanix. The partnership provides a secure, scalable, cloud-ready managed DBaaS offering integrated with Nutanix Era and Prism for automation and management for database & hyperconverged infrastructure.

There is much more to come in future releases!!

Final Word

Good DBA’s are far too valuable to allocate to mundane tasks that can be automated. The DBA’s can create and control the policies, and delegate to competent team members the rights to perform tasks for themselves. DBA’s can then focus on solving real business problems, improving data efficiencies and delivering far greater insights. Utilising Nutanix Era can greatly reduce the storage required to manage database environments and maintaining large numbers of non-production systems. The capital saved from not needing excess storage infrastructure can be redeployed to more business focused investments. There is no need to migrate defects to production because you couldn’t test changes on a full scale copy in your non-production systems! Don’t forget to get some hands on experience with Nutanix Era, please take a look at the Nutanix Era Test Drive – Available Online from the comfort of wherever you are.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2021 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

We recently changed over from Vodafone VDSL to Chorus UltraFast Broadband (UFB) Fibre Max with Vodafone (See Vodafone Broadband Plans). The new Fibre connection is amazingly fast, but we soon discovered some limitations with the Vodafone router. I found out that the Vodafone UltraHub doesn’t support static routing. This meant that most of our home network couldn’t access the Internet. This article will show you how I worked around this limitation and created a Home Fibre Router / Firewall in the process. Warning: Sorry to anyone reading this in Australia who has NBN, feel free to migrate to New Zealand (Or Singapore).

You might be wondering why the featured image on this article is the Palo Alto Networks Logo and one of the 3020 Firewalls. When I ran into this problem of the Vodafone UltraHub not supporting static routing I contacted a friend at PAN to see if there was anything they had that might be able to help. I was offered a trail of a Virtual Edition Palo Alto Firewall (VM-300 – 4 vCPU, 9GB RAM), which I am keen to try out. I’ll definitely be writing about it when I get hold of the trail, and letting you know how it compares to a roll your own home solution. Thanks Palo Alto for being willing to work with me on a trial. All going well I may well switch over to it, as it’ll make connecting to other people around the world, who also have PAN’s much easier.

I’ve previously written about how we converted our Home Area Network (HAN) to a Leaf Spine Architecture, and how to create a low latency L2 network with Dell Force10 and Cumulus Linux. So we have a fairly complex set up here and a lot of servers and other devices and lots of VM’s on different VLAN’s and subnets. So when our Fibre connection came along it was a bit frustrating that most of the network couldn’t access the Internet. To complicate matters we also have a Vodafone SureSignal so we can get mobile service as we are in a coverage dead spot. The SureSignal requires special configuration, we’ll get to that later.

We have OSPF as our main home routing protocol, and I have the spine now on 2 x Dell S6000 32x40GbE switches, with the main leafs being 2 x S4048’s. We have our 1G boarder leaf’s running 2 x Dell N2048’s. All of the 1G segments, Wifi access points, and Internet access is off the boarder leaf.

I knew I needed something that could talk OSPF to the rest of our switches for all the VLANs and subnets as that would make it easy to get the routing correct and minimize the number of static routes. It needed to be able to support NAT and be stateful (and allow IPSEC) so it could handle the Vodafone SureSignal. It had to be able to talk to the Chorus GPON ONT directly, as any other router / modem would. I also had to minimize downtime in the process (lack of Internet access is a P1 at home and I have to apply for a maintenance window in advance unless I want to hear a lot of screaming). I decided to try my hand at setting up a Linux VM and seeing if I could make that work in the interim until I could find a more robust solution.

The speed through our original Vodafone UltraHub wasn’t too bad, as you can see below.

I’ll explain the physical network set up as well as the VM configuration as we go. First let’s look at the physical network and how I connected the ONT (the box that sits inside the house) to the environment without having a dedicated modem/router. This ended up being easier than I had thought.

Regardless of who your ISP is, one of the physical network providers provides the actual connection. In Auckland that is Chorus. They use an IPoE connection, which means basically it’s DHCP on an Ethernet link. This is much simpler than using PPPoE or other types of connection. Some Fibre connections may still need PPPoE, so please check with Chorus or your provider / ISP as you may need some additional things to get a Linux based router working with PPPoE. For the example I’ll give we just used an Interface with DHCP enabled. The physical connection comes in on a tagged VLAN. In our case that was VLAN 10.

The original Vodafone UltraHub had been configured to allow tagged packets from VLAN 10 get a DHCP IP address. All I needed to do to allow our physical home network access then was to create a VLAN 10, allow tagged packets to the relevant ports (making sure all the switches would pass it to each other), and then create a port group on my VM hosts with VLAN 10 tagged for the VM to connect to for the external network. Apart from having to configure VLAN 10 on quite a few switches and port channels it was surprisingly easy to get working. Don’t make the mistake I made at one point and set one of the switch ports to be untagged on VLAN 10 and connected that port to the ONT, that won’t work, as the ONT is sending tagged packets.

Once the physical network connectivity was established I created my Router VM. You can use any Linux distribution you like, in my case I chose CentOS. I configured the VM with 2 vCPU and 2GB RAM, with a 100GB Disk. I gave it 2 NIC’s, one on the Internal Network (zone=internal) and one on the External Network (zone=external). I did a minimal install of the OS and then added in Epel-Release, Quagga (dynamic routing), Traceroute, IPTraf, TCPDump, Links, DDClient (to update DynDNS), NSLookup (Bind-Utils), WireShark (wireshark-gnome), Net-Tools. The minimal install has SELinux, FirewallD, SSH and the basics that you need.

Here is the config I used on the Linux VM:

# cat /etc/sysctl.conf

# sysctl settings are defined through files in
# /usr/lib/sysctl.d/, /run/sysctl.d/, and /etc/sysctl.d/.
#
# Vendors settings live in /usr/lib/sysctl.d/.
# To override a whole file, create a new file with the same in
# /etc/sysctl.d/ and put new settings there. To override
# only specific settings, add a file with a lexically later
# name in /etc/sysctl.d/ and put new settings there.
#
# For more information, see sysctl.conf(5) and sysctl.d(5).

# Controls IP packet forwarding
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

# Controls source route verification
net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 1

# Do not accept source routing
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0

# Optimize Memory Management Settings 
vm.overcommit_memory = 1 
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5 
vm.dirty_ratio = 15 
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 500 
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 100 
vm.swappiness = 0

# Network MTU Probing - Michael Webster
net.ipv4.tcp_mtu_probing=1

# Optimize Network Stack and Memory Buffers 
# Increase TCP max buffer size setable using setsockopt()
net.core.rmem_max = 536870912 
net.core.wmem_max = 536870912 

# Increase Linux autotuning TCP buffer limit
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 536870912
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 536870912

# Increaes max backlog of packets and congestion control method
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 250000
net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=htcp

# advanced network stack tuning
net.core.somaxconn = 65535
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl = 15
net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 15
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes = 5
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 65535


fs.aio-max-nr = 1048576
fs.file-max = 6815744

# cat /etc/default/grub 
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="crashkernel=auto rd.lvm.lv=centos_router/root rd.lvm.lv=centos_router/swap rhgb quiet elevator=noop iommu=soft apm=off numa=off transparent_hugepage=never vmw_pvscsi.cmd_per_lun=256 vmw_pvscsi.ring_pages=32"
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

# cat /etc/quagga/ospfd.conf 
!etc/quagga/ospfd.conf
hostname router
log file /var/log/quagga/ospfd.log
interface ens192
 description Internal
 ip ospf network broadcast
!
router ospf
 ospf router-id 192.168.xxx.xxx
 network 192.168.xxx.xxx/24 area 0
 default-information originate always
access-list localhost permit 127.0.0.1/32
access-list localhost deny any
line vty
 access-class localhost

Then I configured the firewall using firewall-cmd

# Put the correct interfaces into the correct zones
firewall-cmd --zone=internal --change-interface=ens192
firewall-cmd --zone=internal --change-interface=ens224

# Allow ospf to work for the Internal network
firewall-cmd --add-protocol=ospf --permanent --zone=internal

# Set internal target to allow traffic from Internal network
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=internal --set-target=ACCEPT 

#Forward email and https traffic to internal system
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=external --add-forward-port=port=25:proto=tcp:toport=25:toaddr=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=external --add-forward-port=port=443:proto=tcp:toport=443:toaddr=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

#reload firewall config and display zone settings

firewall-cmd --reload

firewall-cmd --zone=external --list-all
firewall-cmd --zone=internal --list-all

It was at this stage that I ran into trouble with OSPF not wanting to work properly on the Linux VM. None of the neighbours would respond correctly. After some Googling it looked like the most obvious issue was going to be the MTU and sure enough the logs supported that as the physical switches were trying to send packets of 9198 bytes and the Linux VM could only accept 9000. Due to the various different switches in the environment I found I had to configure multiple different MTU settings to get everything to converge. On some switches it was MTU 9018 and on some others it was 9000. After getting the MTU’s correct across the different switches everything started working.

After switching over to the Linux Firewall the speed of the connection was even better. However the Vodafone SureSignal would not work. I stumbled across a configuration article for complex networks on the Vodafone NZ web site. This advised to open up and forward port 123, 500 and 4500 UDP from the Firewall to the SureSignal and ensure the SureSignal can resolve DNS correctly. In spite of doing this, and calling Vodafone NZ support it was not possible to get the SureSignal to function. In the end I decided to configure the Vodafone UltraHub and SureSignal on a separate VLAN so they could directly communicate and then put the Linux Firewall VM on that same VLAN so the rest of the network could have Internet access. This resulted in some Double NAT, but everything is now working.

Final Word

I hope in the future we don’t actually need a SureSignal and we can get proper mobile service, maybe when the new Vodafone NZ 5G network is launched in December 2019. Then we’ll be able to directly connect our Linux Firewall VM to the ONT and keep it simple (and fast!). I’m also hoping that when I try out the Palo Alto Networks VM-300 that I can get around the annoying issues I had with the SureSignal and that it works directly via the PAN to the Fibre ONT. Time will tell, and I’ll write about how the evaluation of that goes when it’s completed.

I’ve also been in contact with Chorus regarding their 10G Trial. I have the equipment to utilize this and enough devices at home and plenty of requirements to upload and download large data sets to the USA and elsewhere. The 10G service is due to go live in 2020 anyway, when it does, I’ll definitely be looking to get on it, even if I don’t make it onto the trial.

If you don’t have a SureSignal then you won’t have any of the problems I ran into and you’ll be able to connect your ONT directly to your Linux host or VM to act as your Internet firewall using the above info. Alternatively you could check out a Palo Alto Networks VM-300 (or one of their physical firewalls) if you run a corporate environment and want something robust and simple to use that also offers context aware security. I hope this is helpful in some way, let me know in the comments below.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2019 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Just after SAP Sapphire in Orlando I wrote about how Nutanix AHV had been validated for SAP HANA Non-Production Environments. Great news is, on August 28th Nutanix AHV became the first hypervisor validated for SAP HANA Production environments with the publishing of SAP Note 2686722. This is a major milestone and represents SAP’s confidence in Nutanix AHV as a hypervisor to run the most critical workloads for production environments. It’s also worth noting that test results for the certification measured only a 4% different to bare metal. On September 13th Nutanix and our OEM Partners Dell and Lenovo became the first solutions to be full certified and listed on the SAP HANA HCI Certification web page. Nutanix AHV with our Partners Dell and Lenovo is certified for 2 socket and 4 socket solutions for SAP HANA production environments and all non-production environment use cases with certified hardware combinations. Check out the full list of SAP HANA HCI Certified Solutions. Important Note: A competing solution (VXRail) that includes VMware VSAN must turn off important data integrity features, such as object checksums, in order to meet the strict performance requirements for Production SAP HANA, Nutanix does not allow data checksums to be turned off and has met the strict performance requirements for SAP HANA with full data integrity features enabled. Let’s look at some of the resources and details for you to start planning your SAP HANA HCI journey, now that we’re fully certified for production environments.

The only vendor to provide a complete @SAPInMemory #HANA solution for #HCI is @nutanix with certified OEM hardware. Official list of configurations is here – https://t.co/bEXHXPRnuE thanks to @KasimHansia @BasRaayman @vcdx026 for leading this! pic.twitter.com/lvuOrirN6v

— Lord WebScale Webster (@vcdxnz001) September 13, 2018

The first place to start is the Nutanix SAP Page, which lists all of the content available with regard to SAP on Nutanix. There is the blog article announcing our Nutanix AHV Hypervisor Certification For SAP HANA Production Environments.  Which also links through to our SAP HANA on Nutanix Best Practices Guide, which has all the real details on how to architect a solution for SAP HANA on Nutanix. If you are an existing Nutanix customer you can access the guide and all other solutions documentation through the Support Portal under Solutions Documentation. You should also refer to the official SAP Note 2686722 for configuration details and options. You will need an SAP Support Login to access the note.

Also check out the official SAP HANA HCI Infrastructure Solutions page. This page lists all of the certified combinations of hardware and software. As of writing this article only Nutanix AHV was certified for 4 socket solutions. Over time we will continue to expand the options that are available.

Dell has also published detailed documentation and guidance on their solutions at their SAP HANA Technical Resources page. We expect Lenovo to follow shortly and publish their detailed guidance. I’ll update this article when they do.

It’s great to be at the point where customers can now experience the simplicity, predictability, scalability and performance with one click operations that HCI brings for SAP HANA production and non-production environments. The Nutanix SAP Engineering team worked with SAP to create the SAP HANA HCI Certification program right from the start. We wanted to make sure it properly validated day 1 and day 2 operations and provide the SLA’s and certainty of the hardware appliance approach for SAP HANA, with the flexibility of TDI, but without the complexity. I believe we have achieved this result and all customers as well as SAP will benefit from this.

Final Word

Not all solutions are created equal. Nutanix makes sure all enterprise features and especially data integrity are enabled by default and not disabled while at the same time meeting the very strict performance and reliability tests that SAP HANA solutions for production demands. Other vendors have taken short cuts and disabled important features like data integrity checksums. Our opinion is that makes those solutions not fit for purpose when it comes to production systems that expect highest levels of availability and performance. Return of your data and data integrity are our number one priorities and are built into everything Nutanix does. We created the Hyper-converged industry on this basis and continue to lead it as a result. Our solution is production ready, for the enterprise and at scale. No Compromises! Other vendors might be playing Russian Roulette with your data!!

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2018 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Some vendors in the storage, hyper-converged, and cloud industries may be playing Russian Roulette with their customers’ data. Solutions are not created equally, some turn off basic data integrity features such as data checksum by default, or when there are performance problems. Some don’t have background consistency checks and scrubbing to protect against silent data corruption or latent sector errors. Others might use consumer grade devices that may have a higher risk of error and higher failure rate. In the age of software defined solutions, the customer has become the storage platform architect. There is enough rope to hang yourself (your data and your platform availability) any number of different ways. Which is why having a software foundation and integrated solution that has been properly validated from end to end, and that contains data integrity and enterprise data protection features at it’s core, should be the highest priority. Return of data, in the form it was originally written, at any scale, while protecting against known data and device risks, is of upmost importance. How important is performance (IOPS, Latency and Throughput) if you can’t even read back the data you originally wrote? Here are the top 10 questions you can ask potential vendors to find out if they really have protecting your data as their top priority.

Before we get started with the questions, it’s always good to have some science and evidence to back things up. Here is one paper – An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack. Another paper – Characterizing Private Clouds: A Large-Scale Empirical Analysis of Enterprise Clusters. Both papers cover large scale studies. Any study across a small population of devices or a very small sample size is going to be invalid. Any conclusions from something like a 30 drive study isn’t going to be valid when you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of devices.

Questions to ask your potential solution vendor:

1. Does the solution include data checksums to ensure that data written is the same as data read / returned, if so, are they on by default or optional?
2. Do the checksums have a performance impact on random or sequential IO operations, if so, what is the impact?
3. Does the solution include consistency checks or scrubbing to protect against silent data corruption, silent bit rot, and latent sector errors, if so, are they on by default or optional?
4. Does the solution include SMART checks and predictive failure analysis, which could include predictive replacement and automated support case generation?
5. What is the annualized return rate or failure rate of the devices used in the solution and over what number of devices and duration has that been measured?
6. How does the solution protect data between different components (disks, servers/nodes, clusters) and is this tunable based on different requirements?
7. How does the solution protect against multiple concurrent component failures and which type of component failures are protected against?
8. Are user defined failure domains supported to protect against situations such as chassis failure, rack failure, multiple storage device failure?
9. How does the solution recover from single and multiple component failure, this could be single storage device failure, multiple devices on the same shelf or node, or multiple node failures, and what is the expected recovery time and performance impact? Does this scale linearly as the solution continuously grows over time?
10. Do recovery options rely on a single device, such as a hot spare, or in the case of an object store, a single device holding the replica of a large component, or do recoveries utilize all devices in the system equally and fairly?

There are plenty more questions that could be asked, but the 10 questions above cover the most common areas of risk in terms of data integrity, data protection and data loss prevention, and that are not always protected against, at least not by default, with some systems.

Final Word

From a Nutanix point of view, as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, we take data integrity seriously and it’s our top priority. We protect against all of the areas highlighted in the questions above and we have a paper that explains the Infrastructure Resiliency of Nutanix Solutions, which compliments the research paper on enterprise clusters. We also have many hundreds of thousands of devices in production that are proactively monitored from which we can draw real world data, and a very thorough device qualification and QA process, which limits risk. We use similar high standards across all hardware platforms that our software supports. Our software is built based on a philosophy that hardware will eventually fail, so we must deal with these failures gracefully. Your data deserves better protection!

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2018 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

If you have not yet seen or heard about 3 serious security vulnerabilities (Spectre and Meltdown) that become public last week then you need to be across them fast (CVE-2017-5715, 5753 and 5754). They represent the largest and widest ranging computing ecosystem security problem that I’ve seen in a long time, and have had a response across the entire enterprise and consumer computing industry as a result. One of the issues (Meltdown) is Intel specific, the other issues impact multiple CPU architectures (Intel, ARM, AMD, Power etc). Although patches for some products have been released already the full solutions are expected to take some time to resolve. All of the major IT vendors have given response to the issues their top priority. This article will contain key links to information that you need to know to prepare and determine the risk for your particular environment.

There are three specific variants for the issues:

The starting point should be the industry created site to aggregate the research data for these issues – https://spectreattack.com/.

Then you should review the specific academic research papers and documentation:

There have been performance concerns with regards to the fixes and RedHat has done some specific research on this and it is available – https://access.redhat.com/articles/3307751.

Final Word

As you can see from the research and various papers and advisories that are available the security vulnerabilities are wide ranging and required and industry wide response. The security research, discovery, coordination and patching of these problems has been cross industry and covers consumer and enterprise systems. This is no small undertaking and all industry participants have been working together on the response. This is a good example of industry participants working together to resolve customer issues. There will no doubt be many lessons to be learned coming out of this and this will make for interesting reading and research for years to come.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2018 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

If you are a talented architect or administrator and you’d like to take your skills across multiple hypervisors and enterprise and public clouds to a new level then the Nutanix NPX Certification might be the way to do it. Nutanix NPX Solutions Design Bootcamps, which are free of charge, might be the best way to find out. You can find a list of available bootcamp locations on Eventbrite Here. The spaces are very limited and you need to have the Nutanix NPP certification (being a Nutanix Customer, Partner or Solution Integrator is an advantage) or related knowledge first before attending, but the only costs are for your travel and accommodation if there isn’t a local bootcamp in your city. If you know there are a group of interested people that meet the minimum requirements, then the NPX program may be able to schedule a bootcamp for you. Please contact NPX at Nutanix dot com and enquire about a bootcamp near you. Check out the Eventbrite Link to find out more.

For more NPX Related Blogs and Info on the Current Group of NPX Architects, check out the following:

Rene van den Bedem’s Blog – https://vcdx133.com/category/npx/

Magnus Andersson’s Blog – http://vcdx56.com/npx/ including the Meet the NPX’s

Nutanix Platform Expert Community Site – http://next.nutanix.com/t5/Nutanix-Platform-Expert-NPX/bd-p/NutanixPlatformExpert

Request Nutanix Platform Expert Preparation Guide – https://go.nutanix.com/npx-application.html

While a lot of people (me included) are excited about the technical speeds and feeds of the vSphere 6 launch, there is something much more fundamentally important about this release. Some technical highlights include 64 node clusters, 8000vm’s per cluster, 480 pCPU’s & 12TB RAM & 2048 VM’s per Host, 128 vCPU & 4TB RAM per VM support, SMP FT (up to 4 vCPU FT), enhancements to NIOC, VVOLs, SIOC enhancements etc, and much more. The reason this release is more fundamentally important though is related to the same reason that Amazon with AWS went from nothing to cloud leader. It’s not just about the technology, but what the technology enables, changing the business model, reducing friction, enabling flexibility. What might seem like a relatively small feature on the surface has the potential to change the landscape in hybrid cloud SDDC. If you’d like to know more about this, and all of the goodness coming as part of the launch of vSphere 6, keep reading.

VMware is about to release the latest version of the flagship vSphere product in what I predict will be a defining moment for the Mobile / Cloud Era. For the first time you will be able to live migrate, without any disruption, between private cloud datacenters, to public cloud, and over long distance, a true hybrid cloud and software defined datacenter. You will be able to implement improved quality of service for all applications with additional SLA guarantees, and scale to unprecedented levels. All while reducing management overheads and complexity across the entire ecosystem. With the policies following the virtual machines and virtual applications regardless of where they are physically located. 

This release has been baking for a while and for good reason. There is a big commitment to product quality, which was evidenced by the first ever public beta for VMware vSphere.  This is a major release, and is well deserving of the 6.0 version number. A lot of hard work has gone into this release by thousands of people. I was able to test a lot of the functionality during the beta and it was great to be able to contribute to the product. 

So why do I think this is such a defining moment? The world is changing with the massive explosion of mobile smart phones and the applications that support them. Billions of users are now demanding their applications wherever and whenever they want. So not only are the users mobile, their applications need to be. The applications need to be able to scale massively and on demand, and move to wherever it makes sense.

Previously migrating workloads from a private cloud or private SDDC to a cloud provider and to support a hybrid cloud required the systems being migrated to be shut down. You could migrate templates and power them on and update load balancer records, but that’s not quite the same as being able to dynamically live migrate any workload from your datacenter to a cloud without any downtime or disruption, and across long distances. If you really wanted to deliver cloud workloads and mobile workloads at scale, they had to be written for a particular cloud environment. Then you are stuck in a hotel California, where you can check out, but can never leave. This is the fundamental difference, and the fundamental technical change that is potentially enabled by vSphere 6, which in turn will deliver business and commercial disruption to current models.

The enhancements to VMware vMotion have the potential to change the way organisations run their datacenters, applications and interact with cloud service providers. It is conceivably possible to migrate workloads between different clouds on demand, based on various business rules and policies, provided they are based on vSphere 6.

So where does the comparison to Amazon and AWS come from? The reason I believe AWS became successful it not because of technology, it’s because it changed the economic and business model of consuming infrastructure. It reduced the friction, made everything on demand, and delivered to development and applications teams, in a way that was transparent. With the VMware vMotion enhancements allowing Cross vCenter vMotion and Long Distance vMotion, Cloud Service Providers can provide even less friction, on demand, run anywhere appropriate type of service. Some of the tyrannies of the network and live migration are being demolished. This again can change the way infrastructure is consumed and make it easier for app teams to deliver. But this needs to be blended with a commercial construct that also supports it.

At VMworld in 2014 Bill Fathers, Father of vCloud Air, reported that some 6% of workloads were running in Cloud environments. I believe part of the reason is because of the difficulty in migrating workloads to a Cloud, and between different Clouds, without disruption, and without having to change the underlying apps. With the changes that VMware is starting to deliver from vSphere 6, conceivably this could rapidly change the adoption of VMware compatible Clouds. There is still much to do in terms of the Network, which is still one of the barriers to Cloud, but this will go a long way. Soon you will be scaling workloads on demand to support the billions of mobile users and migrating those workloads to the cloud of choice that makes sense, almost anywhere in the world.

I was recently at the Singapore VMUG User Conference and listening to one of my colleagues, Scott Drummonds, talk about Cloud and locality. Locality is important because there are orders of magnitude computational difference the further the users are from their applications and data. How this relates back to the VMware vSphere 6.0 launch and vMotion Across vCenter and Long Distance is that it will now be possible to migrate workloads on demand closer to where the users are, especially as we start to see Cloud services become more local, and more miniaturised over time.

Final Word

At first glance vMotion Across vCenters and Long Distance vMotion may not seem that revolutionary. When you put this all in the context of the Hybrid Cloud and Software-Defined Datacenter that VMware has been building towards for over 5 years it is easier to see that this actually delivers a fundamental change in the way infrastructure resources can be used. It won’t be long before the live migration of VM’s is happening as depicted in the image above. What new possibilities will this open up for businesses? What impacts will this have on data sovereignty? Your thoughts and comments are appreciated.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2015 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

CloudPhysics have come up with a great Halloween themed report that has some very interesting insights into what Ghosts and Goblins are lurking in virtual datacenters. I was particularly surprised by the 41% of clusters that don’t have admission control enabled. You can get the full report here. I’ve included the infographic here for your enjoyment.

Also check out the CloudPhysics free community edition that you can deploy into your home labs.