I think John Troyer sums today at Oracle OpenWorld up well – Hell Freezes Over? VMware Support on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Software Support on VMware Hypervisor, even when deployed on-premises!

Today at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco there was a small announcement that might not have initially got too much attention, but it’s really caused a tectonic shift in the IT industry. Oracle and VMware jointly announced VMware Cloud Foundation support for VMware’s stack on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and at the same time announced support for Oracle software on VMware, including premises deployments. This is the first time ever that Oracle has acknowledged the presence of VMware in the ecosystem and support for their software on VMware’s hypervisor, although previously they certified Hyper-V.

OCI has some special features including significantly less complex networking compared to some of the other cloud vendors, so VMware will get some benefit from that. Additionally VMware customers who use OCI will get direct access to all of the native OCI capabilities, including Oracle’s highly tuned offerings. This could be a big onramp both ways and shows VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy playing out. I would predict VMware would announce something similar with SAP’s cloud at TechEd in Las Vegas in a few weeks, or at a later date.

I sent a message to one of my long time friends at VMware congratulating him on this monumental announcement. We have both been fighting with Oracle for decades to come up with some sort of common sense. Finally they have made some movement. This will be good for all virtualization in the future as Oracle is more acutely aware of what their customers want. But let’s wait and see if it plays out more widely.

The good news for all Nutanix customers is that this announcement will directly benefit any Nutanix customer currently running Oracle on VMware on Nutanix. Previously there was a lot of FUD. Now the support situation is even more clear, and you can use all of the hybrid offerings as well. When it comes to AHV we already had our storage stack on the Oracle HCL for iSCSI (which AHV uses) and Nutanix Files, so we already had a higher level of support.

Final Word

This is a big announcement for VMware, finally getting Oracle to support their software on VMware’s hypervisor. It also provides an important route to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for Oracle to potentially gain more customers. It’s almost like the Berlin wall coming down at the end of the cold war. I’m sure there will be more to come on this announcement as things develop. This is great news for joint customers, including Nutanix customers. Nutanix will be announcing jointly with Oracle Database Solution Bundles at Oracle OpenWorld, if you are at the conference, look out for them. As soon as the public announcements are made you’ll hear more on it.

Nutanix continues to make Oracle much easier for enterprise environments with our Database as a Service and Copy Data Management Solution – Era. You can create non-production clones of production data including masking with a zero byte overhead, freeing storage and developer and tester productivity. Nutanix Era is the easy button for Oracle and other database engines and allows much higher DBA control and productivity. I strongly encourage you to check it out and request a demo. It will be a tectonic shift for how you manage database copies and clones.

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.

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

When you have a crisis in your VMware environment do you like manually finding a needle in a hay stack of needles to identify the root cause? Do you love spending endless hours with your fingers walking through knowledge base articles, google searches, and scratching your head while your users suffer? Do you have so much time on your hands that you want the sky to be falling so you can spend your after hours and weekends solving problems?

Hopefully the answer to all of the above is no. Most problems you encounter in your VMware environments will already be known issues, many times with a simple solution. Hopefully testing of the patches and upgrades, and combinations of hardware and software was also tested before going into production. But it’s really hard to catch everything and to constantly audit your environment against problems and configuration drift. When an ounce of prevention can prevent an avalanche of cure being needed, Runecast might be the solution you’re looking for. I caught up with the CEO and Co-Founder of Runecast, Stanimir Markov, in Melbourne recently to get the lowdown on what it is and how it can help customers prevent trouble in their VMware environments.

I’ve known Stanimir for a long time as he got his VCDX (VMware Certified Design Expert) shortly after I did. For those that don’t know VCDX is the top VMware certification that is held by a couple of hundred people in the world, people who have proven their VMware and solution architecture expertise. Which makes the knowledge that is built into Runecast all the more interesting.

So what does Runecast do? Well they have built a product called Runecast Analyzer, which they describe as follows:

Proactive VMware management solution that uses our expertise and VMware Knowledge Base articles to analyze virtual infrastructure and expose potential issues and best practice violations, before they cause major outages.

I think the last part of that sentence is the most important, i.e. doing something before it causes a major outage. Runecast uses machine learning and big data analytics and natural language processing to figure out what the VMware KB’s are saying, what the logs in your environment are saying, and what the configuration has been set to and then analyzing if the combination might lead to any issues. Anyone that has spent any time going through VMware KB’s knows this isn’t an easy task. By melding the VCDX knowledge, VMware KB, Logs, and config, and putting some very smart data scientists to work, Runecast Analyzer can continuously monitor and alert you to any irregularities that might potentially cause you a headache.

I really like the fact that Runecast Analyzer can be used in dark sites just as easily as in connected sites. It doesn’t rely on any live outside connection to do the data analysis and updates can be done offline. This is important in secure environments, such as Government organizations. Here is what the architecture looks like.

The Runecast Analyzer appliance can be deployed and operational within minutes and provides continuous compliance and monitoring across multiple vCenters. It’s a very simple and elegant solution to a very tough time consuming problem.

Final Word

If you are looking for a continuous monitoring, alerting and analysis platform to prevent problems in your VMware environment before they occur then Runecast is worth a look. It can help you reduce downtime, improve security, and reduce cost of VMware environments of any size. In the future it could well be expanded to include other parts of the VMware ecosystem including networking / switching. There are certainly a lot of opportunities for a product such as this to build on the current momentum and go into new areas.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2017 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

If you are a Zerto customer they have released a very critical patch that fixes an IO path bug where SCSI sense codes were modified before responses were sent back to guest VM’s. Un-patched, the bug could result in data integrity issues. This has been seen in the field, particularly with Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases where the storage is under constant load and where a storage controller upgrade was being performed online. So it’s very imperative that you review the Zerto release notes and upgrade to Zerto 5.0 U2 ASAP.

The underlying problem was related to SCSI sense codes that the storage system was sending to the guest OS during certain storage controller failover operations. The bug prevented proper processing of the SCSI sense code (the code was being modified and truncated by Zerto software), which erroneously resulted in the OS thinking a write operation had been completed when in fact it had not. This issue was seen on Nutanix systems due to the frequency that storage controllers (CVM’s) are updated. The Nutanix business critical apps team was able to reproduce the issue and worked with Zerto to get the problem reproduced and corrected. We have confirmed Zerto 5.0 U2 has resolved the issue. Zerto is a great partner, and they were extremely helpful in resolving this issue and coordinating with their impacted customers.

I’ve personally been involved in a number of very successful large scale (many PB of data) projects where Zerto has been used for migration and DR and have not experienced this issue. I’ve also been involved in helping recover from this issue for a number of impacted customers. It’s good to know that when found this issue was fixed and assistance provided to impacted customers jointly by Zerto and Nutanix.

Derek Seaman was first to write about this issue being resolved here.

Here is an image of the Zerto Release Notes. Although it mentioned Nutanix in the notes any storage system could potentially be at risk due to the way the bug was caused. The full release notes for Zerto Replication 5.0 U2 are found here. 

It was about this time in 2013 that Michael Corey, Jeff Szastak and I started writing Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware: Doing IT Right (VMware Press) 2014. Microsoft SQL Server was the single most virtualized business critical app in the world then, and it is still the case today. Our book is still as relevant today as it was when we published it and the recommendations we documented still hold true. In spite of it being the most popular critical app to virtualize there are still a lot of cases where some simple best practices are not followed. Best practices that could greatly improve performance. Not all of the best practices apply to all database types at all times, so some care is required. One thing we’ve learned with experience is that the only similarity in customers’ database environments is that they are all different. So this article will focus on the top 5 things you can do to improve performance for many different types of databases and give some examples from performance testing that my team and I have done.

SQL Server Memory Management – Max Server Memory, Reservations, Lock Pages, PageFile

SQL Server, like any RDBMS is really a big cache for data at the end of your storage, regardless of what storage is under the covers. Allocating the right amount of memory to the SQL Server Instance, and ensuring the Operating System has enough memory so it doesn’t cause swapping, are our primary goals. Then we need to look at protecting the SQL Buffer Cache from paging and protecting the VM memory. Paging of the database buffer cache can cause sever performance problems for a busy database server.

Max memory should be changed from the default of 2PB to a value that allows the OS some breathing room. On small SQL Server VM’s with only 16GB or 32GB RAM setting Max Memory to Allocated Memory – 4GB is a good place to start. For larger VM’s the OS may need 16GB or 32GB, and this can be impacted by the number of agents and other tools you have running in the OS. I have seen recommendations that you should leave 10% available for the OS, however this becomes problematic if your VM has a lot of RAM, say 512GB to 2TB.

Reserve the memory assigned to the SQL VM. This guarantees the service levels to the SQL Database, ensures that at least from a memory standpoint it will get the best performance possible, and it will mean the hypervisor page file will not take up any valuable storage. For SQL server VM’s > 16GB memory, and where lock pages are used this is even more critical as hypervisor ballooning is not effective.

Enable the local security policy “lock pages in memory” for the SQL Database service account and set trace flag -T834. This will ensure that the SQL Server instance uses huge pages on the operating system and it protects the database from any OS swapping, as huge pages can’t be swapped. This also reduces the work the OS needs to do with regard to memory management. Huge pages on x86 are 2MB in size, vs the standard 4KB page size that is used by default. Using this setting also prevents ballooning from impacting the SQL Server Instance and is another reason to reserve the memory.

I recommend that you allocate a pagefile big enough for a small kernel dump at minimum, and up to 16GB to 32GB as maximum. If you design your SQL Server VM properly you will not have any OS paging, therefore you shouldn’t need a large pagefile. If you are designing a template that will be used for multiple different sized SQL VM’s then you could consider setting the pagefile to a standard size of 16GB and leaving it at that. The less variation required the better. By reserving the VM memory, locking pages in memory and using -T834 the buffer cache of the DB can’t be paged anyway. These settings will ensure the best possible service level and performance for your database at least in memory.

Split User DB Datafiles and TempDB Across Drives and Controllers

This applies especially to high performance databases. SQL Server can issue a lot of outstanding IO operations and this can cause the queue of a particular drive to become full and prevent the IO’s from being released to the underlying storage for processing. To help alleviate this for large high performance databases you should create the databases with more than one data file (recommended 1 per vCPU allocated to the DB), and allocate each datafile on a different drive. If you have many smaller and less high performance databases you can simply split the database data files across more drives or mount points if you determine a single drive does not provide sufficient performance.

For TempDB the recommendation is 1 datafile per vCPU up to 8 initially and then grow 4 at a time from there as needed. The process of allocating datafiles to TempDB has been automated in SQL Server 2016 so it will choose the correct initial number based on the number of vCPU’s allocated. The reason for doing this is to prevent GAM and SGAM contention.

Each virtual drive and each virtual controller has a queue depth limit, so splitting the datafiles across controllers also helps to eliminate bottlenecks. In a VMware environment you can use up to 4 virtual SCSI controllers, such as PVSCSI and it would be recommended to split the data files across them. You can also tune each controller queue depth by changing registry settings, but be aware of the potential impact on your back end storage. Having really large individual drives / virtual disks might give you extra capacity but it gives you no more performance as the queue depth per device is always limited. This is also the case in cloud environments such as Azure and aligns with Microsoft SQL CAT recommendations.

The image below shows one such design that may be appropriate for splitting data files. This example uses mount points, but you could also use drive letters.

Thanks to Kasim Hansia and Nutanix for the above image.

CPU Sizing, NUMA and MaxDOP

When it comes to CPU sizing for your database VM’s the best size is one that fits within a NUMA boundary. So for a two socket platform this would be a size that fits within a single socket or is easily divisible by the number of cores in a single socket. If you have very large physical servers currently with many databases on them, chopping them up into smaller size VM’s that fit within a NUMA node will help improve performance. The best size of a VM on a system with 8 cores per socket would be 2, 4, or 8 vCPU as an example. In terms of CPU overcommitment a 1:1 vCPU to pCPU core ratio is recommended to start with unless you have a good knowledge of actual system performance, at least for critical production systems, for dev/test a higher ration can be used to start. You can modify increase the ratio as you monitor actual system performance. Production systems general run between 2:1 and 4:1 realistically assuming not all database instances and VM’s running on the host or cluster need the same resources at exactly the same time. You need to design for peak workloads demands and then the averages will take care of themselves.

For very large databases this may not be possible and in that case it is ok to have a VM that spans NUMA nodes as Windows and SQL Server are NUMA aware and will use the processors available to them assuming the correct license, however the scaling of processors across NUMA boundaries in a single VM doesn’t provide linear performance, whereas splitting multiple smaller databases across multiple smaller VM’s that do fit within NUMA boundaries can provide better performance than would otherwise be available on a single physical OS or VM. When it comes to memory and NUMA, more is better for databases and as memory is so much faster than disk or SSD or even NVMe, the penalty for having memory in different NUMA nodes when virtual NUMA is available is not a concern.

With regards to the SQL Server setting Maximum Degree of Parallelism that controls the number of threads or processors that a single query can consume, you need to be careful with modifying it. For OLTP transactional type databases you can get significant performance gains overall when large numbers of users are concurrently accessing the system if MaxDOP is set to a small number or 1, however it is a global setting on the SQL Server instance in versions before 2016 and therefore will impact all databases on an instance. A good rule of thumb may be to set it to an the size of a NUMA node, or some number of processors you are happy to be consumed by a single query. In SQL Server 2016 you can set it per database, so it can be more finely tuned to the individual database workloads. Leaving it at the default of 0 i.e. unlimited can also have negative performance impacts especially when many users access a database as a single query could consume all resources and negatively impact other users.

Networking, Live Migration, Jumbo Frames

When it comes to networking you need to consider more than just the user access to the database, you need to consider management workloads including live migration for maintenance and load balancing, backup, monitoring and out of band management. With very large SQL Server VM’s with 512GB and above the live migration network may have some hefty requirements. Especially with very active SQL Server VM’s. I have seen the live migration networks struggle with evacuating a host for maintenance if they were not designed and implemented correctly. If you have hosts with multiple TB of RAM and enough VM’s to occupy that RAM you should consider multiple 10G networks for live migration traffic. Using LACP network configurations can indeed help, as can using Jumbo Frames. As you start adopting 40GbE, 50GbE and above NIC’s the use of Jumbo Frames to increase performance and lower CPU utilization becomes ever more important. You can achieve up to 10% to 15% additional performance by using Jumbo Frames for live migration traffic depending on CPU type and bandwidth of you NIC. But take care as it does need to be implemented properly. It is fortunate that many enterprise class switches now come with Jumbo Frames enabled by default, but you will still need to enable it in your hypervisor and on the life migration virtual NIC. If you are using Jumbo Frames why not enable SQL Server to use a packet size of 8192 bytes instead of the standard 4096 (same size as a database page although there is no direct relationship), 8192 bytes and it fits nicely into the 8972 byte TCP packet (9000 bytes with overhead included) on the wire. Take into consideration the network impacts of any software defined storage solution especially as adopting modern all flash systems because your network may be too slow for flash.

Maintaining an Accurate and Objective Performance Baseline

Maintaining an accurate and objective performance baseline of your databases is the only real way to measure when things are going wrong or when performance is not acceptable. Before, during and after virtualization you should be updating your baslines whenever major configuration changes are made. This prevents the ‘feeling’ that it’s slow, without defining what slow it, or without being able to quantify the feeling. If you can accurately test acceptable performance and repeat that test then you can be sure your system is behaving as expected throughout its useful life. This is not as easy as it sounds, and due to the many hundreds or thousands of databases that most customers have, a risk based approach is recommended. For the most important or highest risk systems it’s worthwhile making the investment into proper baselines and monitoring, for the great unwashed this might not be practical. There are many tools that can help, and they start from industry standard benchmarks and system monitoring tools to more elaborate enterprise test suites. We cover a number of different options in our book, but a simple option might be to use HammerDB, Record and Replay, and/or SCOM/PerfMon. Without a baseline you have no objective way to measure success.

Performance Results With and Without Best Practices

When you’ve been successfully virtualizing SQL Server for years and you know the best practices it is pretty hard to go back and create a database VM with next, next finish and ignore all that you have learned. But that is just what we had to do in order to measure the difference between the default configuration and applying the best practices. In this case we used a VM with 8 vCPU, 32GB RAM and HammerDB. The only difference between the two tests was the configuration of SQL Server and the operating system. The same number of users in HammerDB are used for each test.

Default configuration without best practices applied:

Configuration after best practices have been applied:

Thanks to Bas Raayman and Bruno Sousa for the two images above.

In this example the difference in performance is 12x between the default configuration and the optimized configuration. The benefits grow as you start to scale out the number of VM’s and number of servers, which is what the next image shows.

Here we have a number of database VM’s being scaled our across a number of servers, in this case using Nutanix systems. The performance growth is linear, as you add more VM’s and more Nutanix nodes you get the same performance per node, and linearly scalability of the overall performance in terms of transactions per minute.

#TBT A blast from the past (2014) Scaling 1M MS SQL transactions per #Nutanix node.https://t.co/CDwiVQKMbQ pic.twitter.com/eViiA3b10m

— Gary Little (@garyjlittle) January 26, 2017

Final Word

We have covered a few best practices that can help improve performance and ensure success of any virtualization project. There is significantly more covered in Virtualizing SQL Server With VMware: Doing IT Right (VMware Press 2014). I also had a hand in crafting the Nutanix best practices for SQL Server, which is freely available. Nutanix has published many best practice guides for many applications and a lot of them are applicable regardless of what system you are running. Hopefully applying some of these simple best practices helps improve the performance of your virtualized SQL Server environments. I’d love to hear any feedback or comments you might have.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Most VMware admins know by now that auto tiering storage systems should have SIOC configured differently than if they have storage systems that don’t do auto tiering. Especially if it’s auto tiering at block level. It’s also recommended to have IO metric collection disabled because it will get different results based on where the blocks on the datastore physically reside. What you may not know is that VMware has enabled IO metric collection for every datastore by default with ESXi 6.0. This can cause some weird latency spikes on your storage system that can be very hard to isolate if you don’t know what you’re looking for or what might be causing it. So here is how you fix the problem.

If like a lot of people you still primarily use the C# client for vSphere then you will have to switch to a web browser to fix this problem. This will require you log into the vSphere Web Client. Once you are logged in select Storage -> <Datastore> -> Manage. You should see something similar to the following image:

Click on the Edit button and then click the check box next to Disable Storage I/O statistics collection as in the image below:

Click Ok and repeat the process for your other datastores.

If you would like to do the above more automatically by using a PowerCLI Script, please check out this great blog post by Burke Azbill here.

Final Word

Hopefully the above helps you reduce any unexpected latency spikes on your datastores and storage systems you use with ESXi 6.0. As the number of storage systems with auto tiering and multiple storage types increases over time this becomes even more relevant. Given the trends in the industry it is a wonder VMware made this a default setting in the first place. As storage systems become more intelligent there is less and less need for features such as Storage IO Control, which means admins should be able to focus on other more important things, rather than worrying about noisy neighbor problems. FYI, If you are a Nutanix customer this also applies to you. I found this little gem while running an NCC check on a cluster that I was getting periodic unexplained latency spikes. Needless to say the problem has now been resolved after making this change.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

When you are running a VMware environment for your private cloud I’ve always recommended customer look seriously at the VMware management tools to get the most value out of their environments. Many customers miss out of critical information that could help their business by not making the investment in tools such as vRealize Operations Suite and vRealize Log Insight (although I think we all agree the name is pretty bad, VMware hasn’t vRealized it yet). Having management packs and content packs available that integrate with these tools makes it easier for customers to get not only more value out of their VMware environment, but more value out of the components that make up their complete private cloud or enterprise cloud ecosystem. There are vRealize Operations and Log Insight management packs or content packs for App Delivery Controllers (F5), Databases (Oracle & SQL), Servers (e.g. Dell, Lenovo and others), and now Nutanix.

In this article we will look at two different management tools from VMware and their respective integration with Nutanix. Firstly VMware vRealize Operations Suite and then vRealize Log Insight. Both of these tools can reduce problem resolution times, and allow operations teams to be far more proactive and responsive to business needs, especially in large VMware environments.

vRealize Operations Management Pack for Nutanix

While I was at VMware I worked with the team at Blue Medora and customers implementing vRealize Operations. Blue Medora created a lot of great management packs that fit into the vRealize Operations Suite, including the Oracle management pack I wrote about here. When I joined Nutanix I started to look at ways we could better integrate into the VMware ecosystem and vRealize Operations was one of those ways. After some early initial discussions and a lot of effort on Blue Medora’s part, I’m pleased to say that the Blue Medora vRealize Operations Management Pack for Nutanix is now available.

The Blue Medora vRealize Operations Management Pack for Nutanix allows you to monitor the health of your hyperconverged systems inside vRealize Operations— alongside the rest of your heterogeneous IT stack. Once installed, you’ll see your Nutanix systems within vRealize Operations Views—giving you a clear and accurate understanding of the relationships between Nutanix and VMware VMs, hosts and datastores. As mentioned above you can additionally add in management packs for F5, Dell, Lenovo, Oracle etc, to further build out dashboards that can correlate real application behaviour and performance across your environment.

Blue Medora has integrated Nutanix specific alerts and configuration practices into the vRealize Operations Management Pack using the Nutanix REST API’s. The above image shows some of the alerts that are included.

Included in the management pack are custom dashboards that include the full integrated environment and detailed metrics. The management pack will work with any Nutanix environment as it uses the REST API’s to collect the metrics. So even if you have a heterogenous environment, you can benefit from the vRealize Operations Management packs if you run Nutanix.

You can even deep dive into the hundreds of metrics that are made available to vRealize Operttions via the Nutanix REST API’s. To find out more about the Blue Medora vRealize Operations Management Pack for Nutanix please visit their web site.

vRealize Log Insight Content Pack for Nutanix

If you have VMware and logs then you should have vRealize Log Insight. Log Insight correlates logs across many different systems and has content packs that allow mere mortals to interpret the logs and find trends. VMware has released a content pack for Nutanix that can process all of the Nutanix logs and present them in vRealize Log Insight dashboards. Here is an example of the overview dashboard:

Important to note that Nutanix does not support any agents being installed on the Nutanix Controller VM’s. To avoid needing to do this you should use the rsyslog configuration through NCLI to set up the Nutanix logs to go to a remote host. You can then process the logs on the remote host and have the vRealize Log Insight agent on the central log host. This would be a supported configuration. Adam Baron already found this out and commented on the VMware Blog Article about the content pack for Log Insight:

“Nutanix do not support the installation of the log insight agent in the CVM’s so getting the logs that way is not possible – however there is support to rsyslog configurations on the CVM. The downside to this is that none of the dashboards work because of the way the data is tagged with *product* ‘NUTANIX’ when it is collected by agent. in the end I removed this from the dashboards, added in *appname* of ‘stargate, prism, genesis, cassandr*, acropolis, curator, cerebro, zookeeper, prism_gateway’ and did the same with the custom fields that were associated with the dashboards too.
Now it’s all working as expected, and fully supported by Nutanix”

Final Word

The VMware vRealize Operations Suite and Log Insight are incredibly useful tools that VMware customers can leverage to get more value from their existing investments. They work in heterogenous environments, so even if you have some physical components, you can plumb solutions together to correlate events and reduce troubleshooting and restoration time, or prevent problems even happening in the first place. If you are going to run these management tools and others you should consider having a management cluster, that is separate from the infrastructure being managed. You should also consider the backup, recovery and DR plans for your management tools, as well as the security of them and how you will review logs if one site has been compromised. It’s always a good idea to have logs mirrored across two sites at least. These two management packs add to the already very tight integration between Nutanix and the VMware ecosystem.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Licensing databases in your datacenter is a complex task. Remaining compliant with the licensing agreement is also complex. You need to figure out what is fact (and legally binding), vs what is FUD or fiction (of no consequence to your contractual obligations). When it comes to Oracle this is a topic I have covered a lot in the past and you can find references to it on my Oracle Page here. I haven’t really covered other databases in the past as they are more clear cut and their licensing policies and vendor sales teams are usually much more honest and transparent. But Oracle is really the ISIS of your datacenter when it comes to software licensing and it’s time every customer and their vendors stood united. It’s time we all started to give them what they deserve, which is less of your money, or more specifically, only what you owe them and not a penny more. Nothing will change until customers demand change and vote with their wallet. So it’s good to see there are some new resources that you can use to help you in the fight against the licensing terrorists in your datacenter.

So what prompted this renewed angst against the global villain, axis of evil that is Oracle Licensing? My good friends Dave Welch (other articles by Dave are here) and House of Brick have recently published a white paper on licensing databases in a virtualized environment. Although the paper specifically targets VMware and EMC technology it is applicable to all environments. Nobody would argue that Oracle doesn’t have great technology, but universally their licensing practices make them more like mob bosses or terrorists (spreading licensing terror), than a technology company. How this happened and why it continues to persist is beyond comprehension.

Chad Sakac, President of VCE, has lamented this same problem in his article here. My experience is very similar to what Chad is describing. While we may not agree in some areas, where Oracle Licensing is concerned, we certainly do. Everyone that is running databases in their virtualized environment needs to read the House of Brick white paper. Let’s fight the FUD and eradicate the technology terrorist threat from our data centers.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

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