Automation, Nutanix, Nutanix AHV, Openshift, Redhat

Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix HCI – Nutanix.dev

This post is an index for all the Nutanix.dev posts related to how to deploy RedHat Openshfit on Nutanix HCI

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Nutanix, Nutanix AHV, Openshift, Redhat

Technote – Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix

Not some days back Nutanix announced a strategic partnership and not only certified RHEL but Red Hat OpenShift becomes the preferred enterprise full stack Kubernetes Solution on Nutanix Cloud Platform with AHV and vice versa.

The announcement can be found here

Today Nutanix had released Technote #2030 for individuals responsible for designing, building, managing, and supporting Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix infrastructures. This document covers;

  • Planning and deploying OpenShift on Nutanix AHV.
  • Integrating OpenShift into Nutanix Unified Storage.
  • Appropriate strategies for integrating with an existing deployment

The document can be accessed through Nutanix portal in Solutions Documentation or here

Nutanix, Nutanix Calm

Nutanix Calm Version 3.5 — Virtualization, DBaaS & Whatever Crosses My Mind

With the new Calm 3.5 release we are getting a feature requested by more and more Nutanix customers and that is —-Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Support—- This is really great news and brings another layer of flexibility and security to your overall self-service solution driven by Calm. A tunnel virtual machine (VM) is required on…

Nutanix Calm Version 3.5 — Virtualization, DBaaS & Whatever Crosses My Mind
Nutanix

AOS 6.1 Improvements for Day-2 database operations. — n0derunner

AOS 6.1 greatly improved database performance on Nutanix especially when the guest VM uses just a single disk for all the database files. The underlying change is known as vdisk sharding. Basically it allows the Nutanix CVM to scale up the number of threads used to service a single virtual disk under heavy load. IOPS…

AOS 6.1 Improvements for Day-2 database operations. — n0derunner
Nutanix

What’s New: Nutanix AOS 6.1 and Prism Central 2022.1.

Today Nutanix announce the release of new AOS and Prism Central versions with performance enhancements and key features to raise the bar with new milestones.

Below are some of the salient features as part of the release.

AOS 6.1 (STS)

NOTE: AOS 6.1 is Short Term Release

Improved Single vDisk Performance: This feature enabled multithreaded vDisk controller where based on size and IO of the vDisk, the IO will be sharded to multiple threads. This will improve the performance of workload where distributing data between multiple disks is not possible like huge databases.

Enhanced Security with Restricted Shell Access: This will improve the security posture of Nutanix AOS with,

  1. Ability to freeze the security configuration and settings through Nutanix Command-Line Interface (nCLI). You must contact Nutanix Support to unlock the security configuration to allow for changes.
  2. Optional feature that imposes certain restrictions on the “nutanix” account access to the nCLI and encourage the usage of “admin” account for basic administrative workflows.

Optane Tier for NVMe: In an all-NVMe configuration having Intel Optane drives, Intel Optane is tier 0 and part of ILM multi-tiering architecture. AOS will migrate the random data read with high frequency (read-hot random data) to the Optane performance tier since Optane drives provide very low read latency. 

Dark Theme on Prism UI: Dark Theme in the UI sets a dark background with high contrast view of the Prism UI background.

Whole Node Maintenance Mode: Now Prism Element has the feature to enter/exit a node in and out of maintenance mode with all the VM migration and/or power actions workflow.

VM Centric Storage Policy: Through Prism Central this feature will let you manage the storage attributes like encryption, compression, and QoS for VMs running on AHV clusters by categories.

Space Reporting Enhancements in Storage Summary Widget: The Storage Summary Widget now shows the Total Used Capacity for the snapshots (in GiB or TiB) and resilient capacity of the cluster.

NGT Windows Performance Monitor (perfmon) Integration: This feature provides the ability to monitor the hosts specific metrics for a VM in a guest VM running the Windows OS. The supported metrics are fetched from the CVM and are published to the Microsoft Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon) utility on the guest VM after the NGT metrics collection is enabled on the UVM.

Support for In-place Entity Restore with Leap Recovery Points:  In-place restoration enables you to restore guest VMs with the same properties like UUIDs, network routing, MAC addresses, hostnames as that of the original guest VMs, and therefore maintain the operational workflow.

Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2022: AOS 6.1 supports guest VMs running Microsoft Windows Server 2022.

Enhanced Cluster Expansion Capabilities: AOS now supports concurrent requests for node preparation and expand the cluster. configuring node networking information, storing network configuration settings, and specifying whether a node should be a hyperconverged (HCI) or storage-only node.

Network Segmentation Enhancements: These will enable to configuring Backplane IP Pool, Enabling Backplane Network Segmentation on a Mixed Hypervisor Cluster, Updating Backplane Portgroup, IP Address Customization for Each CVM and Host, Enabling Physical Backplane Segmentation on Hyper-V.

Removing Multiple Nodes from a Cluster: Now AOS allows you to remove multiple nodes from a cluster.

Support for Storage only Nodes When Expanding Clusters: AOS 6.1 introduces the option to choose Storage only nodes during the expand cluster.

Support for Restoring Network Configuration during Host Break-fix: Now you can store cluster-wide network configurations at regular intervals or on-demand. The stored network configuration can be used to restore a node to the same configuration in break-fix scenarios.

Additionally few Volume Group Enhancements, PagerDuty Integration with Prism, New CHAP Algorithms for Volumes, along with bug fixes and security patches.

Prism Central 2022.1

Category-based Host affinity policy: This feature will enable VM-Host affinity policy in Prism Central using categories. This feature will let easily manage affinities for a large number of VMs.

AHV VM templates: This release introduces the VM templates feature for AHV VMs. The feature enables you to create and manage a master copy of a VM that you can use to deploy multiple VMs across clusters. A template includes the guest operating system, VM configuration (that may include multiple disks), and all the applications installed on the VM. You can maintain multiple versions of a template. The feature also enables you to upgrade the guest operating system of the template.

Storage Container Management: This feature extends the existing storage container management in Prism Element to Prism Central. The functionality helps the users to create, update, delete the Storage Container through Prism Central.

Along with Dark Theme on Prism UI, Categories Services, Nutanix V4 API Versioning, Utility Actions Enhancements, Ownership of Restored VM from Recovery Point and along with bug fixes and security patches.

As always go through the release notes and documentation before upgrading cluster AOS and Prism Central.

Nutanix, Nutanix ERA

Nutanix – Database Migration — Virtualization, DBaaS & Whatever Crosses My Mind

Customers has been running databases on top of Nutanix HCI for quite a few years and the number keeps increasing. One reason being is obviously the magic HCI solution but another major reason is the Nutanix Database Management solution, Era, which i believe you are already familiar with. 11 more words

Nutanix – Database Migration — Virtualization, DBaaS & Whatever Crosses My Mind
Nutanix

Nutanix AOS 6.1 – Multi-node removal & the advantages for Public Cloud Bursting. — CloudXC

I’ve previous detailed the many advantages the Nutanix AOS solution provides in terms of Scalability, Resiliency and Performance including detailed posts on rebuild performance which ensures Nutanix environments can restore themselves to a fully resilient state as soon as possible … Continue reading →

Nutanix AOS 6.1 – Multi-node removal & the advantages for Public Cloud Bursting. — CloudXC
Nutanix, Nutanix ERA

Nutanix Era ServiceNow Plugin 2.0 Released — Virtualization, DBaaS & Whatever Crosses My Mind

For almost 6 months ago Nutanix released an initial version of its Era ServiceNow plugin which i wrote about here. Today a new version, 2.0, of the ServiceNow certified plugin has been release and made available via the ServiceNow store. Picture borrowed from ServiceNow web page  In addition to the plugin capabilities included in the…

Nutanix Era ServiceNow Plugin 2.0 Released — Virtualization, DBaaS & Whatever Crosses My Mind
Nutanix, Nutanix ERA

Nutanix Era with Oracle Databases – By Marc Wagner at dbi-Services

The post are authored by Marc Wagner at dbi-Services, all credits goes to original author, this post is just reference collection of series posts.

What is Nutanix Era

Nutanix Era is a suite of software which automates and simplifies database management, bringing one-click simplicity and invisible operations to database provisioning and lifecycle management (LCM). Starting with Copy Data Management (CDM) as its first offering, Nutanix Era enables database admins to provision, clone, refresh and restore their databases to any point in time. Through a rich, but simple to use, UI and CLI, they can restore to the latest application-consistent transaction.

Nutanix Era with Oracle Databases : Part 1 – Introduction

Nutanix Era with Oracle Databases : Part 2 – Create an Oracle Database template VM

Nutanix Era with Oracle Databases : Part 3 – Provision an Oracle database

Nutanix Era with Oracle Databases : Part 4 – Taking a snapshot and running Log Catch Up

Nutanix Era with Oracle Databases : Part 5 – Clone an Oracle Database

Nutanix Era with Oracle Databases : Part 6 – Refresh an Oracle Clone Database