IT BLOOD PRESSURE

May

Part 1 was the overview of the magic of the Nutanix Distributed File System(NDFS).
Part 2 was an overview of Zookeeper in regards maintaining configuration across a distributed cluster built for virtual workloads.
Part 3 is the reason why Nutanix can scale to infinity, a distributed metadata layer make up of Medusa and Apache Cassandra.

Before starting at Nutanix I wrote a brief article on Medusa, Nutanix: Medusa and No Master. Medusa is a Nutanix abstraction layer that sits in front of a NoSQL database that holds the metadata of all data in the cluster. The database is distributed across all nodes in the cluster, using a modified form of Apache Cassandra. As virtual machines move around the nodes(servers) in the cluster they know where all their data is sitting. The ability to quickly know where all the data is sitting is why hard drive failures, node failures and even whole blocks* can fail and the cluster can carry on.

When a file reaches 512K in size, the cluster creates a vDisk to hold the data. Files small than 512K will be stored inside of Cassandra. Cassandra runs on all nodes of the cluster. These nodes communicate with each other once a second, using the Gossip protocol, ensuring that the state of the database is current on all nodes.

A vDisk is a subset of available storage within a container. The cluster automatically creates and manages vDisks within an NFS container. A general rule is that you will see a vDisk for every vmdk since most times they are over 512K. While the vDisk is abstracted away from the virtualization admin it’s important to understand. vDisk’s are how Nutanix is able to present vast amounts of storage to virtual machines with only having a subset of the total amount on anyone node.

vDisks are Block-level devices for VMDKs,
These are mapped seamlessly through the Nutanix NFS Datastore

vDisks are made up of extents and extents groups which help to serialize the data to disk. This process also helps avoid misalignment issues with older operating systems. All of the blocks that make up a vDisk are maintained my Medusa. As workloads migrate between flash and HDD automatically, consistency is maintained across the cluster. If hot data is in flash on one node in the cluster, it’s replica is also in flash on another node, vice versa if the data is stored on HDD.

Cassandra does depend on Zeus to gather information about the cluster configuration.

* You need three blocks before you can survive a whole block going down, we call this feature block awareness.

May

Why Nutanix is getting traction & how it works?

By dlessner | Featured

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May

EUC Tip 85: GPU Pairing with View 5.2

By dlessner | EUC Tips, Featured

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Just like pairing a fine cheese with the perfect side to please the senses and your appetite, you must do the same for your new GPU with View 5.2.

For your GPU users you want to match the MaxAppFrameRate with the PCoIP frame rate. If your GPU is rendering a workload higher than the PCoIP Max you’re wasting resources for no real gain.

MaxAppFrameRate
HKLM\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware SVGA DevTap\MaxAppFrameRate

PCoIP
HKEYLOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Teradici\PC0IP\pcoip_admin\pcoip.maximum_frame_rate

For more performance information read this whitepaper from VMware,
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/vmware-horizon-view-hardware-accelerated-3Dgraphics-performance-study.pdf

May

Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform – Part 2: ZZ Top

By dlessner | Featured, Nutanix, Storage

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In case you missed Part 1 – Part 1: Built For Scale and Agility

No it’s not Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, or drummer Frank Beard. It’s Zeus and Zookeeper providing the strong blues that allow the Nutanix Distributed File System to maintain it’s configuration across the entire cluster.
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May

Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform – Part 1: Built For Scale and Agility

By dlessner | Featured, Nutanix, Storage

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Lots of talk in the industry about how had software defined storage first and who was using what components. I don’t want to go down that rat hole since it’s all marketing and it won’t help you at the end of the day to enable your business. I want to really get into the nitty gritty of the Nutanix Distributed Files System(NDFS). NDFS has been in production for over a year and half with good success, take read of the article on the Wall Street Journal.

Below are core services and components that make NDFS tick. There are actually over 13 services, for example our replication is distributed across all the nodes to provide speed and low impact on the system. The replication service is called Cerebro which we will get to in this series.

This isn’t some home grown science experiment, the engineers that wrote the code come from Google, Facebook, Yahoo where this components where invented. It’s important to realize that all components are replaceable or future proofed if you will. The services\libraries provide the API’s so as newest innovations happen in the community, Nutanix is positioned to take advantage.

All the services mentioned above run on multiple nodes in cluster a master-less fashion to provide availability. The nodes talk over 10 GbE and are able to scale in a linear fashion. There is no performance degradation as you add nodes. Other vendors have to use InfiniBand because they don’t share the metadata cross all of the nodes. Those vendors end up putting a full copy of the metadata on each node, this eventually will cause them to hit a performance cliff and the scaling stops. Each Nutanix node acts a storage controller allowing you to do things like have a datastore of 10,000 VM’s without any performance impact.

While the diagram can look a little daunting, rest assured the complexity has been abstracted away for the end user. It’s a radical shift in data center architecture and will be fun breaking it down.

May

Login VSI v4.0: So Easy I Could Use It

By dlessner | Featured, Virtualization

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Below is a listing of the new and great things in Login VSI 4.0 which is GA tomorrow. I think the greatest thing from my perspective is ease of use that was focused in the new release. Login VSI is going from a tool used by Partners and Consultants to a tool that can be used by the regular joe. Not that anyone couldn’t figure it out before, it just wasn’t something you would keep running as a customer.

At a feature level, Direct Desktop Launch (DDL) is my prized gem for this release. From a Nutanix perspective I can take 3 or 4 nodes in a separate cluster and quickly figure out the impact of hardware or software changes on my VDI environment with out a lot of required infrastructure. Take the number of desktops I can run after the change and divide by the number of nodes I was testing with. So even if I have 5,000 VDI production environment, I really only need to maintain 4 node test environment to get a deep understanding of a pending change on my environment. I think customers should be looking at this tool moving forward.
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Apr

Why Veeam and Nutanix? Fast, Low Impact, Results

By dlessner | Nutanix, Storage, Virtualization

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* Nutanix is able to sense traffic patterns and can prevent flooding the high performance tier with replication

* Both offer top class Time to Value. With Nutanix’s ability to go from shrink wrapped to production in 1 hr or less paired with easy to setup replication from Veeam. Remote sites can be easily sprung up. Set and forget.

* IT teams don’t have double the time to setup DR facilities. Veeam gives the ability to provide replication from legacy storage arrays to the Nutanix Complete Cluster
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Apr

VMworld 2013: 3rd time is the Charm?

By dlessner | VMware View

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I have presented at BriForum from 2011 – 2012, vForums and various VMUGS but never at VMworld. I had a pretty lack lustred effort this year on my submission to BriForum and it showed. I was also betting on two other vendors for my APEX + GPU + View 5.2 to become a reality at BriForum so I am not surprised nor mad.

I’ve made serious efforts with VMworld sessions in the past with out much luck. I am very hopeful this year though. My session this year – 5060 Benchmarking the Horizon Workspace Appliance with Performance and Scalability – is pretty cool. The session is a chance to showcase new a approach to load testing the Horizon Workspace. I hope I get the chance to co-present with Manrat Chobchuen from VMware.

If doesn’t happen it will be great for my local VMUG!

Pick want you want to see at VMworld while the voting is open

Apr

Busting Down The Doors of Private Cloud

By dlessner | Featured

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“By 2017, the major public cloud compute architectures will be common architectures in enterprises.”

“The greatest transformation from the cloud will come from true scale-out application architectures.”

Gartner Data Center Conference, Keynote: Rethink Infrastructure and Operations to Dramatically Reduce Costs, Raymond Paquet, December 2012.

Nutanix is helping to bring Private Cloud to the Enterprise by embracing the Software Defined Data Center(SDDC) story. The engineers of Nutanix, which consist of people from Google, Aster Data, Facebook, Oracle, Yahoo(should be enough name dropping) have helped to bring all the intelligence out of big iron hardware and into software so it can be quickly scaled up and out. In essence they have flattened the data center, combining storage and compute in one easy nice pill to sallow. The pill happens to be in dense block form factor but the magic is in the software.
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Apr