Tag: Nutanix

Nutanix .NEXT EU 2018 Announcements

This week, Nutanix .NEXT EU 2018 is being held in London. There are six announcements of note:

  • Nutanix Xtract announcements:
    • Xtract 2.0 GA Targeted for FY Q2
      • Support for AWS as a source
      • Performance enhancements to reduce migration time
      • Installation & Upgrade improvements for 1-click experience
    • AWS to AHV Customer Preview
      • Migrate running EC2 instances to AHV
      • Mini instance of Xtract deployed on AWS to orchestrate migration
      • User VMs “instrumented” to determine change block tracks and AHV conversion
    • Hyper-V to AHV Alpha
      • Win 2012R2 and 2016 supported
      • Alpha in progress and GA targeted for 1H 2019
  • Nutanix Era announcements:
    • Era 1.0 is GA
    • Supports Oracle 11.2.0.4 & 12.1.0.2
    • Supports PostgreSQL 9.6 & 10.3
  • Nutanix Karbon announced and in Tech Preview (on-prem Kubernetes)
  • Nutanix Files:
    • Version 3.2 November 2018 GA
      • Nested Shares
      • Larger Shares (140TB/share)
      • SMB signing performance
    • Version 3.5 December 2018 GA
      • NFS v3 Early Access
      • Multiprotocol Early Access
      • File Analytics 1.0
      • NFS self-service restore
      • NFS Change File Tracking (CFT)
  • Xi Leap DR service available in December 2018:
    • North America only
    • Offered as a cloud service with monthly, 1 year or 3 year subscriptions
    • Sold directly and through channel partners
  • Xi IOT service announced (no other details provided)

Running @IBM AIX with @Nutanix software

Earlier this year IBM announced that AIX is supported on the Nutanix platform. This is in addition to the 2017 announcement of PowerLinux being initially supported.

What does this mean if you are a customer, particularly in finance? You finally have a web-scale platform that you can use to consolidate all of your legacy and cloud-native applications onto. Those vertically-scaled mission critical applications running on AIX and PowerLinux finally have a modern platform that aligns with your x86 workloads. Strategically, this makes the Nutanix platform a great choice if you need a stepping stone for non-x86 to x86 application refactoring (assuming your applications fit on the scale-out POWER8 CS hardware and do not require the POWER8 E8XX big iron).

Requirements of the solution:

  • You need IBM POWER8 technology-based CS821 and CS822 nodes.
  • Running Acropolis Operating System (AOS) 5.2.1.1 and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) 20170331.78.
  • For AIX 7.2 with the 7200-02 Technology Level with Service Pack 7200-02-02-1810 and APAR IJ05283, or later.
  • For PowerLinux, SLES 11 or 12, Ubuntu 16.04 or 17.04, CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 are supported.

Some caveats and additional information:

  • LPARs, VIO Server and HMC are no longer required and are replaced by AHV, Prism and IPMI as the management and virtualization platform.
  • Nutanix X-Ray 2.3 and above supports the IBM CS platform as test targets for scenario-centric performance testing.
  • Need to ensure app/DB binaries are ported to ppc64le (PowerLinux) and ppc64be (AIX) to run on the IBM CS platform with AHV.
  • NIM/mksysb are supported.
  • Data can be migrated using similar techniques available to the Nutanix x86 platform.
  • Intel CPUs have 2 threads per core, IBM POWER8 CPUs have 8 threads per core.
  • AHV schedules threads for x86 and cores for POWER8.
  • POWER8 processors excel at computationally intensive workloads, in particular high throughput databases and congnitive/AI workloads.
  • Purchases are transacted through IBM channel partners or IBM Power Systems server sales.
  • You contact IBM for support.
  • Implementation services via IBM Lab Services.
  • Nutanix sales teams can assist customers with the sales process.

Additional Resources

Nutanix AOS 5.5 Released

Nutanix has released version 5.5 (codename “Obelix”) of their Acropolis Operating System (AOS). For Nutants, this release is the capstone of Nutanix goodness. Be aware that the full list of Obelix features could not fit into one major release and is actually being released over the coming months as a series of minor releases (5.5.0, 5.5.1, 5.5.2, etc.).

This obviously also means that the supporting components of the Nutanix eco-system also have new releases to complement AOS, namely AHV, Prism Central, NCC, LCM and Foundation. Please refer to the resources section at the end for links to downloads and release notes.

Continue reading Nutanix AOS 5.5 Released

Nutanix .NEXT EU Announcements

Last week, Nutanix .NEXT EU was held in Nice, France. There were four announcements of note:

Directly modifying ESXi host managed by vCenter Server

In the world of Nutanix HCI on vSphere, you sometimes do not have access to the vCenter Server, but you do have the root credentials of the ESXi host. However, when you try to make your changes, the ESXi host returns the message, “Access to resource settings on the host is restricted to the server that is managing it”.

There is one particular administrator task where this workaround comes into play: the Nutanix CVM resizing procedure to increase/decrease vCPU and RAM. I always forget the exact details of this workaround and then spend 30 minutes searching for it, so here it is. If this was a Production system, then obviously you would have an approved Change Request before you executed the workaround.

Continue reading Directly modifying ESXi host managed by vCenter Server

#Nutanix #NEXTConf 2017 US Announcements

Today Nutanix announced three major products: Xi Cloud Services, Calm and Xtract.

Nutanix Xi Cloud Services

  • Native cloud extension to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.
  • This is a hybrid cloud play, not a public cloud play.
  • Xi DRaaS is the first service to be offered.
  • Initial service locations (4): Oakland and Santa Clara, CA and Ashburn, VA (2).
  • Nutanix is using Co-location with NX infrastructure to provide Xi Cloud Services. In the future GCP will provide Xi Cloud Services as well.
  • Targeting SMB and large-Enterprise ROBO customers.
  • Early Access Q4 2017, GA Q1 2018.

Continue reading #Nutanix #NEXTConf 2017 US Announcements