Let's Talk About Tech!

Background Always wanted to give a try to a Nutanix examen but you cannot afford it ? (between $99 and $199). Your company does not want to pay for it ? There are discounts from time to time, but you need to prepare for the exam, they are not super easy.  Ok, I have a good news for you !

Background Last night, I was in my monthly upgrades process for my clusters. I was about to catch up with all the versions. I was about to start the last run of patches, so I ran the LCM inventory for the last time. Of course I was doing something else in parallel - LCM is so time consuming, you'd better parallel tasking. When I came back to the LCM inventory screen, I saw 6 pre-checks errors : Cassandra down, network down, connection timeout, .... Most scary : node removed from Metadata Ring.

Background When doing upgrade campaign, you need to go to each cluster to verify who's got what software version and then check the progress. Sometimes, it could be painful to collect that information, especially when you have a lot of clusters. I was wondering how this could automated, some obvious details can easy be obtained with "classic" API calls, but not everything. Challenge accepted!

Background I'm one of the many lucky early adopters of Nutanix and my first cluster is older than 7 years old now. Still in good condition and serving test VMs for years. This one was the proof of concept that leads the way to many other clusters. In good condition yes, until mid Jan when I discovered that I've lost one node out of 3 in that cluster!

Background Always wanted to give a try to a Nutanix examen but you cannot afford it ? (between $99 and $199). Your company does not want to pay for it ? There are discounts from time to time, but you need to prepare for the exam, they are not super easy (especially NCP/NCM...). Ok, I have a good news for you !

Background I would like to automate the Nutanix AHV cluster addition on my Rubrik appliances. Either for testing purpose or for more general deployments. In order to achieve this, you need to perform couple of actions and clicks in the UI. But since the Rubrik UI is API-First, of course, that should be doable via API call ? Isn't it ? But why limiting this to only adding new Cluster ? Let's see...

Background We have a quite large AHV infrastructure and sometimes this is not always easy to get all the relevant details to improve/maintain it. Don't get me wrong, Prism Central is helping a lot. But, when it comes to optimisation of the assets, it is hard to see what gains we can make - starting by detecting the powered off VMs.

Background When we had an issue on an AHV VM, the first reflex was to restore it from last night backup. It was very quick and we were all happy ... unless we realized that no networking was connected. We opened a case with Nutanix to troubleshoot the issue and ....

Background While working on a AHV cluster, you can notice that, with time, the storage decreases. This is obvious, all VMs are using thin-provisioning by default. Doing some cleanup and maintenance is required on every IT systems and Nutanix does not escape the rule. One area where we are not focusing enough is the snapshots we are creating and most of the time forgot !

Background This is not a big secret, the next famous OS from Microsoft leaked over the Internet few days ago . Windows 11 beta. I'm not a Windows fan, but I'm curious about anything technology related (as you already notice since you are here). I was wondering how it looks and what is the experience. The only quick and easy platform that I have with me is a Nutanix AHV cluster. I wonder if it works.

Background Now that we have seen how to get and apply categories and values to VMs, it is about time to learn how to create categories and values. Indeed, to be able to apply categories to VMs they first need to be created and ready to be used. Nutanix allows us to create whatever categories we have in mind.

Background Managing Categories (tags), within a Nutanix environment can be cumbersome, especially if you have big amount of VMs or if you want to automate the process and why not, react on triggers. Hopefully, Nutanix is giving you the power.I just finished couple of functions and added them to my Nutanix Php Framework !

Background It's been a while since I passed my NPP 4.5 certification. I've seen that a new branding plus full revamp of the Nutanix certifications just been relased by the Nutanix Education team. So I thought I should give it a try ! And after all, a new badge is always satisfying.

Background After a couple of years of service, your loved cluster is becoming old, there is no better way to refresh him than providing a big more space for VMs and services by upgrading the nodes' memory. I did that few days ago and now the cluster is like brand new. Let's do this ! So, for the sake of compliance, conformity and risk, I would like to share the official Nutanix procedure with you, so you know the real background. The official procedure is located here . Important to mention at this stage that the below procedure is applying to AHV environments. If you are running either vmware or Hyper-V, there are some additional steps described in the official Nutanix documentation. My cluster is a 5 years old 1050 with 3 nodes. Originally shipped with 128GB RAM. It was becoming slow and I wanted to test Calm so forget it with that so low memory figures. I decided to upgrade it to 256 GB per node. This is the status of the cluster before upgrade Hig...

Background In today's world, we are always looking at automation. Automation is key to provide a certain level of self-service. With Nutanix, you can automate many things in many ways (Calm, X-Play, API scripts ...). But if you don't have the resources nor the money for this, there is another player on the market Meet Terraform Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. It enables users to define and provision a datacenter infrastructure using a high-level configuration language known as Hashicorp Configuration Language, or optionally JSON. At least, this is what Wikipedia is saying about it.  You can either run Terraform in the cloud or on-prem (on your laptop for example). There are providers  for many different infrastructure like AWS, Azure, GitHub, OVH, ... and Nutanix. Those providers are maintained either by the community or the vendors themselves. Installation for macOS I'm using brew to install terraform, i...

Background You are a Nutanix customer but not in the vmware shop and you still want to make good use of Rubrik EDGE virtual appliances. The good news is : Rubrik EDGE can run on Nutanix AHV. But, some extra actions are needed to achieve this.

Background In those days where we are connected from everywhere, we are all looking at having the same experience on any platforms. This is where VDI is coming from. Today, VDI is very common but users want more. Administrators as well, they want granularity and easiness.

Background There we go, you have been able to deploy a Nutanix CE instance for your lab/testing environment. You would like to set some backups up ? You also have some Rubrik deployment and you would like to take benefit of this environment ? This is totally making sense but you cannot add your CE cluster because of the AOS version incompatibility ? There is a way to overcome this - at your own risks !

Background Sometimes in the life of the datacenter, you need to move hardware from one location to another. Funny enough, we not always think that we need to move - especially when everything works (very) well. In the case of a Nutanix cluster, this could require some particular attention.

Background Trying to upgrade to the latest AOS, NCC, Hypervisor .... but you are running out of space on your cluster and pre-checks are failing ? There is a fix !