Nutanix SCVMM Fast Clones Plug-in

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Robert Corradini

Hi Everyone…I love to show off the cool Microsoft integrations that Nutanix has and most recently Nutanix released System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 R2 Fast Clones plug-in.

With NOS 4.1.3, Nutanix has released a Fast Clone plugin for SCVMM. The plug-in has the ability to provide space efficient, low impact clones from SCVMM and quickly. The plugin is a wrapper around Nutanix powershell commands for Fast Cones. The plugin does need proper access rights to the Hyper-V hosts and SCVMM and already should be setup for most environments that have Nutanix with Hyper-V deployed. You will need to install the plugin on the SCVMM host along with the Nutanix powershell command-lets.

Once you have the SCVMM Fast Clones plug-in installed, you can start creating Fast Clones right away. Installation is quick and easy and creating clones is just as easy as shown below.

To create VM clones using the Nutanix Fast Clones wizard, follow the below steps:

Start the SCVMM
Navigate to the Nutanix hosts.
Select a host and then select the VM to be cloned.
To invoke the wizard, do one of the following: Click the “Nutanix Fast Clone” button on the top menu-bar. Right-click the target VM and select “Nutanix Fast Clone” from the pop-up context menu:
In the Introduction screen, read the instructions and then click the “Next” button. NOTE: On start of the wizard, it makes a connection to the VMM to be able to communicate with it to run SCVMM PowerShell cmdlets to gather information about the selected VM.
The “Identity” screen is displayed. The “Source VM Name” and “Source VM Host Name” is prepopulated, enter the following information and then click the “Next” button:
1. Clone Type: Click the “Clone One Virtual Machine” radio button and enter a name for the clone when creating a single clone or click the “Clone Multiple Virtual Machines” radio button and enter the following information:
  1. VM Prefix Name: This is the root part of the new VM name.
  2. Beginning Suffix: a number to start the numbering of the new VMs
  3. Number of Clones: a number between 1 and 100.
In the Authentication screen, enter the Prism and VMM Service Account user names and passwords in the appropriate fields, and then click the “Next” button.
In the “Select Path” screen, select the destination path and then click the “Next” button. Leave the default path “as is” or change it to a new path as needed by clicking the “Change the default path” box. Click the Browse button to select a destination path for the clone VMs. This is the path where virtual machine configuration files will be stored. The path must be on the same Nutanix SMB share as the VM configuration file.
In the “Add Properties” screen, click the appropriate radio button to either power on or not power on the VMs after cloning and then click the “Next” button.
In the Summary screen below, review (confirm) the settings are correct.

Clicking the “View Script” button displays the script to be executed:

Clicking the “Enable Verbose Messages” displays detailed log messages as the VMs are being created.
When the settings are correct, click the “Create” button to create the cloned VM(s). An hour glass is displayed and progress messages are displayed.
After the clones are created, click the Finish button to close the wizard and you just created VM’s at lighting speed.

If you want to check out Fast Clones for your environment, you can download Fast Clones from the Nutanix Portal at https://portal.nutanix.com.

Below is a demo video shows traditional cloning vs Fast Clones that my buddy @mcghem created. It shows the awesome benefit of Fast Clones.

https://youtu.be/cWGEvjHZxdw

As always, if you have any questions please post a comment.

Until next time….Rob

Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference 2015…Picture Highlights

Gallery

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Robert Corradini

This gallery contains 29 photos.

Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference 2015 WPC is the largest event for Microsoft partners When it comes to meeting the right people in the right place, bigger is better. The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) brings together over 15,000 attendees … Continue reading →

Nutanix SCOM Management Pack – Monitor Your Nutanix Infrastructure

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Robert Corradini

As a Microsoft Evangelist at Nutanix, I am always asked….”How would you monitor your Nutanix Infrastructure and can I use System Center suite. And my answer always is, “YES, with SCOM”….What is SCOM you ask?
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is designed to be a monitoring tool for the datacenter. Think of a datacenter with multiple vendors representing multiple software and hardware products. Consequently, SCOM was developed to be extensible using the concept of management packs. Vendors typically develop one or more management packs for every product they want plugged into SCOM.

To facilitate these management packs, SCOM supports standard discovery and data collection mechanisms like SNMP, but also affords vendors the flexibility of native API driven data collection. Nutanix provides management packs that support using the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to monitor a Nutanix cluster.

Nutanix SCOM Management Pack

The management packs collect information about software (cluster) elements through SNMP and hardware elements through ipmiutil (Intelligent Platform Management Interface Utility) and REST API calls and then package that information for SCOM to digest. Note: The Hardware Elements Management Pack leverages the ipmiutil program to gather information from Nutanix block for Fans, Power Supply and Temperature.

Nutanix provides two management packs:

Cluster Management Pack – This management pack collects information about software elements of a cluster including Controller VMs, storage pools, and containers.
Hardware Management Pack – This management pack collects information about hardware elements of a cluster including fans, power supplies, disks, and nodes.

Installing and configuring the management packs involves the following simple steps:

Install and configure SCOM on the Windows server system (if not installed) (will blog a post soon on this topic)
Uninstall existing Nutanix management packs (if present)
Open the IPMI-related ports (if not open). IPMI access is required for the hardware management pack
Install the Nutanix management packs
Configure the management packs using the SCOM discovery and template wizards

After the management packs have been installed and configured, you can use SCOM to monitor a variety of Nutanix objects including cluster, alert, and performance views as shown in examples below. Also, I check out this great video produced by pal @mcghem . He shows a great demo of the SCOM management pack…Kudo’s Mike….also, check out his blog.

Views and Objects Snapshots

Cluster Monitoring Snapshots

Cluster Performance Monitoring

Hardware Monitoring Snapshots

In the following diagram views, users can navigate to the components with failure.

Nutanix Objects Available for Monitoring via SCOM

The following provides an high level overview of Nutanix Cluster with Components:

The following sections describe Nutanix Cluster objects being monitored by this version of MPs:

Cluster

Monitored Element	Description
Version	Current cluster version. This is the nutanix-core package version expected on all the Controller VMs.
Status	Current Status of the cluster. This will usually be one of started or stopped
TotalStorageCapacity	Total storage capacity of the cluster
UsedStorageCapacity	Number of bytes of storage used on the cluster
Iops	For Performance: Cluster wide average IO operations per second
Latency	For Performance: Cluster wide average latency

CVM Resource Monitoring

Monitored Element	Description
ControllerVMId	Nutanix Controller VM Id
Memory	Total memory assigned to CVM
NumCpus	Total number of CPUs allocated to a CVM

Storage

Storage Pool

A storage pool is a group of physical disks from SSD and/or HDD tier.

Monitored Element	Description
PoolId	Storage pool id
PoolName	Name of the storage pool
TotalCapacity	Total capacity of the storage pool Note: An alert if there is drop in capacity may indicate a bad disk.
UsedCapacity	Number of bytes used in the storage pool

Performance parameters:

Monitored Element	Description
IOPerSecond	Number of IO operations served per second from this storage pool.
AvgLatencyUsecs	Average IO latency for this storage pool in microseconds

Containers

A container is a subset of available storage within a storage pool. Containers hold the virtual disks (vDisks) used by virtual machines. Selecting a storage pool for a new container defines the physical disks where the vDisks will be stored.

Monitored Element	Description
ContainerId	Container id
ContainerName	Name of the container
TotalCapacity	Total capacity of the container
UsedCapacity	Number of bytes used in the container

Performance parameters:

Monitored Element	Description
IOPerSecond	Number of IO operations served per second from this container.
AvgLatencyUsecs	Average IO latency for this container in microseconds

Hardware Objects

Cluster

Monitored Element	Description
Discovery IP Address	IP address used for discovery of cluster
Cluster Incarnation ID	Unique ID of cluster
CPU Usage	CPU usage for all the nodes of cluster
Memory Usage	Memory usage for all the nodes of cluster
Node IP address	External IP address of Node
System Temperature	System Temperature

Disk

Monitored Element	Description
Disk State/health	Node state as returned by the PRISM [REST /hosts “state” attribute ]
Disk ID	ID assigned to the disk
Disk Name	Name of the disk (Full path where meta data stored)
Disk Serial Number	Serial number of disk
Hypervisor IP	Host OS IP where disk is installed
Tire Name	Disk Tire
CVM IP	Cluster VM IP which controls the disk
Total Capacity	Total Disk capacity
Used Capacity	Total Disk used
Online	If Disk is online or offline
Location	Disk location
Cluster Name	Disk cluster name
Discovery IP address	IP address through which Disk was discovered
Disk Status	Status of the disk

Node

Monitored Element	Description
Node State/health	Node state as returned by the PRISM [REST /hosts “state” attribute ]
Node IP address	External IP address of Node
IPMI Address	IPMI IP address of Node
Block Model	Hardware model of block
Block Serial Number	Serial number of block
CPU Usage %	CPU usage for Node
Memory Usage %	Memory usage for node
Fan Count	Total fans
Power Supply Count	Total Power supply
System Temperature	System Temperature

Fan

Monitored Element	Description
Fan number	Fan number
Fan speed	Fan speed in RPM

Power supply

Element	Description

Power supply number	Power supply number
Power supply status	Power supply status whether present or absent

If you would like to checkout the Nutanix management pack on your SCOM instance, please go to our portal to download the management pack and documentation.
This management pack was development by our awesome engineering team @ Nutanix. Kudos to Yogi and team for a job well done!!! 😉 I hope I gave you a good feel for Nutanix monitoring using SCOM. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please leave below….

Until next time….Rob

NPP Training series – Drive Breakdown

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Robert Corradini

To continue NPP training series here is my next topic: Drive Breakdown
If you missed other parts of my series, check out links below:
Part 1 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Part 2 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Cluster Architecture with Hyper-V
Data Structure on Nutanix with Hyper-V
I/O Path Overview
To give credit, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s “Nutanix Bible” blog as his content is the most accurate and then I put a Hyper-V lean to it.

Drive Breakdown

In this section I’ll cover how the various storage devices (SSD / HDD) are broken down, partitioned and utilized by the Nutanix platform. NOTE: All of the capacities used are in Base2 Gibibyte (GiB) instead of the Base10 Gigabyte (GB). Formatting of the drives with a filesystem and associated overheads has also been taken into account.

SSD Devices

SSD devices store a few key items which are explained in greater detail above:

Nutanix Home (CVM core)
Cassandra (metadata storage) – MORE
OpLog (persistent write buffer) – MORE
Extent Store (persistent storage) – MORE

Below we show an example of the storage breakdown for a Nutanix node’s SSD(s):
NDFS_SSD_breakdown3 Drive Breakdown
NOTE: The sizing for OpLog is done dynamically as of release 4.0.1 which will allow the extent store portion to grow dynamically. The values used are assuming a completely utilized OpLog. Graphics and proportions aren’t drawn to scale. When evaluating the Remaining GiB capacities do so from the top down. For example the Remaining GiB to be used for the OpLog calculation would be after Nutanix Home and Cassandra have been subtracted from the formatted SSD capacity. Most models ship with 1 or 2 SSDs, however the same construct applies for models shipping with more SSD devices. For example, if we apply this to an example 3060 or 6060 node which has 2 x 400GB SSDs this would give us 100GiB of OpLog, 40GiB of Content Cache and ~440GiB of Extent Store SSD capacity per node. Storage for Cassandra is a minimum reservation and may be larger depending on the quantity of data.
NDFS_SSD_3060_2 Drive Breakdown
For a 3061 node which has 2 x 800GB SSDs this would give us 100GiB of OpLog, 40GiB of Content Cache and ~1.1TiB of Extent Store SSD capacity per node.
NDFS_SSD_3061v2 Drive Breakdown

HDD Devices

Since HDD devices are primarily used for bulk storage, their breakdown is much simpler:

Curator Reservation (Curator storage) – MORE
Extent Store (persistent storage)

NDFS_HDD_breakdown Drive Breakdown
For example, if we apply this to an example 3060 node which has 4 x 1TB HDDs this would give us 80GiB reserved for Curator and ~3.4TiB of Extent Store HDD capacity per node.
NDFS_HDD_3060 Drive Breakdown
NOTE: the above values are accurate as of 4.0.1 and may vary by release.
Next up, I figured we would look at some of the cool software technologies that run on our CVM (Controller Virtual Machine), next up Elastic Dedupe Engine.

Until next time, Rob

Nutanix Community Edition – Public Beta – Now Available – Build Your Own Nutanix Test Lab for Free

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Robert Corradini

nutanix-community-edition_w_500

Nutanix Community Edition

Another very exciting announcement was Nutanix Community Edition (CE) on June 9th, 2015 at our Inaugural .NEXT conference. So, what is it?…..Our website describes it the best “Community Edition is a 100% software solution enabling technology enthusiasts to easily evaluate the latest hyperconvergence technology at zero cost.” In other words, you can use your own hardware to test out Nutanix. Very cool. This is great for building a lab and just gaining understanding of hyperconvergence hands on.
Nutanix is offering a hardware compatibility list (HCL) to users that includes the minimum requirements to run the software; essentially, any standard x86 server can be used….
And to quote our CEO and co-founder Dheeraj Pandey,
“From our very first software release in 2012, Nutanix has been dedicated to open architectures and technologies, offering unprecedented customer choice and flexibility,” “Community Edition is the next step in democratizing hyperconverged infrastructure technology, enabling anyone to experience the transformative benefits of our software. Only by eliminating the requirement for proprietary hardware and embracing off-the-shelf platforms can the next revolution of datacenter technologies be fully realized.”
As the name implies, the support for the CE will come from the community through Nutanix’s NEXT online portal. Users will be able to log in, ask questions and get answers from the community.
CE also allow you to also check our new hypervisor based on KVM and Acropolis. Check out Josh Odger’s Blog to learn more about Acropolis.
Join the beta…And don’t forget my NPP training series that helps you with all the concepts around hyperconvergence.
Currently, I am getting started with Nutanix CE installation and will be posting my experiences in a later blog post with how I build my Nutanix Lab @ Home. 🙂

Until next time….Rob

NPP Training series – I/O Path Overview

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Robert Corradini

To continue NPP training series, here is my next topic: I/O Path Overview
If you missed other parts of my series, check out links below:
Part 1 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Part 2 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Cluster Architecture with Hyper-V
Data Structure on Nutanix with Hyper-V

To give credit, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s “Nutanix Bible” blog as his content is the most accurate and then I put a Hyper-V lean-to it.

IO Path Overview

The Nutanix IO path is composed of the following high-level components:

OpLog

Key Role: Persistent write buffer
Description: The Oplog is similar to a filesystem journal and is built to handle bursty writes, coalesce them and then sequentially drain the data to the extent store. Upon a write the OpLog is synchronously replicated to another n number of CVM’s OpLog before the write is acknowledged for data availability purposes. All CVM OpLogs partake in the replication and are dynamically chosen based upon load. The OpLog is stored on the SSD tier on the CVM to provide extremely fast write I/O performance, especially for random I/O workloads. For sequential workloads the OpLog is bypassed and the writes go directly to the extent store. If data is currently sitting in the OpLog and has not been drained, all read requests will be directly fulfilled from the OpLog until they have been drain where they would then be served by the extent store/content cache. For containers where fingerprinting (aka Dedupe) has been enabled, all write I/Os will be fingerprinted using a hashing scheme allowing them to be deduped based upon fingerprint in the content cache.

Extent Store

Key Role: Persistent data storage
Description: The Extent Store is the persistent bulk storage of NDFS and spans SSD and HDD and is extensible to facilitate additional devices/tiers. Data entering the extent store is either being A) drained from the OpLog or B) is sequential in nature and has bypassed the OpLog directly. Nutanix ILM will determine tier placement dynamically based upon I/O patterns and will move data between tiers.

Content Cache

Key Role: Dynamic read cache
Description: The Content Cache (aka “Elastic Dedupe Engine”) is a deduped read cache which spans both the CVM’s memory and SSD. Upon a read request of data not in the cache (or based upon a particular fingerprint) the data will be placed in to the single-touch pool of the content cache which completely sits in memory where it will use LRU until it is ejected from the cache. Any subsequent read request will “move” (no data is actually moved, just cache metadata) the data into the memory portion of the multi-touch pool which consists of both memory and SSD. From here there are two LRU cycles, one for the in-memory piece upon which eviction will move the data to the SSD section of the multi-touch pool where a new LRU counter is assigned. Any read request for data in the multi-touch pool will cause the data to go to the peak of the multi-touch pool where it will be given a new LRU counter. Fingerprinting is configured at the container level and can be configured via the UI. By default fingerprinting is disabled.

Below we show a high-level overview of the Content Cache:

Extent Cache

Key Role: In-memory read cache
Description: The Extent Cache is an in-memory read cache that is completely in the CVM’s memory. This will store non-fingerprinted extents for containers where fingerprinting and dedupe disabled.

Drive Breakdown

SSD Devices

SSD devices store a few key items which are explained in greater detail above:

Nutanix Home (CVM core)
Cassandra (metadata storage) – MORE
OpLog (persistent write buffer)
Extent Store (persistent storage)

Below we show an example of the storage breakdown for a Nutanix node’s SSD(s):
NOTE: The sizing for OpLog is done dynamically as of release 4.0.1 which will allow the extent store portion to grow dynamically. The values used are assuming a completely utilized OpLog. Graphics and proportions aren’t drawn to scale. When evaluating the Remaining GiB capacities do so from the top down.

For example the Remaining GiB to be used for the OpLog calculation would be after Nutanix Home and Cassandra have been subtracted from the formatted SSD capacity. Most models ship with 1 or 2 SSDs, however the same construct applies for models shipping with more SSD devices. For example, if we apply this to an example 3060 or 6060 node which has 2 x 400GB SSDs this would give us 100GiB of OpLog, 40GiB of Content Cache and ~440GiB of Extent Store SSD capacity per node. Storage for Cassandra is a minimum reservation and may be larger depending on the quantity of data.

For a 3061 node which has 2 x 800GB SSDs this would give us 100GiB of OpLog, 40GiB of Content Cache and ~1.1TiB of Extent Store SSD capacity per node.

HDD Devices

Since HDD devices are primarily used for bulk storage, their breakdown is much simpler:

Curator Reservation (Curator storage) – MORE
Extent Store (persistent storage)

For example, if we apply this to an example 3060 node which has 4 x 1TB HDDs this would give us 80GiB reserved for Curator and ~3.4TiB of Extent Store HDD capacity per node.
For a 6060 node which has 4 x 4TB HDDs this would give us 80GiB reserved for Curator and ~14TiB of Extent Store HDD capacity per node.
Statistics and technical specifications: opportunites-digitales.com/avis-expressvpn/
NOTE: the above values are accurate as of 4.0.1 and may vary by release.
Next up, Drive Breakdown on Nutanix

Until next time, Rob….

NPP Training series – Data Structure on Nutanix with Hyper-V

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Robert Corradini

To continue NPP training series here is my next topic: Data Structure on Nutanix with Hyper-V
If you missed other parts of my series, check out links below:
Part 1 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Part 2 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Cluster Architecture with Hyper-V
To give credit due, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s “Nutanix Bible” blog as his content is the most accurate and then I put a Hyper-V lean to it and have updated the graphics for Hyper-V.

Data Structure on Nutanix

The NDFS (Nutanix Distributed Filesystem) is composed of the following high-level structs:

Storage Pool

Key Role: Group of physical devices
Description: A storage pool is a group of physical storage devices including PCIe SSD (Solid State Drive), SSD, and HDD (Hard Disk Drive) devices for the cluster. The storage pool can span multiple Nutanix nodes and is expanded as the cluster scales. In most configurations only a single storage pool is leveraged.

Container

Key Role: Group of VMs/files
Description: A container is a logical segmentation of the Storage Pool and contains a group of VM (Virtual Machine) or files (vDisks). Some configuration options (eg. (RF) Resiliency Factor) are configured at the container level, however are applied at the individual VM/file level. Containers typically have a 1 to 1 mapping with a datastore (SMB Share(s)).

vDisk

Key Role: vDisk
Description: A vDisk is any file over 512KB on NDFS including VM hard disks. vDisks are composed of extents which are grouped and stored on disk as an extent group.

Below we show how these map between NDFS and the Hyper-V:
SP_structure Data Structure

Extent

Key Role: Logically contiguous data
Description: A extent is a 1MB piece of logically contiguous data which consists of n number of contiguous blocks (varies depending on guest OS block size). Extents are written/read/modified on a sub-extent basis (aka slice) for granularity and efficiency. An extent’s slice may be trimmed when moving into the cache depending on the amount of data being read/cached.

Extent Group

Key Role: Physically contiguous stored data
Description: A extent group is a 1MB or 4MB piece of physically contiguous stored data. This data is stored as a file on the storage device owned by the CVM (Controller Virtual Machine). Extents are dynamically distributed among extent groups to provide data striping across nodes/disks to improve performance.

Below we show how these structs relate between the various filesystems:
NDFS_DataLayout_Text Data Structure Here is another graphical representation of how these units are logically related:
NDFS_DataStructure3 Data Structure Next up, I/O Path Overview

Until next time, Rob…

NPP Training series – Cluster Components with Hyper-V

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Robert Corradini

To continue NPP training series here is my next topic: Cluster Components

If you missed other parts of my series, check out links below:
Part 1 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Part 2 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Cluster Architecture with Hyper-V
Data Structure on Nutanix with Hyper-V
I/O Path Overview

To give credit, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s “Nutanix Bible” blog as his content is the most accurate and then I put a Hyper-V lean to it.

Cluster Components

The Nutanix platform is composed of the following high-level components:

NDFS_Cluster Components

Cassandra

Key Role: Distributed metadata store
Description: Cassandra stores and manages all of the cluster metadata in a distributed ring like manner based upon a heavily modified Apache Cassandra. The Paxos algorithm is utilized to enforce strict consistency. This service runs on every node in the cluster. Cassandra is accessed via an interface called Medusa.

Medusa

Key Role: Abstraction layer
Description: Medusa is the Nutanix abstraction layer that sits in front of the cluster’s distributed metadata database, which is managed by Cassandra..

Zookeeper

Key Role: Cluster configuration manager
Description: Zeus stores all of the cluster configuration including hosts, IPs, state, etc. and is based upon Apache Zookeeper. This service runs on three nodes in the cluster, one of which is elected as a leader. The leader receives all requests and forwards them to the peers. If the leader fails to respond a new leader is automatically elected. Zookeeper is accessed via an interface called Zeus.

Zeus

Key Role: Library interface
Description: Zeus is the Nutanix library interface that all other components use to access the cluster configuration, such as IP addresses. Currently implemented using Zookeeper, Zeus is responsible for critical, cluster-wide data such as cluster configuration and leadership locks.

Stargate

Key Role: Data I/O manager
Description: Stargate is responsible for all data management and I/O operations and is the main interface from Hyper-V (via SMB 3.0). This service runs on every node in the cluster in order to serve localized I/O.

Curator

Key Role: Map reduce cluster management and cleanup
Description: Curator is responsible for managing and distributing tasks throughout the cluster including disk balancing, proactive scrubbing, and many more items. Curator runs on every node and is controlled by an elected Curator Master who is responsible for the task and job delegation. There are two scan types for Curator, a full scan which occurs around every 6 hours and a partial scan which occurs every hour.

Prism

Key Role: UI and API
Description: Prism is the management gateway for component and administrators to configure and monitor the Nutanix cluster. This includes Ncli, the HTML5 UI and REST API. Prism runs on every node in the cluster and uses an elected leader like all components in the cluster.

prism1 Cluster Components prism2 Cluster Components

Genesis

Key Role: Cluster component & service manager
Description: Genesis is a process which runs on each node and is responsible for any services interactions (start/stop/etc.) as well as for the initial configuration. Genesis is a process which runs independently of the cluster and does not require the cluster to be configured/running. The only requirement for genesis to be running is that Zookeeper is up and running. The cluster_init and cluster_status pages are displayed by the genesis process.

Chronos

Key Role: Job and Task scheduler
Description: Chronos is responsible for taking the jobs and tasks resulting from a Curator scan and scheduling/throttling tasks among nodes. Chronos runs on every node and is controlled by an elected Chronos Master who is responsible for the task and job delegation and runs on the same node as the Curator Master.

Cerebro

Key Role: Replication/DR manager
Description: Cerebro is responsible for the replication and DR capabilities of DFS(Distributed Storage Fabric). This includes the scheduling of snapshots, the replication to remote sites, and the site migration/failover. Cerebro runs on every node in the Nutanix cluster and all nodes participate in replication to remote clusters/sites.

Pithos

Key Role: vDisk configuration manager
Description: Pithos is responsible for vDisk (DFS file) configuration data. Pithos runs on every node and is built on top of Cassandra.

Next up, Data Structures which comprises high level structs for Nutanix Distributed Filesystem

Until next time, Rob….

To create VM clones using the Nutanix Fast Clones wizard, follow the below steps:

Nutanix SCOM Management Pack

Nutanix provides two management packs:

Installing and configuring the management packs involves the following simple steps:

Cluster Performance Monitoring

Hardware Monitoring Snapshots

Nutanix Objects Available for Monitoring via SCOM

Cluster

Monitored Element

Description

CVM Resource Monitoring

Monitored Element

Description

Storage

Storage Pool

Monitored Element

Description

Performance parameters:

Monitored Element

Description

Containers

Monitored Element

Description

Performance parameters:

Monitored Element

Description

Hardware Objects

Cluster

Monitored Element

Description

Disk

Monitored Element

Description

Node

Monitored Element

Description

Fan

Monitored Element

Description

Power supply

Element

Description

Drive Breakdown

SSD Devices

HDD Devices

Nutanix Community Edition

IO Path Overview

OpLog

Extent Store

Content Cache

Extent Cache

Drive Breakdown

SSD Devices

HDD Devices

Data Structure on Nutanix

Storage Pool

Container

vDisk

Extent

Extent Group

Cluster Components

Cassandra

Medusa

Zookeeper

Zeus

Stargate

Curator

Prism

Genesis

Chronos

Cerebro

Pithos