A Video Walkthrough on installation, configuration and demo of the Nutanix App for Splunk. Also, included is demo of Splunk Mobile running the Nutanix App versys Safari running Prism. To learn more about Splunk, and details on this app, check out Andre’s Leibovici @andreleibovici blog post. Happy Splunking 🙂
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:
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:
VM Prefix Name: This is the root part of the new VM name.
Beginning Suffix: a number to start the numbering of the new VMs
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.
As always, if you have any questions please post a comment.
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)
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
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