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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
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.
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.
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
In the following diagram views, users can navigate to the components with failure.
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:
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 |
Monitored Element | Description |
ControllerVMId | Nutanix Controller VM Id |
Memory | Total memory assigned to CVM |
NumCpus | Total number of CPUs allocated to a CVM |
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 |
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 |
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 |
Monitored Element | Description |
IOPerSecond | Number of IO operations served per second from this container. |
AvgLatencyUsecs | Average IO latency for this container in microseconds |
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 |
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 |
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 |
Monitored Element | Description |
Fan number | Fan number |
Fan speed | Fan speed in RPM |
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
Hey everyone…I wanted to share a very cool update (and maybe a little of hero-worship 😀 ). Well, anyways, my job at Nutanix had another highlight recently. As many of your know, I love reading, breathing, consuming Microsoft technology. During my consumption of education, there number of people I follow, but there are few that stand out…and one that I spent a lot of time listening to via podcasts; Symon Perriman
He takes complex technology subjects and explains it extremely well on many levels so everyone understands..He believes in the community….all things as technologists, we can all strive to achieve.
I recently had the lucky chance to interview him for the Nutanix .Next Community Podcast. It was great honor to interview him with my colleaguebuddy @NutanixTommy as we both had different points of views.
Symon joined 5nine Software earlier this year as Vice President, Business Development & Marketing and is how I came to meet Simon as part of my job in Technical Alliances at Nutanix.
For those of you who are not familiar with 5nine Software, 5nine has a great alternative management product for Hyper-V with benefits of simplified vCenter type management without the footprint of System Center. They also are the only vendor with agentless security product via the Hyper-V extensible virtual switch. Think vShield for Hyper-V…Very cool… 😎
For those that are not familiar with Symon…a brief history…
With more than 12 years of experience in the high-tech industry, Symon is an internationally recognized expert in virtualization, high-availability, disaster recovery, data center management, and cloud technologies.
As Microsoft’s Senior Technical Evangelist and worldwide technical lead covering virtualization, infrastructure, management and cloud. He has trained millions of IT Professionals, hosted the “Edge Show” weekly webcast, holds several patents and dozens of industry certifications, and in 2013 he co-authored “Introduction to System Center 2012 R2 for IT Professionals” (Microsoft Press). He graduated from Duke University with degrees in Computer Science, Economics and Film & Digital Studies.
Enjoy the show……
Until next time, Rob…
To continue Windows Azure Pack series here is my next topic: Installing and Configuring Windows Azure Pack
If you missed other parts of the series, check links below:
Part 1 – Understanding Windows Azure Pack
Part 2 – Understanding Windows Azure Pack – Deployment Scenarios
Part 3 – Understanding Windows Azure Pack – How to guide with Express Edition on Nutanix – Environment Prep
Part 4 – Deploying Service Provider Framework on Nutanix
Again to reiterate from my previous blog posts and set some context, Windows Azure Pack (WAP) includes the following capabilities: Continue reading
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.
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 store a few key items which are explained in greater detail above:
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.
Since HDD devices are primarily used for bulk storage, their breakdown is much simpler:
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.
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
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
A special thanks to @andreleibovici @LauraPadillaSF @jweingarten @Tomorrowisms @LukasLundell @nutanix for all the great pics and videos….
This was our first user conference in sunny Miami, Fla. The conference turned out great and we had lots of customers and partners at the event from around the world. And as you know, its all about the customer. 🙂 Some Highlights include a speech from Condalisa Rice and a guest appearance from Microsoft’s Vjay Tewari from General Manager, Global Network Services. Also, we launch our first NPX boot camp and certified 7 people.
Very exciting day today….at our Nutanix .NEXT conference…We announced our vision for Invisible Infrastructure for the Datacenter of the Future…Which is the future of datacenter weather you are onpremis or in the cloud….WebScale methodology is how you build out your datacenter….the second video is a great interview with Vijay Tewari & Sunil Potti at .NEXT…….It great to see all the hard work that my company, team and I have come together at this great conference…..Truly humbling experience…..
Many of the transformative technologies in our lives are things that we don’t even think about. They just work, remove constraints and limitations and eliminate the need for guesswork and prediction. We are not even aware of them.
As technology becomes increasingly central to how a business operates, the way it stays competitive and relevant to its customers, IT infrastructure needs to become invisible as well. Applications and services need infrastructure, but you don’t want to spend all your time dealing with infrastructure issues. It is the plumbing that makes your applications run. You want it to work in a flawless way without much effort. This is what the Nutanix solution does for you. Sit back and enjoy the show…
Until next time, Rob…