Random Short Take #7

Posted on 2018-08-27 by dan

Here are a few links to some random things that I think might be useful, to someone. Maybe.

Here’s a really simple and clear guide by Tim Smith on installing Nutanix Community Edition on vSphere.
VMworld US kicks off shortly. I won’t be there this year, but I’m looking forward to hearing all the VMware-related news coming from the show.
The NBA season schedule is now locked in for 2018-19. Here’s a printable version of the Lakers schedule. I imagine this will be an amusing, if not always successful season.
I spent more time than I should putting media into my Plex environment, and have been looking for ways to optimise the experience. This series of articles by Carolyn Van Slyck has inspired me to do some more work on my transcode workflow. I’m also looking at doing something like this or this to automatically ingest the media in the first place.
(Site sponsor) Vembu recently announced Vembu BDR Essentials for Small Businesses. You can read more about that here.
This is a great article by my friend Paul – Solving Problems Without Falling Into the Helpfulness Trap.
Alastair wrote a good article exploring the idea of backup platforms as a data management platform. The data protection vendors won’t shut up about it, and it’s worthy of further consideration.
Howard sheds some light on what’s happened with Optane in an article at SearchStorage.
Pure Storage recently acquired StorReduce. Chris M. Evans broke it down in this article.

Brisbane VMUG – December 2014

Posted on 2014-12-05 by dan

The final Brisbane VMUG of the year will be a vBeers event sponsored by Nutanix. It will be held on Thursday 18th December at the Story Bridge Hotel (Martini Room) from 2 – 4 pm. Here’s the agenda:

How You Can Actually Virtualise ‘Everything’
Demonstrating True Business Benefits, Including How Langs Achieved 53% Lower IT TCO
Virtualisation Challenges and Best Practices for Delivering Web-Scale at Any Scale
Q&A with vBeers!

Guest Speakers are Matt Day, IT Manager, Langs Building Supplies for EUC and Josh Odgers, VCDX#90, Senior Solutions & Performance Engineer, Nutanix. You can register here. I hope to see you there.

VMware – VMworld 2014 – VAPP3031-SPO – Deploying Web-Scale Converged Infrastructure: Software Defined Storage for the Real World

Posted on 2014-08-27 by dan

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2014 – SF. My flights and accommodation were paid for by myself, however VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

VAPP3031-SPO – Deploying Web-Scale Converged Infrastructure: Software Defined Storage for the Real World

VAPP3031-SPO was the last session today and, while it was sponsored by Nutanix, I found it reasonably useful to get a customer’s perspective on things, so I figured I’d at least write up my notes.

It was presented by:

Sachin Chheda, Nutanix – Director of Product Marketing
Ali Alladin, Williams-Sonoma – Global Director of Enterprise Infrastructure
Dan Gorman, Williams-Sonoma – Senior Enterprise IT Architect

Williams-Sonoma are best known for the Pottery Barn range of stores, but they do a bit more than that. You can check them out here.

Nutanix, of course, are pretty well known. They were founded in 2009, and are now shipping the 4th version of their OS. Their stated goal is to “deliver IT infrastructure that delivers the scale of Google, Facebook, etc to enterprise IT”.

So what’s webscale?

Scale one x86 server at a time
Smart software, commodity hardware
Highly distributed software
Storage is local
Heavily automated

So what is it not?

Vanity hardware
Islands of storage
Unused, over-provisioned resources
North-south network traffic
Lots of server and storage admins

Nutanix are also focussed on what they call “VMCaliber Operations”

Meet SLAs and provide cost-effective DR
VM and infrastructure insight
Non-disruptive operations

Sachin provided a brief explanation of the architecture, and then handed over to the Williams-Sonoma guys.

Their business is multi-channel, multi-brand – retail stores, catalogue, on-line. It’s therefore a complex IT infrastructure and they need to be reactive.

What drove the move to Nutanix?

Moving to 100% virtualised infrastructure
Converged infrastructure
Deploy infrastructure for remote and branch offices

Looked at standalone, Open Compute Project, and FlexPod, but they needed a FRU model. They also had a lot of infrastructure silos.

They needed efficiency and ease of management, also needed replication. It also needed to

Deliver performance
Scale linearly
Avoid noisy neighbours

For workloads such as:

e-commerce
communications and collaboration
Business intelligence

With Nutanix they got:

Resiliency and availability
Tiering and data localisation
VM management and protection

The criteria was provide a consistent repeatable infrastructure design that was designed to survive failure.

So they did a PoC and it did what it said it would. Happy days.

They now have an IaaS model that their business units understand. They’re aiming to have an internal private cloud on Nutanix, and want to be able to scale in any direction as business changes.

One thing they did need to do was rethink management. The PRISM UI has plenty of pretty things to look at though. and they could also integrate REST API with tools such as PERL.

Some of the advantages realised included:

Scalability
Productivity
Availability
Predictable performance
FRU-model

I liked this approach:

You can’t be efficient if you keep putting yourself in the loop. You need to start with intelligent IT infrastructure.

Lessons learnt:

Pay attention to your apps and the IO and data flow
Build a reasonable level of competency
Continue building out our service model
Automate more functions
Evaluate new workloads such as big data

In conclusion:

Find out your requirements – efficiency and scalability should be on your list
Be thorough – investigate all of your options
Remove yourself from the equation – rely on dashboards, automate where possible.

There were some nice customer insights here, without too much marketing fluff. 3.5 stars.

VMware vExpert 2013

Posted on 2013-06-05 by dan

I’m a bit behind at the moment, but I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to John Troyer, Corey Romero and the folks in the VMware Social Media & Community Team for leaving me on the list for vExpert 2013. It’s a long list, and you’ll notice a lot of familiar names on there. So, thanks.

It’s also been really cool to see the rest of the community kick in with some goodies for vExperts. TrainSignal have come through with a year’s free training for vExperts – which I think is really quite awesome. You can also sign up for a free trial here – worth checking out.