- Why OpenStack is much more than just hype
- A summary of key OpenStack technologies
- Why to consider converged infrastructure for building private clouds
- The right way to scale-out OpenStack deployments
Watch the webinar here!
//Richard
Archive
Posts Tagged ‘Hyper-V’
Citrix Lifecycle Management cloud service – is it something for you? YES! – #Citrix, #WorkSpaceCloud, #DaaS @EnvokeIT
August 26, 2015
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I must admit that both Microsoft and Citrix are on the right track, it’s amazing to see the number of great “cloud” services that they now are releasing. If you’ve been reading my blog and follow me on Twitter then you know that I’m already a HUGE fan of Azure and all its offerings, and now Citrix comes up with a real interesting cloud based service to simplify the life-cycle management of their offerings, great job!
In this post we’re going to look at little closer to the Citrix Lifecycle Management service. So let’s start of with what it is, have a look at this great overview video:
Citrix Lifecycle Management is a comprehensive cloud-based lifecycle management solution to accelerate and simplify the design, deployment and ongoing management of Citrix workloads and enterprise applications.
Supporting many types of IT workloads across virtual and private or public cloud environments, this solution enables IT organizations to become faster, more cost-effective and more agile, and it helps maintain service quality and high availability with redundancy, automatic scaling and disaster recovery of applications. Built on blueprints incorporating validated reference architectures, configurations and best practices, Citrix Lifecycle Management provides a unified and standardized set of management tools for rapid and best practice-driven design, deployment and management of Citrix workloads and enterprise applications.
See this blog for a further explanation of Citrix Lifecycle Management.
Citrix Lifecycle Management is delivered as a cloud-based service through the newly launched Citrix Workspace Cloud.
The cloud service interacts with many types of supported Resource Locations that can be located either up in a public cloud service like Azure (that rocks!) or your on premise location and leveraging any of these technologies:
Once that you’ve connected the service to one of your Resource Locations then you can really start to look at the process of deploying your services to it, here is a good overview of the process of deploying a blueprint:
As you can see the process is really straight forward, 1 connect to your Resource Location, 2 Add your blueprint and then as the 3rd step you Deploy it! Read more…
Categories: All, Azure, Citrix, Client Services, Cloud, Device Management, Mobility, ShareFile, XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile
Amazon, AWS, Azure, byod, Citrix, Citrix Lifecycle Management, CitrixPartners, CloudPlatform, DaaS, EnvokeIT, Hyper-V, Life-cycle, Lifecycle Management, LoginVSI, management, Mobility, VMWare, WorkSpaceCloud, XenServer
Microsoft Specialist – Architecting Microsoft Azure Cloud Solutions – #Azure, #LoveAzure, #EnvokeIT
May 29, 2015
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Yes, I found a really interesting exam and must say that this is a great one! Makes you show that you understand all the great services that Azure has to offer and on such a good level as well!
I’m happy I made it and that EnvokeIT continues its journey within the Microsoft Cloud and Mobility area! 🙂
The things that I love is the way that Microsoft puts a lot of really good material out there for free for all us techies to consume, like the Microsoft Virtual Academy, Channel 9, Azure Friday, etc.
Also what is really good if you’re preparing for this exam (70-534) is to go through this great prep guide:
So go and explore everything that Azure has to offer and if you have any thoughts or questions around Azure don’t hesitate to contact me at richard at envokeit.com or through our official contact details for the UK and Swedish businesses here.
Have a great weekend!
//Richard
Categories: All, Azure, Azure Stack, Cloud, Infrastructure, Microsoft
70-534, AAD, ad, AD FS, ADFS, Architecting Microsoft Azure, Architecture, Azure, BI, certification, DirSync, EnvokeIT, exam, Hyper-V, IaaS, Load Balancer, Microsoft, Microsoft Virtual Academy, Mobility, network, Notification hub, PaaS, pack, Service Bus, Site Recovery, specialist, stack, VM, VPN
Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations – #IaaS, #Cloud, #PaaS, #Microsoft, #Azure
January 11, 2015
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This series of blog posts by Thomas W Shinder – MSFT and contributors is really great and do cover the best practises and principles behind building Microsoft based private or hybrid IaaS services. Have a look at their great work!
The goal of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Foundations series is to help enterprise IT departments and cloud service providers understand, develop, and implement IaaS infrastructures. This series provides comprehensive conceptual background that combines Microsoft software, consolidated guidance, and validated configurations with partner technologies such as compute, network, and storage architectures, in addition to value-added software features.
The IaaS Foundations Series utilizes the core capabilities of the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, Hyper-V, System Center 2012 R2, Windows Azure Pack and Microsoft Azure to deliver on-premises and hybrid cloud Infrastructure as a Service.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations (this article)
Chapter 2: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Compute Foundations
Chapter 3: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Network Foundations
Chapter 4: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Storage Foundations
Chapter 5: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Virtualization Platform Foundations
Chapter 6: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Design Patterns–Overview
Chapter 7: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations—Converged Architecture Pattern
Chapter 8: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations-Software Defined Architecture Pattern
Chapter 9: Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations-Multi-Tenant Designs
Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations is written and presented in a way that enables architects, designers, implementers and operators to view the content that is most relevant to them. Some readers will choose the read the entire “book”, while others will focus on areas that are most interesting and relevant to them.
At this time, the Microsoft IaaS Foundations “book” is available in web format only. In the coming days, individual files (one for each chapter) and a single file that represents a compilation of all the chapters, will be made available for download. A link to these files will be included in this article, and in each of the articles included in this “book”.
The world of cloud computing moves quickly and the underlying technologies supporting the infrastructure that powers the cloud change and improve just as fast. For this reason, each of the chapters includes a published date and the versions of the software that are discussed in the text. For non-versioned software and services (such as Microsoft Azure), a note of “feature set and capabilities as of…” date is included.
Your feedback is crucial
A lot of time, energy and expense goes…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Azure, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Microsoft, Networking, Storage
Azure, Cloud, compute, design, hybrid, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, multi, network, on-premise, private, public, SC, SCCM, storage, System Center, Tenant
Dell + Nutanix = awesome! – #Nutanix, #Dell, #EnvokeIT
October 8, 2014
1 comment
Hi all,
It’s been a while since I posted something… so the blog backlog is huge right now but I’ll try to finalise all of the items I have prepared soon when time allows!
But this is a really cool thing that I think that many don’t understand the capabilities of! Dell will now provide the awesome Nutanix distributed file system on their XC series!
You all know much I already like Nutanix and the the way that it “just works”! Think about it for a while, it’s so easy just to build a platform that you can scale and manage in such a simple manner. It’s also like a match in heaven for the Hyper-V Failover cluster and VMM world with storage presented over SMB3.. so easy to setup, so simple to manage, and what a performance and scalable solution!
If you have any thoughts, questions or simply just want to learn more about Nutanix or Dell then contact us at EnvokeIT, we know how this works and can help you to simplify and modernise your IaaS service in a true web-scale way!
//Richard
#Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 1 of 7) – Introduction
July 7, 2014
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This is a great blog post series! Good job Cristian Edwards!
Hi Virtualization gurus,
Since 6 months now, I’ve been working on the internal readiness about Hyper-V Networking in 2012 R2 and all the options and functionalities that exists and how to make them work together and I realize that a common question in our team or from our customers is what are the best practices or the best approaches when defining the Hyper-V Network Architectures of your Private Cloud or your Virtualization farm. Hence I decided to write this series of posts that I think they might be helpful at least to do the brainstorm to find the best approach for every particular scenario. The reality is that each environment is different and use different hardware, but at least I can help you identify 5 common scenarios on how to squeeze the performance of your hardware.
I want to make clear that there is no just one right answer or configuration and your hardware can help you determine the best configuration for a robust, reliable and performer Hyper-V Network Architecture. Please note that I will do some personal recommendation based on my experience. These recommendations might or might not be the official – generic recommendations from Microsoft, so please call you support contact in case of any doubt.
The series will contain these post:
1. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 1 of 7 ) – Introduction (This Post)
5. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 5 of 7) – Converged Networks using Dynamic QoS
6. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 6 of 7 ) – Converged Network using CNAs
7. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 7 of 7 ) – Conclusions and Summary
8. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures (Part 8 of 7) – Bonus
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Hyper-V
2012, Architecture, Cloud, cluster, configuration, hardware, Hyper-V, Microsoft, network, Network Architecture, Network Architectures, performance, powershell, QoS, R2, SCVMM
OpenStack and Nutanix – perfect match! (perfect with VMware and Microsoft as well of course) – #Nutanix, #OpenStack, #IaaS
May 2, 2014
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This is a good post by Dwayne Lessner around how perfect match OpenStack and Nutanix is (not just OpenStack of course, Nutanix rocks with VMware and Microsoft as well)!
Nutanix NDFS also provides an advanced and unique feature set for OpenStack based
private clouds. Key features include:
- Simplicity – The same great platform that simplified your virtualisation deployment can simplify the compute and storage deployment for key OpenStack services (Glance, Nova, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, and Swift)
- Single Scalable Fabric – NDFS provides a single fabric for data storage that integrates seamlessly with OpenStack services. NDFS-based storage is easy to provision, manage, and operate at scale.
- Hypervisor Agnostic – Just like OpenStack, Nutanix NDFS was designed from the ground up to be hypervisor agnostic. Nutanix enables customers to choose between KVM, Hyper-V, and the VMware ESXi hypervisor for deployments of OpenStack.
- Enterprise Ready – Nutanix enables a full set of enterprise storage features including Elastic Deduplication, Compression, In-Memory and Flash-based Caching, VM-Data Locality, intelligent Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Snapshots, Fast Clones, and Live Migration.
Read more here.
Here you also have the link to the webinar with topic:
Building OpenStack on a Single 2U Appliance
OpenStack promises to be the open source cloud operating system. Automated provisioning and management of network, server and storage resource via a single dashboard is great, but how can you get the same one-stop-shop simplicity for the underlying infrastructure?Attend this advanced private cloud webinar and learn:
Categories: All, Cloud, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OpenStack, Storage
Cinder, Cloud, computing, deployment, design, ESXi, Glance, Horizon, Hyper-V, hypervisor, IaaS, Information Lifecycle Management, Keystone, KVM, Life-cycle, Microsoft, NDFS, Nova, Nutanix, Nutanix NDFS, OpenStack, perfect match OpenStack, Platform, private, private clouds, Swift, Virtual, VM, VMWare
#XenDesktop 7.1 on #Hyper-V Pilot Guide! – #Citrix
February 19, 2014
1 comment
This is a great PoC guide, some thing I would have done differently in detail but overall great work!
You’ve heard of XenDesktop 7.1, experienced a demo and worked through the Reviewer’s Guide. Now where do you turn when you’re ready for a PoC, pilot and preparations for a full-scale rollout?
Here on the Citrix Readiness and Enablement Team, we’re always looking for ways to empower our customers to be successful on their projects. To this end, we’ve taken one of our most popular hands-on lab guides used to train hundreds of internal and external students and reworked it for consumption by the masses. The XenDesktop 7.1 on Hyper-V Pilot Guide can be download fromhttps://citrix.sharefile.com/d/scaa256260df4ab3b. In this guide we cover the following topics with step-by-step instructions and screenshots:
– Configuring System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Installing the Agent
– Setting Up SQL Server Mirroring for a XenDesktop site
– Setting up the XenDesktop Site
– Joining a Controller to an Existing Site
– Configuring StoreFront and Installing Certificates
– Configuring NetScaler for StoreFront Load Balancing
– Installing the VDA Software on Desktop and Server VMs
– Creating Catalogs of Machine for Desktops and Servers
– Creating Delivery Groups for Desktops and Servers
– Delivering Installed and App-V Applications
– Provisioning Services Configuration and Optimizations
– Using the XenDesktop Setup Wizard
– Setting up Remote Access with NetScaler and StoreFront
– Internal and External Connectivity Scenarios
– Load Evaluator Policies
– Monitoring with Director
– Exploring Configuration Logging
– Exploring Delegated Administration
– Working with PowerShell
And much more!
Take a look through the document and let us know your thoughts…
IMPORTANT: This guide is designed to be used as a reference for building PoC and/or pilot environments. Production environments should always be…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Citrix, Hyper-V, XenDesktop
administration, agent, App-V, Architecture, Citrix, controller, design, Guide, Hyper-V, Load balancing, logging, NetScaler, Poc, policies, powershell, Remote access, SCCM, site, SQL, StoreFront, System Center, VDA, Virtual Machine Manager, VMM, XenDesktop, XML
Nutanix NX-3000 review: Virtualization cloud-style – #Nutanix, #IaaS
January 29, 2014
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A great review of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform! 🙂
What do you get when you combine four independent servers, lots of memory, standard SATA disks and SSD, 10Gb networking, and custom software in a single box? In this instance, the answer would be a Nutanix NX-3000. Pigeonholing the Nutanix product into a traditional category is another riddle altogether. While the company refers to each unit it sells as an “appliance,” it really is a clustered combination of four individual servers and direct-attached storage that brings shared storage right into the box, eliminating the need for a back-end SAN or NAS.
I was recently given the opportunity to go hands on with a Nutanix NX-3000, the four nodes of which were running version 3.5.1 of the Nutanix operating system. It’s important to point out that the Nutanix platform handles clustering and file replication independent of any hosted virtualization system. Thus, a Nutanix cluster will automatically handle node, disk, and network failures while providing I/O at the speed of local disk — and using local SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently used data. Nutanix systems support the VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, as well as KVM for Linux-based workloads.
[ The Nutanix NX-3000 is an InfoWorld 2014 Technology of the Year Award winner. Read about the other winning products in our slideshow, “InfoWorld’s 2014 Technology of the Year Award winners.” | For quick, smart takes on the news you’ll be talking about, check out InfoWorld TechBrief — subscribe today. ]
Nutanix was founded by experienced data center architects and engineers from the likes of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. That background brings with it a keen sense of what makes a good distributed system and what software pieces are necessary to build a scalable, high-performance product. A heavy dose of innovation and ingenuity shows up in a sophisticated set of distributed cluster management services, which eliminate any single point of failure, and in features like disk block fingerprinting, which leverages a special Intel instruction set (for computing an SHA-1 hash) to perform data deduplication and to ensure data integrity and redundancy.
A Nutanix cluster starts at one appliance (technically three nodes, allowing for the failure of one node) and scales out to any number of nodes. The NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File System) provides a single store for all of your VMs, handling all disk and I/O load balancing and eliminating the need to use virtualization platform features like VMware’s Storage DRS. Otherwise, you manage your VMs no differently than you would on any other infrastructure, using VMware’s or Microsoft’s native management tools.
Nutanix architecture
The hardware behind the NX-3000 comes from SuperMicro. Apart from the fact that it squeezes four dual-processor server blades inside one 2U box, it isn’t anything special. All of the magic is in the software. Nutanix uses a combination of open source software, such as Apache Cassandra and ZooKeeper, plus a bevy of in-house developed tools. Nutanix built cluster configuration management services on ZooKeeper and heavily modified Cassandra for use as the primary object store for the cluster.
| Test Center Scorecard | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 20% | 20% | 20% | 20% | 10% | 10% | ||
| Nutanix NX-3000 Series | 10 | 9 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 8 |
9.3 EXCELLENT
|
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Cloud, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OpenStack
availability, built, computing, facebook, Google, Hyper-V, independent servers, KVM, Microsoft, NS, Nutanix, performance, Platform, scalability, Test, Virtual, VMWare, Yahoo
#Gartner report – How to Choose Between #Hyper-V and #vSphere – #IaaS
November 19, 2013
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The constant battle between the hypervisor and orchestration of IaaS etc. is of course continuing! But it is really fun I must say that Microsoft is getting more and more mature with it’s offerings in this space, great job!
One of the things that I tend to think most of is the cost, scalability and flexibility of the infrastructure that we build and how we build it, I often see that we tend to do what we’ve done for so many years now. We buy our SAN/NAS storage, we buy our servers but lean towards Blade servers though we think that’s the latest and coolest, and then we try to squeeze that into some sort of POD/FlexPods/UCS or whatever we like to call it to find our optimal “volume of Compute, Network and Storage” that we can scale. But is this scalable like the bigger cloud players like Google, Amazon etc.? Is this 2013 state of the art? I think that we’re just fooling ourselves a bit and build whatever we’ve done for all these years and don’t really provide the business with anything new… but that’s my view… I know what I’d look at and most of you that have read my earlier blog posts know that I love the way of scaling out and doing more like the big players using something like Nutanix and ensure that you choose the right IaaS components as a part of that stack, as well as the orchestration layer (OpenStack, System Center, CloudStack, Cloud Platform or whatever you prefer after you’ve done your homework).
Back to the topic a bit, I’d say that the hypervisor is of no importance anymore, that’s why everyone if giving it away for free or to the open source community! Vendors are after the more IaaS/PaaS orchestration layer and get into that because if they get that business then they have nested their way into your business processes, that’s where ultimately that will deliver the value as IT services in an automated way once you’ve got your business services and processes in place, and then it’s harder to make a change and they will live fat and happy on you for some years to come! 😉
Categories: All, CloudStack, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Microsoft, OpenStack, VMWare
Cisco, CloudPlatform, CloudStack, compute, cost, EMC, FlexPod, functionality, Gartner, governance, HP, Hyper-V, hypervisor, IaaS, management, Microsoft, NAS, NetApp, network, offering, OpenStack, operations, Orchestration, orchestration layer, performance, POD, report, richness, SAN, storage, System Center, UCS, virtualisation, VMWare, vSphere
#Netscaler Insight and Integration with #XenDesktop Director – via @msandbu
November 15, 2013
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Great blog post by Marius! 🙂
This is another one of Citrix hidden gems, Netscaler Insight. This product has been available from Citrix some time now, but with the latest update in became alot more useful. Insight is an virtual applance from Citrix which gathers AppFlow data and statistics from Netscaler to show performance data, kinda like old Edgesight. (NOTE: In order to use this functionality against Netscaler it requires atleast Netscaler Enterprise or Platinum)
Insight has two specific functions, called Web Insight and HDX insight.
Web Insight shows traffic related to web-traffic, for instance how many users, what ip-adresses, what kind of content etc.
HDX Insight is related to Access Gateway functionality of Citrix to show for instance how many users have accessed the solution, what kind of applications have they used, what kind of latency did the clients have to the netscaler etc.
You can download this VPX from mycitrix under Netscaler downloads, important to note as of now it is only supported on Vmware and XenServer (They haven’t mentioned any support coming for Hyper-V but I’m guessing its coming.
The setup is pretty simple like a regular Netscaler we need to define an IP-address and subnet mask (Note that the VPX does not require an license since it will only gather data from Netscaler appliances that have a platform license and it does not work on regular Netscaler gateways)
After we have setup the Insight VPX we can access it via web-gui, the username and password here is the same as Netscaler nsroot & nsroot
After this is setup we need to enable the insight features, we can start by setting up HDX insight, here we need to define a expression that allows all Gateway traffic to be gathered.
Here we just need to enable VPN equals true. We can also add mulitple Netscalers here, if you have a cluster or HA setup we need to add both nodes.
After we have added the node, just choose configure on the node and choose VPN from the list and choose expression true.
Categories: Access Gateway, All, Citrix, NetScaler, Receiver, XenDesktop
Citrix, Director, end-user, HDX, Hyper-V, ICA, Insight, integration, IP, Monitoring, NetScaler, Netscaler Enterprise, Netscaler Insight, session, statistics, Trend, VPN, VPX, Web Insight, XenDesktop
The IT Melting Pot! 