Archive
#Citrix #ShareFile StorageZone Controller logs – #BYOD
This is great blog post by Dan about where to find that little extra info when you’re having issues with StorageZone controllers!
When troubleshooting issues with the Citrix ShareFile StorageZone Controller the first place to look will be on the Monitoring page of the StorageZone Controller configuration page. If there are items in red on that page I’d next recommend looking in the logs for more details information.
The logs for the StorageZone Controller are located by default at c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\StorageCenter\SC\logs.
Within this directory multiple logfiles exist. The main ones you should check are:
- cfgsrv_%date%.txt – StorageZone configuration logs
- sc_%date%.txt – ShareFile StorageZone “ShareFile Data” logs
- CIFS_%date%.txt – ShareFile StorageZone Connectors for Network File Shares logs
- sharepoint_%date%.txt – ShareFile StorageZone Connectors for SharePoint logs
You can enable extended logging for…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
GREAT VIDEO – #Citrix #XenDesktop vs. #VMware #Horizon #View installation video
This is really funny! Have a look at this video to see how you can compare a XenDesktop and a Horizon View installation side-by-side!
And another thing that is kind of funny is that VMware still compares Horizon View with XenDesktop 5.6: https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-View-vs-Citrix-XenDesktop-Datasheet.pdf
//Richard
NutaniXpress – January 2014 – #Nutanix, #IaaS, #Virtualization, #Storage
Great NutaniXpress release!!!! There is a good prediction and I must say that I’m really impressed with this company and their product!!!
Read the whole NutaniXpress January 2014 article here!
| Deliver High Performance & Scalable Microsoft Exchange with NutanixWith more than 50% of Microsoft Exchange installations now virtualized, it is critical to select the right server and storage architecture to support such critical workloads. Read this solution brief to learn how the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform overcomes the challenges of legacy storage architectures and makes for an ideal solution for your Microsoft Exchange virtualization needs. |  |
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Learn More: Microsoft Exchange Solution Brief |
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| Microsoft SQL Server on Nutanix: Best PracticesThis document makes recommendations for the design, optimization and scaling of Microsoft SQL Server deployments on Nutanix. It shows the scalability of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform and provides detailed performance and configuration information on the scale-out capabilities of the cluster when leveraged for MSSQL deployments. |
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Learn More: Microsoft SQL Server on Nutanix: Best Practices |
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#Nutanix Triumphs at V3 Technology Awards 2013 for Best Virtualisation Product – #IaaS
This is great! A great product takes another award!!! 😉
V3 Readers Award Nutanix with Prestigious Industry Recognition in Highly Competitive Category
Nutanix also won the Best of VMworld 2013 Gold Award for Private Cloud Computing!
LONDON, December 3, 2013 – Nutanix, the leading provider of hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple datacentre infrastructure solutions, has been awarded for its continuing innovation in optimising datacentre infrastructure at the V3 Technology Awards 2013. During a ceremony at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel, the company was awarded Best Virtualisation product, beating a host of well respected and larger, more established organisations in the virtualisation market.
V3.co.uk is a leading source of news and analysis for technology professionals, written by a team of expert IT journalists in the UK and Silicon Valley. The awards were hotly contested this year, with more than 450 entries from 150 companies.
“It’s great to see a new company like Nutanix being recognised at the V3 Technology Awards, among the industry giants. It wasn’t an easy task whittling down the hundreds of entries to create the shortlist, and then V3 readers voted in their thousands for their favourites, making this a significant achievement and a well-deserved win. Well done Nutanix!” said Madeline Bennett, Editor, V3 and The INQUIRER.
Alan Campbell, Regional Director of Western Europe at Nutanix, commented on the success: “Nutanix is a company that is constantly innovating and striving to provide the best platform for its customers, so this recognition by a highly respected publication is a testament to the hard work of our team. Virtualisation is a rapidly evolving technology which we are proud to be at the forefront of and to receive an award in the UK, a key market for us, is an honour.
As the fastest growing enterprise…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers – #ADC, #NetScaler, #Citrix
Citrix is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers for the seventh consecutive year: the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report focuses on vendor’s ability to solve complex application deployment challenges. Don’t miss this chance to learn from Gartner’s independent research.
NetScaler is well established as the industry’s leading internet delivery system, touching an estimated 75 percent of internet users each day. Citrix builds on this leadership to provide the world’s most advanced cloud networking platform, giving customers a single, integrated solution that brings the elasticity, simplicity and expandability of the cloud to any network. This combination helps customers deliver public and private cloud services with the best performance, security and reliability to any device. Learn more about the importance of this recognition by reading this recent press release.
Source: Gartner (October 2013). The full 2013 Gartner Application Delivery Controller Magic Quadrant, report can be viewed on the Gartner website.
//Richard
#Gartner analyst slams #OpenStack, again – #IaaS
Good article and I must agree that OpenStack has quite a long way to go before the “average” enterprise embraces it…
OpenStack still has maturing to do before it’s really ready for the enterprise, analyst says
Network World – Gartner analyst Allessandro Perilli recently attended his first summit for the open source cloud platform OpenStack and he says the project has a long way to go before it’s truly an enterprise-grade platform.
In a blog post reviewing his experience, the analyst – who focuses on studying cloud management tools – says that OpenStack is struggling to increase its enterprise adoption. Despite marketing efforts by vendors and favorable press, enterprise adoption remains in the very earliest stages, he says.
Don’t believe the hype generated by press and vendor marketing: OpenStack penetration in the large enterprise market is minimal.— Gartner analyst Alessandro Perilli
Sure there are examples like PayPal, eBay and Yahoo using OpenStack. But these are not the meat and potatoes types of enterprise customers that vendors are looking to serve. Why? He outlines four reasons, most of which are related to the process and community nature of the project, and less around the technical maturity of it. By the way, this is not the first time a Gartner analyst has thrown cold water on the project.
[EARLIER CRITICISMS FROM GARTNER: Gartner report throws cold water on OpenStack hype]
Lack of clarity about what OpenStack does
There is market confusion about exactly what OpenStack is, he says. It is an open source platform that can be assembled together to build a cloud. It, by itself, is not a cloud though just by downloading and installing it. OpenStack requires some heavy lifting to turn the code into an executable cloud platform, which is why dozens of companies have come out with distributions or productized versions of OpenStack code. But, the code itself is not a competitor to cloud platforms offered by vendors like VMware, BMC, CA or others. Read more…
New #Nutanix Platforms for Graphics, Performance and Economical Storage – #IaaS, #XenDesktop, #BYOD, #NVIDIA
This is really cool!!! Great job as usual Nutanix!!
and Economical Storage
Enterprises continue to embrace converged scale-out architectures to make their datacenters simpler and easier to manage. Nutanix—the leader in converged infrastructure—brings these benefits to all parts of enterprise IT, providing the flexibility and power to run any virtual workload within a single infrastructure. Nutanix has added several new products to its family of Virtual Computing Platforms:
NX-7000 series platform for
powering graphics intensive users
Virtual desktop computing has become mainstream in all size organizations, and throughout all industries. Despite its successful and pervasive enterprise deployment, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been unable to deliver many graphics-intensive applications and services with the same level of performance as when running on physical workstations.
To address this need, Nutanix has partnered with NVIDIA and Teradici to broaden its VDI portfolio, and integrate cutting edge acceleration for graphics rich desktops. The NX-7110 supports configurations with both NVIDIA GRID K1
and K2 GPU technology, as well as Teradici PCoIP APEX cards. The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is the industry’s first converged infrastructure to support every type of VDI user, from task and knowledge workers to power and data scientists. Leveraging VMware’s SVGA driver technology along with NVIDIA GRID, the NX-7000 supports multiple rendering models, including Soft 3D, vSGA and vDGA.
Existing Nutanix environments can dynamically deploy NX-7110 appliances into a unified cluster that is centrally managed, while maintaining graphics intensive users in a separate desktop pool. Additional benefits include the delivery of maximum compatibility and portability to any user. For the first time, organizations have the confidence to move away from more expensive and rigid physical workstations, and virtualize their entire portfolio of desktops. The NX-7110 is now generally available.
NX-6020 delivers more economical
data storage
The NX-6020 supports VMs with very large datasets, such as SQL databases, big data
analytics projects and VDI deployments with full clones. It provides a 25% increase in available capacity. With both in-line and post-pr
ocess compression, it delivers between 42TB and 68TB of effective capacity in a space-efficient 2U platform. In addition, Nutanix has focused on cost-reducing other components within the appliance delivering a more economical data storage solution.
NX-3000/6000 series gets more powerful CPUs for 30% faster performance
Nutanix has updated the existing NX-3000 and NX-6000 product families with four new platforms featuring Intel’s Ivy Bridge server CPUs. As a 100% software-defined solution, Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform can rapidly adopt new technologies.
These new appliances benefit from 25% more CPU cores, faster clock speeds and a reduced power profile. This translates to a 30% increase in performance for VMs running on Nutanix, as well as support for higher VM densities. Each of these new platforms can be seamlessly added to any existing Nutanix cluster to immediately take advantage of the most advanced CPU technologies.
Read more here!
//Richard
#Citrix #ShareFile StorageZone controller 2.2 released – #BYOD
If you haven’t seen this then have a look at what 2.2 now has to offer!
- StorageZones for ShareFile Data — You can store ShareFile data in either Windows Azure cloud storage or a private single-tenant storage system that you maintain. You specify a storage option when you configure StorageZones for ShareFile Data.
What’s new
StorageZones Controller 2.2 provides the following enhancements:
Support for Windows Azure storage containers — If you have a Windows Azure account, you can use an Azure storage container for your private data storage instead of a locally-maintained share.
To get started create a new zone and choose the Azure option when you configure StorageZones for ShareFile Data.
Connectors to SharePoint root-level sites — You can now create a StorageZones Connector for a SharePoint root-level site or site collection, enabling users to navigate all of the subsites and document libraries in the site. To provide more limited access, you can continue to create connectors to individual SharePoint document libraries.
Connectors to user home drives based on Active Directory — You can now create a Connector for network file shares that reliably points to user home drives. To create a connector for user home drives, set the UNC path to the variable %homedrive%. StorageZones Controller will then create connectors based on the user home folder path property in Active Directory.
Installation on non-English operating systems — You can install the English version of StorageZones Controller on the following operating system versions: French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish.
Read more here!
//Richard
Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform – Built For Scale and Agility – via @dlink7, #Nutanix
I must say that Dwayne did a great job with this blog post series!! It goes into expelling the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) that I must say is the most amazing enterprise product out there if you need a truly scalable and agile Compute and Storage platform! I advise you to read this series!!
Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform – Part 1: Built For Scale and Agility
Lots of talk in the industry about how had software defined storage first and who was using what components. I don’t want to go down that rat hole since it’s all marketing and it won’t help you at the end of the day to enable your business. I want to really get into the nitty gritty of the Nutanix Distributed Files System(NDFS). NDFS has been in production for over a year and half with good success, take read of the article on the Wall Street Journal.
Below are core services and components that make NDFS tick. There are actually over 13 services, for example our replication is distributed across all the nodes to provide speed and low impact on the system. The replication service is called Cerebro which we will get to in this series.
This isn’t some home grown science experiment, the engineers that wrote the code come from Google, Facebook, Yahoo where this components where invented. It’s important to realize that all components are replaceable or future proofed if you will. The services\libraries provide the API’s so as newest innovations happen in the community, Nutanix is positioned to take advantage.
All the services mentioned above run on multiple nodes in cluster a master-less fashion to provide availability. The nodes talk over 10 GbE and are able to scale in a linear fashion. There is no performance degradation as you add nodes. Other vendors have to use InfiniBand because they don’t share the metadata cross all of the nodes. Those vendors end up putting a full copy of the metadata on each node, this eventually will cause them to hit a performance cliff and the scaling stops. Each Nutanix node acts a storage controller allowing you to do things like have a datastore of 10,000 VM’s without any performance impact… continue reading part 1 here.
Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform – Part 2: ZZ Top
In case you missed Part 1 – Part 1: Built For Scale and Agility
No it’s not Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, or drummer Frank Beard. It’s Zeus and Zookeeper providing the strong blues that allow the Nutanix Distributed File System to maintain it’s configuration across the entire cluster. Read more…
Single File Restore – Fairy Tale Ending Going Down History Lane – via @Nutanix and @dlink7
Great blog post by Dwayne Lessner!
If I go back to my earliest sysadmin days where I had to restore a file from a network share, I was happy just to get the file back. Where I worked we only had tape and it was crapshoot at the best of times. Luckily, 2007 brought me a SAN to play with.
The SAN made it easier for sure to go back into time and find that file and pull it back from the clutches of death by using hardware based snapshots. It was no big deal to mount the snapshot to the guest but fighting with the MS iSCSI initiator got pretty painful, partly because I had a complex password for the CHAP authentication, and partly because clean-up and logging out of the iSCSI was problematic. I always had ton of errors, both in the windows guest and in the SAN console which caused more grief than good it seemed.
Shortly after the SAN showed up, VMware entered my world. It was great that I didn’t have to mess with MS iSCSI initiators any more but it really just moved my problem to the ESXi host. Now that VMware had the LUN with all my VMs, I had to worry about resignatureing the LUN so it wouldn’t have conflicts with the rest of production VMs. This whole process was short lived because we couldn’t afford all the space the snapshots were taking up. Since we had to use LUNS we had to take snapshots of all the VMs even though there were a handful that really need the extra protection. Before virtualization we were already reserving over 50% of the total LUN space because snapshots were backed by large block sizes and ate through space. Due to the fact that we had to snapshot all of the VMs on the LUN we had to change the snap reserve to 100%. We quickly ran out of space and turned off snapshots for our virtual environment.
When a snapshot is taken on Nutanix, we don’t copy data, nor do we copy the meta-data. The meta-data and data diverge on a need basis; as new writes happen against the active parent snapshot we just track the changes. Changes operate at the byte level which is a far cry from the 16 MB I had to live with in the past.
Due to the above-mentioned life lessons in LUN-based snapshots, I am very happy to show Nutanix customers the benefits of per-VM snapshots and how easy it to restore a file.
To restore a file from a VM living on Nutanix you just need to make sure you have a protection domain set up with a proper RPO schedule. For this example, I created a Protection Domain called RPO-High. This is great as you could have 2,000 VMs all on one volume with Nutanix. You just slide over what VMs you want to protect; in this example, I am protecting my FileServer. Note you can have more than one protection domain if you want to assign different RPO to different VMs. Create a new protection domain and add 1 VM or more based on the application grouping.
The IT Melting Pot! 