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Metro Availability – Nutanix site-to-site cluster! Sooo cool! – #Nutanix, #EnvokeIT
This is a really cool feature, I know many companies right now that are thinking about refreshing their platform (computer, network and storage) solution(s) and datacenter strategy. Most have dual datacenters today and would like to simplify the setup and ensure that they don’t have to handle two private clouds and manually create disaster recovery processes and technical solutions for ensuring that they can ensure high availability of their applications running on top of the IaaS solution.
This is where this new feature from Nutanix comes into play, now you can get data protection and mirroring of your data across two or more sites built into the product. Think about it, you can ensure your application availability in the event of downtime (planned or unplanned). Really cool!! 🙂
Introducing Metro Availability
Business-critical applications demand continuous data availability. This means that access to applications and data must be preserved even during a datacenter outage or planned maintenance event. Many IT teams use metro area networks to maintain connectivity between datacenters so that if one site goes down the other location can run all applications and services with minimal disruption. To keep the applications running, however, requires immediate access to all data.Â
Nutanix is the first hyper-converged infrastructure vendor to deliver continuous data protection across multiple datacenters. Using synchronous mirroring, Metro Availability stretches datastores for virtual machine clusters across two or more sites located up to 400km apart. All functionality is natively integrated into Nutanix software, and supported across all Nutanix platforms with no hardware changes. Enterprise IT teams benefit from improved business operations by maintaining application availability during planned and unplanned site downtime.Â
Virtualization teams can now non-disruptively migrate virtual machines between sites during planned maintenance events, providing continuous data protection with zero recovery point objective (RPO) and a near zero recovery time objective (RTO). Metro Availability is deployed within minutes and managed directly from Nutanix Prism UI, eliminating any need for additional management consoles.Â
- More Flexibility – Only Nutanix enables customers to deploy different configurations for primary and secondary sites, and support one-to-many and many-to-one topologies. Customers are no longer forced to have identical platforms and hardware configurations at each site
- VM Awareness  – Individual VMs can be mirrored across sites using Metro Availability, giving administrators unparalleled flexibility in configuring multi-site deployments and improving overall system efficiency
- 2X Greater Distances Between Sites – Nutanix Metro Availability supports single datastores stretched up to 400km – twice what current systems support today
Metro Availability enhances and extends the already rich set of integrated data protection and high availability capabilities in the Nutanix solution, catering to the diverse needs of enterprise customers.
Official release not you can find here!
And contact EnvokeIT if you want more information on how this can provide value to you!
//Richard
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! 