Archive
Almost perfect.. #ShareFile StorageZones on Azure is now generally available! – #Citrix, #Azure
This is a great addition I must say, but some things are missing!
One thing that I’m missing is the full integration with Azure storage containers! You still have to specify a temp/cache storage location that today ShareFile controller requires to be on a CIFS share when you have multiple controllers. And if you put the controller up in Azure as well, how do you then get that CIFS share and make it highly available? There is no CIFS exposure directly from the Azure storage, you have to setup a couple of VM’s in Azure, do something like DFS to expose is.. and then all of a sudden you have a whole file service to manage there as well.. and to monitor and all of a sudden you need AD and monitoring and reporting of it.. phuuu…
So I hope that in next version we can specify an Azure storage container for that cache/temp storage as well! 😉
The other thing I’d really like to see is NetScaler support in Azure, so that we could do proper AAA/CS/LB of the controllers in Azure as well so that we can get a simple and fully cloud based service in Azure! 🙂
BYOD and a growing global workforce are generating demand for instant access to data, offline productivity and seamless collaboration from anywhere. Organizations are challenged with reconciling these forces with leveraging existing investments, protect intellectual property and meet regulatory compliance requirements – driving interest in ShareFile StorageZones. StorageZones offers IT the flexibility to store data in secure Citrix-managed datacenters in multiple worldwide locations, or on-premise within their own datacenters.
At Citrix Synergy 2013, we announced new ShareFile StorageZones options with Microsoft Windows Azure. We are now pleased to announce the general availability of ShareFile StorageZones on Azure with the release of ShareFile StorageZones Controller software version 2.2. This release includes support for Windows Azure storage containers, therefore 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. Hosting ShareFile data natively in your Microsoft Azure account helps IT build the most cost-effective and customized solution for their organization. This customer-managed solution integrates ShareFile with Microsoft Azure’s Binary Large Object (Blob) storage, a cloud service for storing large amounts of unstructured data that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS.
Product Overview
Azure storage is customer-managed storage hosted in the Windows Azure cloud. File uploads are initially deposited into a temporary storage area shared by all StorageZone controllers. Then, a background service copies those files to the Windows Azure storage container and deletes the local cached copy of the file(s).
Typically with CIFS based StorageZones, the Controller servers are installed on-premise in the customer’s datacenter. However, if a customer is hosting virtual machines in Azure, they could install the StorageZone Controller software on instances running in their Azure account and not necessarily on-premise.
Read the ShareFile StorageZones on Azure Storage Technical Brief and watch the video Installing and Configuring ShareFile StorageZones v2.2 with Microsoft Azure to learn more about this solution.
Check out our Citrix and…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Nutanix – the ultimate Virtual Computing Platform for VDI – CBRC-like Functionality For Any #VDI Solution with #Nutanix – #IaaS – via @andreleibovici
It’s really great to see the capabilities of the Nutanix platform! Just read this great blog post by @andreleibovici around Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) and how this isn’t necessary at all on a platform like Nutanix!
Conclusion
Overtime I will discuss more about the technology behind Content and Extent Caches. For now what is important to know is that Nutanix provides a better in-memory microsecond latency benefits provided by CBRC for any VDI solution on any of the aforementioned hypervizors, for both Linked and Full-Clones. In fact, Nutanix engineers even recommend Horizon View administrators to disable CBRC because the Nutanix approach is less costly to the overall infrastructure.
It is amazing when your world turns upside down and a technology that used to be awesome becomes mostly irrelevant. It amazes me how fast technology evolves and help organizations to achieve better performance and lower OPEX.
For a long time I have discussed the benefits of CBRC (Content Based Read Cache) available with Horizon View 5.1 onwards, allowing Administrators to drastically cut-down on read IO operations, offloading the storage infrastructure and providing greater end-user experience.
Here are few of the blog posts I wrote on CBRC technology: Understanding CBRC (Content Based Read Cache), Understanding CBRC – RecomputeDigest Method, Sizing for VMware View Storage Accelerator (CBRC), View Storage Accelerator Performance Benchmark, CBRC and Local Mode in VMware View 5.1, View Storage Accelerator (CBRC) Hashing Function.
CBRC helps to address some of the performance bottlenecks and the increase of storage cost for VDI. CBRC is a 100% host-based RAM-Based caching solution that helps to reduce read IOs issued to the storage subsystem and thus improves scalability of the storage subsystem while being completely transparent to the guest OS. However, CBRC comes at a cost.
When the View Storage Accelerator feature (CBRC) is enabled, a per-VMDK digest file is created to store hash information about the VMDK blocks. The estimated size of each digest file is roughly:
- 5 MB per GB of the VMDK size [hash-collision detection turned-off (Default)]
- 12 MB per GB of the VMDK size [hash-collision detection turned-on]
The digest file creation for a large replica disk can take a large amount of time and a bulky quantity of IOPS, therefore it’s is recommendable not to run the operation, create new desktop pools, or recompose existing pools during production hours.
CBRC also uses a RAM to manage the cached disk blocks. The per-VMDK digest file is also loaded into memory. That is the reason why CBRC should not be enabled under memory-overcommit environments. If a host is memory over-committed and CBRC is enabled – the memory pressure is increased as CBRC also uses memory for the cache. In such cases, the host could experience increased swapping and the overall host performance could be impacted.
Whilst I wrote about CBRC benefits, I also received numerous negative comments about the technology, including lack of support for full-clone desktops, being unsupported for layering tools like Unidesk, and taking too long to generate new hashes for every replica.
CBRC is a platform feature (vSphere), however it is only enabled and available via Horizon View. Other VDI products such as XenDesktop or vWorkspace cannot utilize the feature.
Nutanix suppress the need for CBCR, providing similar functionality to any VDI solution running on top of vSphere, Hyper-V or KVM. Nutanix has a de-duplication engine built into the solution that works real-time for data stored in DRAM and Flash.
Content Cache (Dynamic Read cache) Read more…
#VDI Calculator v5 is Now Available with Major New Features – #IaaS, #Storage, #BYOD via @andreleibovici
This is awesome! Great work by @andreleibovici!
I am happy to announce the General Availability of the new VDI Calculator v5. This new version is the single biggest release since I started delivering the calculator. I have completely re-architected the way the calculator works, allowing multiple types of desktops to be configured in a single calculation for a single solution.
All existing features have been retained and will work in the exact same way you are used to, but you now have the ability to select different options for different types of desktops or desktop pools.
As an example, you may choose Desktop Type 1 to be a ‘student’ desktop using Linked Clones with 10 different pools; conversely you may choose Desktop Type 2 to be a ‘professor’ desktop using Full Clones with 5 individual pools. This new calculator gives you much more granular control over your calculations eliminating repetitive tasks when sizing larger environments.
To enable multi-desktop pool calculations just select ‘-’ and ‘+’ in the top bar menu.
Another additional feature is what I call ‘Ask for Help‘. During the application session when you select the Update option a new screen will show up asking if you would like to be contacted by VDI solutions vendors that can help reduce costs, improve performance or improve manageability of your VDI solution. If you are interested…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Nutanix #Prism GUI Interactive Mock-Up Available – via @VirtuallyGeeky and @andreleibovici
Wow, this is great!
Nutanix Sr. Systems Engineer, Tim Federwitz (@VirtuallyGeeky), created a nice interactive mock-up of the Nutanix Prism Administrative Interface.
In Tim’s own words, “I have created a VERY simple, but somewhat functional, slightly interactive look at the Nutanix Prism GUI (the Nutanix Web Console). You can use it from pretty much any device, including mobile phones and tablets. Click or tap on the various items in the GUI to navigate around the different screen captures. The screenshots are all static, of course, but at least you get to see the different screens and features.
It is still in its infant stage as I threw it together in a few hours last Sunday night. I plan on finishing up the screens I didn’t have time for, but feel free to use it as it comes together. I am “releasing” it early as there seems to be a LOT of interest in something like this.
I really created it to easily show potential customers what the Web Console looks like and highlight some of the features and ease of use that it brings. Along with showing how VM centric and granular…
Continue reading here!
//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
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
10TB of free #cloud #storage from China’s #Tencent
Wow, that really puts some pressure on the “other” guys!!! 10TB is a lot!
I’ve talked to people and some are concerned about that it’s a China owned company even though the storage will be located in the US and Southeast Asia though it’s the company that has the “power” to manage and control it, but let us set that aside for now! 10TB of free storage! 🙂
Chinese Internet giant Tencent is looking to dole out a jaw-dropping 10TB worth of free cloud storage to its international users soon, as it seeks to roll out an English version of its cloud storage product next year, PandoDaily reports.
Peter Zheng, the Shenzhen-based vice president of Tencent’s social network group, tells PandoDaily that the company will bring its cloud storage offering to the US in early 2014. It is also launching an English version of Story Camera, an Instagram-like watermark-based photo app already popular in China, in the next two to three weeks.
In August, Tencent started courting Chinese users with its very generous gift of space — as it sought to out-do its rivals Baidu and Qihoo, which started giving away 1TB worth of free storage.
As Tencent gets into the game with an English version of its cloud storage service though, it looks set to attract way more users around the world who want to get their hands on this colossal amount of space — which, to be honest, seems almost impossible to finish using.
The whopping 10TB puts the free space given by Dropbox, Box and Microsoft to shame. At their maximum amounts, Dropbox has offered free space amounts ranging from 25-50GB as part of promotional deals with Samsung and HTC, Box has offered 50GB of free storage with file-size limitations before, and Microsoft upped the storage space for its SkyDrive Pro offering from 7GB to 25GB.
However, just as with the Chinese rollout, Tencent will likely kick in the same caveat for its cloud storage offering — that is, you won’t get the whole 10TB worth of space at one go. Instead, Tencent will top up your storage space as you deplete it.
To put privacy concerns at ease, Zheng tells Pandodaily that the international data will probably be stored on servers outside of China — in the same way that Tencent’s messaging service WeChat uses servers in the US and Southeast Asia.
As Tencent is taking big strides…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Gartner report – How to Choose Between #Hyper-V and #vSphere – #IaaS
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! 😉
The IT Melting Pot! 