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Azure – Time to Deep Dive!

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I don’t often write about personal goals on my blog, but I feel like this is a big enough goal to write on the blog. Maybe this will keep me more accountable.

I have been putting off deep diving into Microsoft Azure for more than two years. You might be asking why, well, to be honest, I don’t know – I am sure if you pressed me hard enough, I could come up with plenty of horrible excuses.

With that being said, with the arrival of college football season, so does the “Dave Strum deep diving into Azure” season.

Here’s the Plan:

  1. Work with the eGroup Azure wizards on where to start – Probably Jesus and Ryan
  2. Complete multiple training programs
    1. Skylines Academy
    2. Pluralsight
    3. acloud.guru
  3. Lots and lots of real-world building.

What’s the goal:

  1. Work on at least one basic Microsoft Azure project by January 31, 2019
    1. This can be a solo project or pulling an assist
  2. Passing at least one Microsoft Azure certification exam

I’m also going to use the blog as an area to walk through the basics.

-Dave

VDI – ProfileUnity

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Good Afternoon Friends – 

In today’s post, I am going to go over a few basic items with Liquidware’s Profile Unity that recently came up on a project.

  • ProfileUnity Configuration Management
    • Profile Unity allows you to create multiple configurations that can be deployed out to users. If you create multiple configurations, remember that the configurations are run in alphabetical order if no group membership is selected
    • If you want to run specific configurations based on group membership:
      • Click on the configuration | Click Main
      • Click on the checkbox next to “Require Group Membership for execution”
      • Click “Update” to update the configuration
  • Configuration Files
    • In most ProfileUnity deployments, the deployment files are located on “\\domain.com\netlogon\profileunity”
    • When updating your configuration, deleting the configuration file is not the way to update the file. 🙂
      • Ensure that you can update the configuration file when you update the configuration files
      • Go to “Administration’ | Under “ProfileUnity Tools” put a checkmark in “Overwrite files if they exist” under “Deployment Path”
  • Folder Redirection
    • You don’t need to use folder redirection if you are using a ProfileDisk. The ProfileDisk is already sitting on a file share that I hope is being backed up. Why redirect these files more than once?

Just a few items that I hope can help others using ProfileUnity in the future!

Since 2018 is the “Year of VDI”, you’re going to need a Profile Management tool to keep users happy! ProfileUnity is a great choice!

 

Horizon View 7.5 Instant Clone Issues

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I was working with someone recently who upgraded their Horizon View environment to 7.5.1 recently who also updated their vCenter to 6.7 – mistake #1.(to get off of the old vCenter Web Client). The customer wasn’t in a position to upgrade their ESXi hosts to 6.7 due to some vendor compatibility issues that needed to be resolved via firmware issues. (mistake #2)

When pushing a new version of a Horizon Instant Clone, they were receiving the error: “Error during provisioning: Cloning of VM Win10-Prod has failed: Fault type is SERVER_FAULT_FATAL – Runtime error: No full links for internal VMs found”

Did I mention that VMware signed off on the version information via an SR?

What did we do to fix the issue? The customer had a small enough VDI environment that it was easy enough to delete the VDI Pools and vCenter and start over (100 clients, 2 Pools).

What would fix the issue: Upgrade your hosts to vSphere 6.7

Moral of the story: Ensure your customers understand the software lifecycle and walk them through the process of ensuring all applications that are dependent on each other are FULLY ready for an upgrade.

Don’t pull a homer.

.Next 2018 Sumary

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Hello friends! I just got back from a great week at Nutanix .Next 2018, where not only did I get to hang out with some amazing coworkers, but was able to catch up with some great folks in the vCommunity. There are a ton of .Next 2018 Summary blogs out there, hopefully this will be different enough to keep you interested.

eGroup Specific Items:

  • Nutanix Certified Sales Expert (NCSX) – I’m going to start off this post by bragging a little bit about one of eGroup’s own becoming one of the first to obtain the NCSX certification. Daniel Navarro is an amazing guy, a great Account Exec (you’re lucky if you get to work with this guy) and someone who sets goals and crushes them EVERY SINGLE TIME!  Extremely proud of this guy!
  • Nutanix Sponsor Theater Session – Mike Dent, Myself and Devin Costa (Customer) presented on how we helped transform a customers datacenter from an aging, legacy three-tier configuration to a Next-Gen datacenter. We discussed their old pain points, and how Nutanix, running on Cisco UCS C-Series simplified everything about their datacenter operations. 

Nutanix Announcements:

  • Nutanix Beam – This is Nutanix first “Software as a Service” offering. Beam is a multi-cloud tool that allows you to manage cost, security and compliance of a customers cloud service. It provides in-depth analysis of how an organization of how they are utilizing their public cloud presence, as well as help you right size your assets. Best of all, if you choose not to use the Nutanix platform in your datacenter, you can still take advantage of the offering. Beam currently supports Microsoft Azure, as well as AWS.
  • Nutanix Flow – Nutanix Flow is the Nutanix SDN solution that provides application based security against internal and external threats against applications. Flow also provides features such as Network Visualization, Network Automation and as mentioned application based microsegmentation. Watch out NSX, Nutanix is coming for you.
  • Nutanix Era – (Not GA Yet) – Era is a suite of software tools which automates and simplifies database management, as well as providing lifecycle management. Era utilizes Nutanix application snapshots.
    • One-Click Time Machine – This allows customers to easily manage multiple copies of databases.
    • One-Click DB clone – Allows admins to quickly create database clones or refresh to any point in time where there is a snapshot.
  • Nutanix Acropolis File Services (AFS) 3.0.0.1 – File servers aren’t the sexiest topic to blog about, but AFS continues to evolve into an even better File Server. With AFS 3.0, Nutanix added the following features:
    • NFS v4 Support – With NFS support, clients that have Linux and Unix clients can not take advantage of AFS.
    • Third-Party Backup integration – This allows third party backup vendors to utilize Nutanix provided API’s to backup the File System using Change File Tracking (CFT) technology. This allows vendors to record and collect information about any changes to the files in each snapshot sent to the backup server, thus providing a log of all file changes across snapshots.
    • File Activity Monitoring – This allows vendors (think Varonis) to integrate with AFS to provide information about every action on every file in a file server. Not the sexiest topic, but a GREAT compliance add.
  • Calm – Nutanix Calm continues to be one of the most talked about features. Calm allows you to create blueprints for application provisioning. These blueprints can provision these blueprints as code on AHV, ESXi, AWS and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Nutanix continues to impress me with their fast pace of innovation and the products that they are bringing to market. All of the above product and updates are tools that any organization can utilize, whether you are big or small.

Until next time, enjoy this gem of us saying “See ya next time Nutanix .Next”

-Dave

Nutanix AOS 5.6 Release!

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Good day friends! I don’t typically write about software releases, however this is a big one for Nutanix. There are some great features that customers will be able to take advantage of. Lets go through a few of them!

AOS

  • Network Microsegmentation goes GA for AHV!
    • Managed through Prism
    • Stateful distributed firewall – app isolation
    • Nothing additional to install
  • 80TB Nodes now available
  • Erasure Coding update
    • Lower Garbage collection and background jobs
  • Volume Group (VG) vDisk Load Balancing meaning splitting up the vDisks in same VG on multiple CVMs. Will give you better performance.
  • Prism Central Scale-Out
    • multiple instances of PC forming a resilient and distributed control plane.
  • Two-node Cluster

AFS – This is what I’m most excited about!

  • Support for NFS v4 in addition to SMBv2 and 2.1
  • A single fileserver will support both SMB and NFS exports (AFS can now be used for NON-Windows use cases)
  • Incremental File backup support
    • Change File Tracker based backups
      • HUGE benefit – no fileserver scans needed for incremental backups, super efficient
  • File Activity Monitoring
    • Use external syslog server
    • This opens AFS up to vendors who conduct file auditing. Varonis maybe?
  • AFS Cluster Network Change
  • Share and Export Statistics Now Available

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