vthistle.com

You are here: Home / Archives for Dave

.Next 2018 Sumary

By

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!

By

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

Useful Links

 

VMware Horizon View & LetsEncrypt

By

As most tech people, I like to build, destroy, rebuild and repeat. It’s what we do, its how we learn to do things. One of my latest deep-dives has been into Horizon View 7.X. A few years ago, I went down this path as well, and I bought a cert so that I could go through the setup.

Enter LetsEncrypt – Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. They provide certificates with a lifetime of 90 days and renewing a certificate is done within a couple of minutes, which is perfect for testing and home labs.

I started researching how I could use the LetsEncrypt certs with Horizon View and I couldn’t find much. Before we dive into how we make this happen, I first want to start out by saying using LetsEncrypt with Windows isn’t the simplest thing to do, So I used a CentOS Linux box – Super Small footprint for a cert generator. I’m not a Linux expert, so using and getting to know CentOS was also a learning experience.

So, in this article, I will go through the steps to get the cert, as well as applying them to Horizon View.

Installing LetsEncrypt

As mentioned above, I am using a CentOS machine to obtain the certs.

  • Log into the CentOS machine as root
  • First, we have to install and enable the EPEL repository
    • sudo yum install epel-release
  • Now, we can install certbot – certbot is just an application that goes out and gets the certs
    • sudo yum install certbot

Now that we have Certbot configured, we can now move on to Request the Certificate

Request a Certificate

*Note: change the items in red to match your needs

  1. Run the following command on your Linux box.
    • certbot certonly –manual –email xxxx@gmail.com -d server.vthistle.net –rsa-key-size 2048
  2. Agree to the ToS
  3. Decide if you want to share your email with LetsEncrypt
  4. Answer the question about “Are you ok with your IP being logged” as the IP requesting the cert
  5. Create a page on a web sever with the challenge key to prove you are in ownership of the site

  6. When the request has been validated, you will see a “CONGRATULATIONS“
  7. Browse to /etc/letsencrypt/live/site.domain.com/
    1. You will find the following files:
      • cert.pem —-> Server Certificate
      • chain.pem —> Root and Intermediate Certs
      • fullchaim.pem –> Server, intermediate and root chain
      • privkey.pem —> Private key for Server Certificate

Convert PEM to PFX with Private Key

  1. Copy the files listed above from your Linux box to a windows box and use OpenSSL
  2. Run: openssl.exe pkc12 -export -out view.pfx -inkey privkey.pem -in cert.pem -certfile chain.pem
  3. You will then copy your “view.pfx” file that you can use on your Horizon View Server

Adding the new Cert to the Connection/Security Servers

  1. The process to replace the certs on the Connection Server and Security Servers are the same: open MMC.exe -> File -> Add/Remove Snap-in… -> Select Certificates -> Add:
  2. Change the “friendly name” of the default certificate to something other than vdm
  3. Go through the import wizard and ensure you check the box to “Mark this key as exportable“
  4. Change the “Friendly Name” to vdm and restart the “VMware View Connection Server” service

Complete – Your View Connection Server is now using you 90 day LetsEncrypt certificate. 

NFS 4.1 – Synology – VMware

By

I was recently studying for my VMware 6.5 Delta Cert and realized NFS 4.1 was on the blueprint. I don’t do much (if any) NFS at customers sites – so I wanted to upgrade my lab from NFS 3 to 4.1. have a small homelab, which consists of the following gear: 2 Intel NUCs, Synology 713+ and a Iomega PX300D. I run NFS off of the Synology, mostly because I was lazy and didnt want to setup iSCSI.

To enable NFS 4.1 on the Synology, I had to update some config files.  *From Synology Support – Do this at your own risk! :

  1. Enable SSH from Control Panel |  Terminal and SNMP
  2. Connect to the Synology using your favorite SSH utility
  3. cd /usr/syno/etc/rc.sysv
  4. sudo vi S83nfsd.sh
  5. Go to line 91 (in my case) – go to “/usr/sbin/nfsd $N” and add “-V 4.1”
    1. Finished product will be: “/usr/sbin/nfsd $N -V 4.1”
  6. Save the file and Exit.
  7. Restart the NFS Service: sudo ./S83nfsd.sh restart
  8. Verify NFS 4.1 is now enabled
  9. In the vSphere Web Client: Unmount the NFS datastore & remount as NFS 4.1
  10. Disable SSH on your Synology

Complete!

#NutanixNTC 2018

By

I am happy to announce that I was selected to be part of the Nutanix Technical Champion program again for 2018! This group is comprised of 138 individuals committed to assisting organizations deliver the best business outcomes utilizing the leader in HCI, Nutanix.

Also part of the group is Mike Dent, who is the Data Center Director at eGroup.

Congrats to all of the other #NutanixNTC’s out there!

The official Nutanix Technical Champion announcement is located here.