Let's Talk About Tech!

Background There we go, you have been able to deploy a Nutanix CE instance for your lab/testing environment. You would like to set some backups up ? You also have some Rubrik deployment and you would like to take benefit of this environment ? This is totally making sense but you cannot add your CE cluster because of the AOS version incompatibility ? There is a way to overcome this - at your own risks !

Background Sometimes in the life of the datacenter, you need to move hardware from one location to another. Funny enough, we not always think that we need to move - especially when everything works (very) well. In the case of a Nutanix cluster, this could require some particular attention.

Background A good example of using the rkFramework.php described in the previous article. This is showing how to call some functions to get some basic cluster info. rkGetinfo.php I have created this script to have a quick overview of a Rubrik cluster, version, nodes, IPs, SLAs, unmanaged object, cluster runway, last events etc ... very handy to quickly discover a new environment or simply check an existing one. The script is available on GitHub . It requires two external files : the rkFramework.php (also available on GitHub ) and a credentials.php file to point to the right cluster with the right access. Once in action, you will see similar output : Feel free to tweak the script as much as you love, so it fits your requirements. Hope this helps!

Background One use case for Rubrik API is when you have a master SQL instance and a stand-by server that needs to be populated with the latest data set. The reason is when a disaster occurs, you want to start as quick as possible in DR mode to avoid service interruption and a too far recovery point objective (RPO). In this case, I thought automating recovery to a certain point in time on regular schedule could potentially do it. Rubrik do not support automated restore/export (yet). But, there is a way to do it by yourself

Background When trying out OpenIO or when some unexpected event occurs on the platform, it may happen that you would like to flush a specific bucket from its content. I had the opportunity to very quickly fill-up my test platform with some outdated backup sets archived out of my Rubrik platform. It was not critical data and it was safe to flush them. But ok, how can we do this ? Flushing a Bucket This is not feasible out of the box and OpenIO support guided me through this process. 1) Get the exact name of the bucket you would like to flush 2) List all object in that bucket 3) Issue a delete command 2) and 3) can be done in a "piped" command so, you can automate the process which makes life easier (less safer?). Getting the bucket name #  openio --oio-ns OPENIO --oio-account AUTH_34698f84fb3541e1b35b8663f70a0842 container list   +--------------------------+-------------+-------+ | Name          ...

Background I have my OS X default language set to French. It is fine, I can leave with it. But Office, I really prefer to have it in English. When installing Office 2016 for Mac, it automatically sets the program language to the OS language. Seems legit ! If you want to change it afterward, there is a workaround.

Background It's been a while since I wanted to solve my WiFi issue outside of my house. When outside, you always need connectivity : checking mails, working from home, streaming music during parties with family and friends, ... there are a lot of use cases. But, how to solve this ? You can add multiple WiFi repeaters but this is not handy.

Background You are archiving (a lot), and soon, your archiving platform become full. How to solve this ? Following the below procedure, you will add an extra volume to the OpenIO platform and continue to archive, again and again.

Background You have a Rubrik cluster which is becoming full and you are thinking at started archiving to off-load the appliance. There are few ways to archive from Rubrik. Once of them is by using object store. Object store became popular with Amazon S3. There are expansive solutions that provides out of the box object store and there is Open Source.

Background Trying to upgrade to the latest AOS, NCC, Hypervisor .... but you are running out of space on your cluster and pre-checks are failing ? There is a fix !

Background You have removed your Prism Central VM and your cluster still shows a registered but disconnected status. You would like to unregister the cluster with a "force" status and start again with a new Prism Central deployment. Yes, this is possible, this is documented but for some reason it does not work. There is a KB on the Nutanix portal ( https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/kbs/details?targetId=kA00e000000XeZjCAK ) but it does not work/apply to your case. I miss read it and here is the solution !

Background Sometimes, when writing scripts or when troubleshooting a problem on a Linux platform you are struggling to remember how to get the number of cores, the current IP address, the kernel version, available space, ... All those settings are present somewhere in the system. Remember, with Linux, everything is file based. There is a way to easily get those details with one single command. Please continue reading !

  Background You still have old physical Windows 2003 servers that you want to migrate to new VMs but before doing that a full backup is a must. You tried to deploy the Rubrik backup agent on it but dam, this is not supported since only exists on 64 bits binaries. What to do ? There is another option : making good use of NAS shares. Problem : you cannot add the share on the Rubrik side, it seem to hang somewhere. I have the solution

Background Your network administrator provides you with some Cisco AnyConnect SSL VPN configuration that works great with WIndows and Mac OS but of course, nobody cares about Linux and you are a proud Linux Fedora 27 user - yeah! But how to access to company resources while on the go ? Read below

Backgound Provide a quick and dirty way to get basic cluster details in Php from the command line. That sound great. And indeed, very feasible making good use of REST API calls.

Background Nutanix platform can be queried out by external application to read/write information to/from the cluster. This can be very handy to connect Nutanix with the external world. This is how Nutanix technology partners are inter-acting with the platform. Example, a platform like Rubrik is making good use of those APIs to perform backups. on the other side, this is how Nutanix instruct vmware to create VMs ... I've decided to implement a small script to get access to some cluster details and then create a little dashboard in my own flavour. You can consider this as a technology demonstrator.

  Background You have completed tests with your new brik and you would like to reset everything to defaults. This is possible with one command : reset. It has some requirements in order to move on. You need to understand what will be reset and what won't.

Background What if your sub-team can manage their backup/restore jobs by themselves ? What if they can configure SLAs for their applications ? They restore job directly without requesting this action to the backup administrators ? A dream ? Probably a reality as well !

Background Sometimes, you have to connect to old IPSec VPN sites. But unfortunately, latest modern Linux distributions are dropping connectivity after around 24 minutes without any valid understandable reason. It was the case for me with Fedora 25. I've made some researches all over the web without finding a solution until ...

Background Most of the time, command line prompt in terminal are boring and not very helpful. The default prompt on Mac OS looks like "$" or "#". I would like to have some more information and add more visibility. After a few tweaks and researches, my actual prompt looks like this :

Backgound This time, this is a MacOS tip ! You have a list of files in the terminal window in front of you, some are pictures, some are texts. For text files, this is easy to quickly issue a "more" or "cat" so you immediately figure out what it is. For a picture, this is another story, you need an image viewer. Whatever the speed and simplicity of this editor, you need to load a 3rd party application and switch to it, this is not very handy. What if you could see this image directly from the terminal ? 

Background You did it ! The brand new Rubrik appliance has been delivered today and you are very euphoric and cannot wait to have it working ! I know I know, we all been there ;) So, time for some great datacenter work ! But where to start ? Check below.

Background Rubrik can connect to Nutanix clusters running AHV since August 2017. This is a perfect fit mixing simplicity and efficiency from both worlds. To have secured communications between the two platforms, there are some mandatory steps that needs to be done.

Background You just got your new set of brik's and you would like to upgrade to the latest version of the Rubrik software ? As today, there is not 1-click upgrade yet, but there are some steps that can be easily done by any IT guy. Don't look too much, they are all described here.

Background Your Raspberry Pi is booting in emergency mode complaining about a device that needs to be checked. Then after a while, you are getting into emergency mode. Of course, your root password does not work because by default root login is disabled on Raspbian or because you simple do not have the right keyboard layout and so on and so on.... Welcome to emergency mode! After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, "systemctl default" to try again to boot into default mode. Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to continue): DON'T PANIC ! Keep calm and read this post How to fix it It took me a while to understand the exact meaning of this message. Actually dev-sda1.device is not related to the Pi itself but to my external hard drive. The one I plugged-in in this post . I have added the drive in my /etc/fstab to have it available at boot time. If any of the devices i...

Background Nutanix CE edition is not able to find a suitable NIC on your brand new Intel NUC G7. Do not worry, there is a workaround. This is an issue with the driver version and the hardware embarked within the Intel NUC G7.

Background I recently bought myself an Apple TV. Absolutely amazing piece of design and technology but ... movies on the Apple Movies platform are (very) expansive. And what about my actual collection of video files ? There is no way to connect storage on the Apple TV. So, I needed to find a solution to play the movies files that I filmed with my camcorder on the Apple TV. Actually, there is a way. The Apple TV AppStore is providing an app called InFuse . It allows you to play remote content. One of the supported protocol is DLNA. DLNA protocol is not new and usually well supported. It allows you to stream content over the network (local ideally to keep smooth broadcasting). You can find more details about DLNA here . For free, you can also use VLC for AppleTV. The user interface and functionalities are very light but if you don't need fancy menus and details about movies, this is a good start. Disclaimer : this article is not encouraging piracy, you can perfectly gene...

Background Somehow, the latest version of Nutanix AOS (starting at v5.5) integrated a bug in the protection domains management. You cannot remove a remote site without getting this message : They know about the error and they are going to release a fix in v5.5.1. But so far, we need to use a workaround to complete this action.

Background Sometimes, you need to create multiple clones for a single gold image (template). This can be boring using the Prism Element UI if you have more than 10. Hopefully, there is a set of commands that can be initiated from the command line ACLI - Acropolis CLI. ACLI is rich in terms of action that can be done. Actually almost everything VM related can be done using ACLI. Here is how to create clones from a source VM.

Background When deploying a Nutanix CE host, the host name is always weird and random. Something like "NTNX-010422a0-A". This is not easy for maintenance - especially when you have more than one host. You probably would like to call it with the matching name of your real host like NUC-1, Host-1. This is not complex here is how.

Background Most of the time when deploying Nutanix CE, the hardware is limited because you need to save costs. Then, maximum RAM is limited - like in the Intel NUC who can only support up to 32 GB. By default, the CVM are configured with 16 GB RAM, therefore this is giving less RAM for creating VMs. If you are not using advanced features like dedup on the flight or erasure coding, you can decrease the CVM memory to 8 GB without any impact on the cluster. This is what this guide is all about.

Nutanix You all heard about Nutanix right ? Nutanix is a software company who creates HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions that enable easy IT in your datacenter and in the the cloud. More details on www.nutanix.com . Beside the commercial product, there is a free  edition called the Community Edition  where tons of people contribute to the success of it. This freed  edition works on very low end hardware such as Intel NUC or refurbished servers that may lay around in your datacenter stock (if they have the relevant VTDx CPU features enabled).