Let's Talk About Tech!

Background It's been a while since I'm overlooking at 3D printing. 3D Printers are becoming more and more affordable and reliable. Now, printing something is really easy for anyone who is a little bit DIY-minded. I have jumped into a brand new world who is eating my nights ;) Hopefully it just started with my summer holidays !

Background You are a real upgrade nerd and you could not wait to upgrade your Macbook to Catalina. Yeah, this is cool (they finally dropped the dashboard!). But some anticipated edge effects just hit you in the face : Google Chrome is not able to reach your favorite internal website ! Indeed, Google Chrome does not allow you to bypass the self signed certificate error. Damn!

Background I came across a challenge the other day. A new starter in the company! With 7 different clusters worldwide, not easy to handle (well - painful, waste of time, ... you name it). The pity is : our clusters are still using local authentication. I was sure we can automate this.

Background You are a Nutanix customer but not in the vmware shop and you still want to make good use of Rubrik EDGE virtual appliances. The good news is : Rubrik EDGE can run on Nutanix AHV. But, some extra actions are needed to achieve this.

Background With the raise of API-driven systems, the need of extra security appeared. When doing a simple API call using simple credentials like username and password you might face some security leaks like stolen credentials. When using a token, you have an expiration time so worst case if the token got stolen it will disappear in the cyberspace once his expiry is reached !

Becoming a Nutanix Technology Champion ! Nutanix has created in 2014 the NTC (Nutanix Technology Champion) Program . This is a group of selected people from both Nutanix Partners and Customers who are specialized in some specific area of the Nutanix galaxy. Put together in a Slack channel, it is forming an amazing set of knowledge.  These NTCs are part of briefings and early bird announcements regarding the future of Nutanix, some specific products and partnership with other industry leaders. Each year, at the .NEXT Conference, they have a specific role to play and the involvement came start at writing blog post, be an active forum member or even be a speaker during .NEXT (either way on the main stage or on breakout session). This community is really bringing values to the product : as I'm used to say, this is a win-win situation for both Nutanix and the customers since the NTC program allows direct access to internal Nutanix human resource. Even Dheeraj Pandey (Nutani...

Background You are creating Linux VMs - whatever hypervisor you are using - and you are configuring your local keyboard layout. In my case, this will be Belgian (be-latin1). But, when you colleague from UK or US is connecting to the console for whatever reason, his password is always wrong. This is because he is using a different keyboard layout that the one used for VM creation. This is annoying and in most cases a waste of time. It does not happen when accessing the VM using SSH . Let's localectl ! Your best friend for this case if  localectl . To check the current status, issue this command : # sudo localectl status    System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8        VC Keymap: be-latin1       X11 Layout: be To list available mapping, you can use this command : # sudo localectl list-keymaps ANSI-dvorak al al-plisi amiga-de amiga-us applkey at at-mac at-nodeadkeys at-sundeadkeys atari-de atari-se ...

Background When you have multiple cluster, you may want to create or revoke access easily to your platform. If your clusters are not connected to a central directory, you need to go one by one and pray for not forgetting one. Hopefully, API comes to the rescue!

Background I never formally introduced my php Framework, although I already used it many times for various tasks. I think, this is now the good time to write a little bit more about it. Indeed, on my daily job, I had some specific needs that cannot be solved by the "out of the box" cluster. It really does not matter since Rubrik offers the ability to make API calls for various tasks.

Background When you have very critical applications, sometimes, the minimum of 1h RPO (Recovery Point Objective) that can be configured on a SLA is not sufficient. There is a way to specify a SLA with minutes instead of hours. But, for this you need API calls !

Background In those days where we are connected from everywhere, we are all looking at having the same experience on any platforms. This is where VDI is coming from. Today, VDI is very common but users want more. Administrators as well, they want granularity and easiness.

Background You have a bunch of snapshots in your Rubrik appliance and you would like to download a file from one of them. I have a particular use case, where I need to attach a file to a report email from a backup to prove this has been successfully completed. This is how our DBAs can confirm that Rubrik is doing the job right.

Breaking news! Nutanix just released a brand new version of Nutanix Community Edition - 2019.02.11. This release is based on AOS 5.10.1 and then the Prism UI has been revamped ! Upgrade process is smooth as usual with the 1-Click philosophy. As a matter of fact, the general rule of thumb is :  First upgrade Prism Central; Next upgrade AOS; Lastly upgrade hypervisor. Once completed, you have the new software release ! And the famous responsive UI. If you are lucky enough and got sufficient amount of memory, you can deploy prism central and then test Calm. This is not my case as I only have 32 GB per node. To be honest, it's been a while since I was waiting for this new version adding more storage optimization, new UI, ... But generally speaking, this is more to sync CE release with the official AOS release train. To get it now, just jump onto this blog post and follow the instructions.

Being a Panelist! Me ?!? I'm a Rubrik and Nutanix fan (in any order), is there a better place than a webinar to spread the love ? I've been contacted by Rubrik to be a speaker in a webinar. Woaw, I felt honored and humble at the same time. But, hold on, should I speak ? me ? alone in a meeting room with many people listening to me ? What an experience! Let's do it! First, I need approval from both my management and the marketing team to decide how this can be done, in what context, how the company brand will be used and what am I allowed to tell publicly. Hopefully this step went well and they all agree on the principle and of course wanted to do some screening on the content before the D-Day. Then, I had to produce content. The subject of the webinar itself was very attracting :  A Customer Love Story: From Legacy Tape to Next-Gen Data Protection with Rubrik and Nutanix.  Ok, let's start from there. Important to know, this will be a shared webinar...

Background You managed to be a happy Rubrik customer and you just rolled out your second cluster. Now, you need visibility, a dashboard, anything that can help you to visualize your investment, in a nice and easy way with only what you are looking for ... [for free!] You eventually reach out to your Rubrik salesman and guess what ? Answer will be we don't have. Well, nothing else than a SaaS platform called Polaris doing a lot of stuff that you do not need now. But I have an answer for you !

Background Because I had to share this with you a long time ago, I decided to do it now. There is a Nutanix employee ( Magnus Andersson , VCDX56 ,  from Sweden) who created a wonderful reporting script for AHV-based Nutanix clusters. This script is written in bash and I think, this is a good opportunity for me to share my Nutanix php Framework. So, I decided, with his consent, to port his script into php. This is a good way to introduce my php framework ;)