Let's Talk About Tech!

Background Lock down, working from home, ... we all been there and for a long time. Since this situation is going to last; we need to have a nice working environment. Today, I'm presenting you a nice way to decorate your home office and ... yes, discount code will follow !

Background There is no mystery, java log4j flaw had a huge impact on any IT team these days. If you want to know more details about it, I really encourage you to read this and upgrade asap your affected systems. This being said, it would be nice to know what systems are affected ... It could be cumbersome to search in each and every systems, especially if you have more than 1000 VMs ... If you are using Rubrik for your backups, it might simplify things !

Background We have a quite large AHV infrastructure and sometimes this is not always easy to get all the relevant details to improve/maintain it. Don't get me wrong, Prism Central is helping a lot. But, when it comes to optimisation of the assets, it is hard to see what gains we can make - starting by detecting the powered off VMs.

Background When we had an issue on an AHV VM, the first reflex was to restore it from last night backup. It was very quick and we were all happy ... unless we realized that no networking was connected. We opened a case with Nutanix to troubleshoot the issue and ....

Background During our ISO audit last quarter, I've been asked to provide a list of the various date of our CDM upgrades. This way they could match with our internal Jira tickets to confirm we are following the process. It was not easy and I had to raise ticket with Rubrik to get support accessing that information. Could it be easier ? I believe so ;)

Background Batteries can be expansive and environmentally unfriendly. Of course, alternatives exist but none of them are truly satisfying. Rechargeable batteries are not providing more than 1.2V, they do not last long and require frequent charge cycles. While scrolling my Facebook feed, I found an interesting ad about a company called Pale blue providing Lithium Ion batteries with the standard batteries form factor with 1.5 V and a standard micro USB port to charge them. Is this the Grail ?

Background While working on a AHV cluster, you can notice that, with time, the storage decreases. This is obvious, all VMs are using thin-provisioning by default. Doing some cleanup and maintenance is required on every IT systems and Nutanix does not escape the rule. One area where we are not focusing enough is the snapshots we are creating and most of the time forgot !

Background It happens quite often that my management is asking for details about our Rubrik usage. Not only a single cluster, all clusters ! This is time consuming (boring too) to go on each clusters, collects the details, compute total usage, protection status, storage savings ratio .... I think you know me now, I'm fan of automating boring things. This task does not escape to the rule ;)

Background I believe most of you heard about the new Red Hat strategy around CentOS ? One of the favorite OS for Linux testing in the Enterprise ? Yes, CentOS used to be the most stable and conservative environment in the Red Hat family (CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux - aka RHEL). When Red Hat announced they are going to shift CentOS to a rolling release exactly like Fedora for the end user world. Many Sysadmin out there were wondering how to address that issue. I believe we have a solid candidate.

Background This is not a big secret, the next famous OS from Microsoft leaked over the Internet few days ago . Windows 11 beta. I'm not a Windows fan, but I'm curious about anything technology related (as you already notice since you are here). I was wondering how it looks and what is the experience. The only quick and easy platform that I have with me is a Nutanix AHV cluster. I wonder if it works.

Background We all been there, and probably me first. When creating codes, the documentation consist most of the time by the comments in the codes ... *sic* For small projects by couple of hundreds lines this is ok but when your project start to hits some 10 thousand lines, this is becoming an issue. There are multiple of initiative on the market to help generating proper documentation (phpDocumentor, phpDox, ....). But they are all massive and not intuitive. I decided to create something ultra simple providing a php source file containing all your function, and an output file that will generating markdown syntax. Ideal for GitHub.

Background I don't know about you but my house is not easy to cover with good and strong WiFi coverage. I've tested almost everything : central strong AP, different WiFi networks, extension via power line, multiple APs with same SSID... all my attempts to get a solid coverage were wrong and this is very frustrating. The dream would be to have multiple hotspots with the same SSID and a technology that allows roaming between APs like mobile networks ... but wait !

Background Nextcloud is a well known file share platform, open source, freely available with nice syncing features. It is the OwnCloud "successor". The platform is providing a web based portal to manage files and shares but as well syncing clients are available on most OSs. The use case I'm trying to achieve here is the file-level restoration. Most of the time, the backup is doing a full VM backup with all files. But what if a user is requesting a restoration of a single file or directory ?

Background If you are already using an object store, you probably have a use case where you want to access the content of the bucket directly from the Linux filesystem. In my case, I'm using Cloudian, and I would like to directly read/write content from/to my Linux machine. Cloudian is object store and Linux is using traditional block store. But, wait ! it is possible to mix those environments !

Background One way to save on expanding a Rubrik Cluster is to offload it. You can do that with an on-prem object store, or in the cloud. But if on-prem is still your way to go, you can consider object store solution. You already know about OpenIO but there are other players : Cloudian is one of them. Their architecture is web scale, same way as Rubrik, Nutanix and all the modern companies these days. The good think with Cloudian is the cloud tiering. If some archives are exceeding a certain lifetime, you can decide to offload your Cloudian appliance and start moving them in the cloud of your choice. Very clever !

Background A long time ago, I was in a plane for more than 10 hours and I had to utilize that time efficiently. I decided to open my laptop and start coding. But, while being off-net for a long period of time, I had no distraction and started to think. I was creating an application that was generating a lot of logs and I thought important to keep them in an efficient way. This is why log rotation came to mind.

Background     I did a mistake - we all do - I have changed the specs on the wrong VMs and of course I did not recall the original settings. I thought I could get them from my backup since all these details are retained when we need to export the VM. Ok, but how ?

Background It's been a while since I'm involved with Rubrik. I was fortunate enough to be part of the CDM 4.0 beta test, helping Rubrik Engineers to polish Nutanix AHV support. This is a great opportunity to be an early adopter, you have the ability to help driving the product into the right direction. One of the achievements I had in mind was to pass the certification. Probably not as easy as it had thought ....

Background After publishing my post about Rubrik Central  months ago, I have received comments saying that it is too difficult to deploy and has too many pre-requisites. I thought about automating the deployment process in many ways and found that containers could be a nice option. But I didn't know anything about Docker. So, I did some research and I think I came across with something definitely usable !

Background I have a home automation system at home (you know that from the Yamaha  article ) and I would like to know the travel time while having breakfast. Always good to plan ahead for any hiccup on the road. Easy to get this info on Google map, but you need a browser and a few clicks, I would like something automated !

Background Yes, Yamaha, I know this is not an usual topic on this blog, but don't worry, we will still code a little ;) Modern amplifiers and home cinema's are now connected. Some with wifi, some with ethernet. It would be nice to have the ability to control them. Mine is a RX-V673, too old to have WiFi but I have an Ethernet port. There is a smartphone app as well. If there is connectivity and an app, for sure we can hack it !

Background Now that we have seen how to get and apply categories and values to VMs, it is about time to learn how to create categories and values. Indeed, to be able to apply categories to VMs they first need to be created and ready to be used. Nutanix allows us to create whatever categories we have in mind.

Background Your Rubrik platform is getting full and you are low on CAPEX. However, you have plenty of OPEX, then cloud is yours. Setting up archiving in the cloud could be complex process. I'm actually quite new to this area so I will try to explain you how to use it

Background As an IT guy focusing on security for privileged accounts, you would like to have a single source of authentication to facilitate user access to resources. Rubrik is a sensitive platform since anyone with admin access to that platform can read/steal data from your Enterprise. It would be nice to authenticate any access to that platform using LDAP or AD. Rubrik got you covered !

Background Managing Categories (tags), within a Nutanix environment can be cumbersome, especially if you have big amount of VMs or if you want to automate the process and why not, react on triggers. Hopefully, Nutanix is giving you the power.I just finished couple of functions and added them to my Nutanix Php Framework !