Nutanix Weekly

The results are in! With NVIDIA’s newest GPUs designed for virtual desktops and applications, you can address a wider variety of use cases than you could ever before. In our independent testing using the NVIDIA® nVector benchmarking tool, we saw that a single A16 GPU could support 64 virtual desktops, each with 2vCPUs and 1GB framebuffer profiles, per node. With two A16 cards installed we were able to scale to 128, albeit we would recommend a high-performance CPU when scaling to 128 desktops. In a minimal Nutanix® configuration of a three node cluster that equates to 384 users per cluster, all having access to 1GB of framebuffer profile!

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Get excited! The latest upgrade to the core Nutanix® hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software is live. The AOS™  6.5 release is our most comprehensive update ever, with improved performance, security, and integrated data services required for demanding database workloads and business critical applications. 

We encourage you to take a fresh look at AOS 6.5 while keeping three key things in mind: 

1. Performance-hungry business-critical applications and databases are coming to HCI 
2. Cyber-resilience is ideally built-in to storage architecture - not bolted on   
3. Granular snapshots and replication data services are a key buying criteria  

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: ben Rogers

We're pleased to announce that the Approval Policies feature is now available in Tech Preview for the Nutanix Cloud Manager™ (NCM) Self-Service.

NCM Self-Service (formerly Calm) provides an easy and seamless way to consume simple Infrastructure as a Service VMs and multi-tier applications via the marketplace[JG1] . This is possible via easy to use blueprints to automate complex application deployment processes. As NCM Self-Service continues to grow its footprint across enterprise deployments, customers have remarked on the need for even better governance and controls on resources provisioned and managed. Governance is key to building a cloud-like experience for IT organizations, and the ability to easily define and monitor policies are important for enterprise customers.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Data is the lifeblood of today’s enterprises, and an extremely lucrative target for attackers. Ransomware, which essentially holds data “hostage” by encrypting it until a ransom is paid by the company, is increasingly common and becoming more advanced every day. 

In fact, some estimates say that a ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. These attacks can cripple an organization, causing unexpected downtime and wreaking havoc on an enterprise’s operations, production, customer service, and even future reputation. 

It can cost a lot of time, effort, and money to recover from a ransomware attack. Simply having a backup of your data is no longer sufficient, because attackers can now infiltrate backups as well. 

In addition to practicing “defense in depth,” IT professionals are now beginning to see the critical need for immutable backups as a last line of defense from ransomware and other attacks—and a smart way to maintain a successful strategy for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

On my previous blog (Link) I showed you how to build a metro availability. Now I want to "upgrade" both clusters to AHV and enable data protection with the help of Leap to achieve an RPO of zero (0).

This blog post are two posts combined. First is the in-place conversion of ESX to AHV and the second is how to enable and configure Leap.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

With unstructured data growing exponentially, securing shared storage is increasingly becoming difficult. It is an operational nightmare to identify datacenter weak points let alone predict the next threat. Ransomware attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated, surpassing firewalls and anti-virus software. 

Does this sound familiar? You plug one hole another opens, you update software, you train end users on how to detect suspicious files or emails but the threats keep coming. The rise of Ransomware in recent years has put companies on red alert. CIO’s are well aware of the impacts this can cause and nearly all would say that security is a top priority for their business.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Although Kubernetes was originally designed to run stateless workloads, the technology has matured over time and enterprises are increasingly adopting the platform to run their stateful applications. In a survey conducted by the Data on Kubernetes community, 90% of the respondents believe that Kubernetes is ready for stateful workloads, and 70% of them are already running them in production with databases taking the top spot. Having the ability to standardize different workloads on Kubernetes and ensure consistency are seen as the key factors that drive value for businesses.

Nutanix provides an industry-leading HCI platform that is ideal for running cloud-native workloads running on Kubernetes at scale. The Nutanix architecture offers better resilience for both Kubernetes platform components and application data. With the addition of each HCI node, apart from scaling the Kubernetes compute nodes, there is an additional storage controller as well which results in improved storage performance for your stateful applications. 

The Nutanix Unified Storage is made available to cloud-native applications with the Nutanix CSI driver. Applications use standard Kubernetes objects such as PersistentVolumeClaims, PersistentVolumes, and StorageClasses to access its capabilities. The CSI driver also enables users to take Persistent Volume snapshots using API objects VolumeSnaphot, VolumeSnapshotContent, and VolumeSnapshotClass. Snapshots represent a point-in-time copy of a volume and can be used to provision a new volume or to restore existing volumes to the previous snapshotted data. OpenShift Container Platform deploys the snapshot controller and the related API objects as part of the Nutanix CSI Operator as described in Blog 3. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Purpose

The infrastructure for Nutanix Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) supports a tenant cluster and a production virtual private cloud (VPC) for each customer. Customers generally have production VMs running in their on-premises cluster, which is connected to the DRaaS VPC using an IPsec tunnel. This is used by the DRaaS workflow to replicate on-premises production data.

During a disaster recovery situation or while running disaster recovery tests, VMs will failover from on-premises to the DRaaS cluster. When this occurs, all VMs in one subnet of an on-premises network (e.g., 192.168.10.0/24) usually failover to DRaaS. If the customer chooses to preserve the IP, VMs in DRaaS come up with the same IPs as on-premises (e.g., 192.168.10.0/24 network).

In this type of disaster recovery situation, customers can choose which critical VMs are replicated to DRaaS. But in those cases, on-premises VMs cannot communicate with VMs in DRaaS. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Introduced with the Nutanix Files™ release 3.8, Smart DR brought share-level replication between active file server instances for disaster recovery. If you’re not yet familiar with Smart DR, you can get an overview of the feature and its benefits here. Shortly after its initial release, Nutanix introduced 1-minute replication interval support with the Files 3.8.1 release. 

The recent Files release 4.0 further enhances Smart DR with scalability improvements and self-service restore (SSR) integration

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox