To continue on my last blog post on Exchange...
As I mentioned previously, I support SE’s from all over the world. And again today, I got asked what are the best practices for running Exchange on Nutanix. Funny enough, this question comes in quite often. Well, I am going to help resolve that. There’s a lot of great info out there, especially from my friend Josh Odgers, which has been leading the charge on this for a long time. Some of his posts can be controversial, but the truth is always there. He’s getting a point across.
On February 16, 2016, Nutanix announced the Acropolis NOS 4.6 release and last week was available for download. Along with many enhancements, I wanted to highlight several items, including some tech preview features.
As always, I try to blog on questions I get from the field and recently, I helped some colleagues and customers build a DAG on Nutanix 2 times last week ;). The process is pretty straightforward, but there are some best practices that everyone should follow to ensure a healthy DAG environment.
If you missed other parts of my series, check out links below:
Part 1 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Part 2 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Cluster Architecture with Hyper-V
Data Structure on Nutanix with Hyper-V
I/O Path Overview
Drive Breakdown
To give credit, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s “Nutanix Bible” blog as his content is the most accurate and then I put a Hyper-V lean to it. Also, he just rocks…other than being a Sea Hawks Fan :).
As mentioned before (likely numerous times), the Nutanix platform is a software-based solution which ships as a bundled software + hardware appliance. The controller VM or what we call the Nutanix CVM is where the vast majority of the Nutanix software and logic sits and was designed from the beginning to be an extensible and pluggable architecture. A key benefit to being software-defined and not relying upon any hardware offloads or constructs is around extensibility. As with any product life-cycle, advancements and new features will always be introduced.
By not relying on any custom ASIC/FPGA or hardware capabilities, Nutanix can develop and deploy these new features through a simple software update. This means that the deployment of a new feature (e.g., deduplication) can be deployed by upgrading the current version of the Nutanix software. This also allows newer generation features to be deployed on legacy hardware models. For example, say you’re running a workload running an older version of Nutanix software on a prior generation hardware platform (e.g., 2400). The running software version doesn’t provide deduplication capabilities which your workload could benefit greatly from. To get these features, you perform a rolling upgrade of the Nutanix software version while the workload is running, and you now have deduplication. It’s really that easy.
Similar to features, the ability to create new “adapters” or interfaces into Distributed Storage Fabric is another key capability. When the product first shipped, it solely supported iSCSI for I/O from the hypervisor, this has now grown to include NFS and SMB for Hyper-V. In the future, there is the ability to create new adapters for various workloads and hypervisors (HDFS, etc.).
And again, all of this can be deployed via a software update. This is contrary to most legacy infrastructures, where a hardware upgrade or software purchase is normally required to get the “latest and greatest” features. With Nutanix, it’s different. Since all features are deployed in software, they can run on any hardware platform, any hypervisor, and be deployed through simple software upgrades.
The following figure shows a logical representation of what this software-defined controller framework (Nutanix CVM) looks like:
Next up, NPP Training Series – How does it all work – Disk Balancing
Until next time, Rob…
Exchange Server 2016 is here and available to download!!!
What sets this version of Exchange apart from the past, is that it was forged in the cloud. This release brings the Exchange bits that already power millions of Office 365 mailboxes to your on-premises environment. And deploying Exchange 2016 on Nutanix, you can truly create the ultimate email web-scale environment.
Email remains the backbone of business communication and the one that workers consider the most essential tool for getting things done. Because of this, it’s vital to have a modern messaging infrastructure that meets today’s business expectations of scale. With the volume of email and other communications continuing to grow, people need tools that help them focus on what’s most important in their inboxes, schedules and interactions with others at work. And as the quantity of email data grows, so do the demands on IT to manage, preserve and protect it. This is why Web-Scale so important in an Exchange 2016 environment.
Web-Scale Fundamentals
To help you meet these challenges with Exchange Server, Microsoft has deepened the integration between Exchange and other Office products, so your organization can be more productive and collaborate more effectively. They’ve made it easier to manage your email with new ways to focus on what’s important, work more efficiently, and accomplish more with your devices. Microsoft has also simplified the Exchange architecture and introduced additional recovery features.
Exchange 2016 builds on and improves features introduced in Exchange 2013, including Data Loss Prevention, Managed Availability, automatic recovery from storage failures, and the web-based Exchange admin center.
That’s just quick list of highlights; I encourage you to get a full view of what’s new by reviewing the Exchange 2016 documentation on TechNet.
Or, if you are in the mood for something more bite-sized, check out these short demo videos in which a few members of the Exchange team show off their favorite features:
Exchange 2016 will follow the same servicing rhythm as Exchange 2013, with Cumulative Updates (CUs) released approximately every three months that contain bug fixes, product refinements, and selected new investments from Office 365. The first CU is expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2016.
Until next time, Rob….
| Table 1. Terminology Updates | |
| New Terminology | Formerly Known As |
| Acropolis base software | Nutanix operating system, NOS |
| Acropolis hypervisor, AHV | Nutanix KVM hypervisor |
| Acropolis API | Nutanix API and Acropolis API |
| Acropolis App Mobility Fabric | Acropolis virtualization management and administration |
| Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric, DSF | Nutanix Distributed Filesystem (NDFS) |
| Prism Element | Web console (for cluster management); also known as the Prism web console; a cluster managed by Prism Central |
| Prism Central | Prism Central (for multicluster management) |
| Block fault tolerance | Block awareness |
Note: You can configure bandwidth throttling only while updating the remote site. This option is not available during the configuration of remote site.
Note: You cannot use an NX-6035C cluster as a backup target with third-party backup software.
Note: Nutanix supports the ability to patch upgrade ESXi hosts with minor versions that are greater than or released after the Nutanix qualified version, but Nutanix might not have qualified those minor releases. Please see the the Nutanix hypervisor support statement in our Support FAQ.
Note: Do not use tech preview features on production systems or storage used or data stored on production systems.
Note: This feature should be used only after upgrading all nodes in the cluster to Acropolis base software 4.5.
Nutanix has introduced a Prism Central VM which is compatible with AHV to enable multicluster management in this environment. Prism Central now supports all three major hypervisors: AHV, Hyper-V, and ESXi.
The Prism Central VM requires these resources to support the clusters and VMs indicated in the table.
| Prism Central vCPU |
Prism Central Memory (GB, default) | Total Storage Required for Prism Central VM (GB) | Clusters Supported | VMs Supported (across all clusters) | Virtual disks per VM |
| 4 | 8 | 256 | 50 | 5000 | 2 |
You can learn more about the Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) health checks on the Nutanix support portal. The portal includes a series of Knowledge Base articles describing most NCC health checks run by the ncc health_checks command.
NCC 2.1 includes support for:
The following features are available as a Tech Preview in NCC 2.1.
| Check Name | Description | KB Article |
| check_disks | Check whether disks are discoverable by the host. Pass if the disks are discovered. | KB 2712 |
| check_pending_reboot | Check if host has pending reboots. Pass if host does not have pending reboots. | KB 2713 |
| check_storage_heavy_node | Verify that nodes such as the storage-heavy NX-6025C are running a service VM and no guest VMs. Verify that nodes such as the storage-heavy NX-6025C are runningthe Acropolis hypervisor only. |
KB 2726 KB 2727 |
| check_utc_clock | Check if UTC clock is enabled. | KB 2711 |
| cluster_version_check | Verifiy that the cluster is running a released version of NOS or the Acropolis base software. This check returns an INFO status and the version if the cluster is running a pre-release version. | KB 2720 |
| compression_disabled_check | Verify if compression is enabled. | KB 2725 |
| data_locality_check | Check if VMs that are part of a cluster with metro availability are in two different datastores (that is, fetching local data). | KB 2732 |
| dedup_and_compression_enabled_containers_check | Checks if any container have deduplication and compression enabled together. | KB 2721 |
| dimm_same_speed_check | Check that all DIMMs have the same speed. | KB 2723 |
| esxi_ivybridge_performance_degradation_check | Check for the Ivy Bridge performance degradation scenario on ESXi clusters. | KB 2729 |
| gpu_driver_installed_check | Check the version of the installed GPU driver. | KB 2714 |
| quad_nic_driver_version_check | Check the version of the installed quad port NIC driver version. | KB 2715 |
| vmknics_subnet_check | Check if any vmknics have same subnet (different subnets are not supported). | KB 2722 |
This release includes the following enhancements and changes:
Customers may create a cluster using the new Controller VM-based implementation in Foundation 3.0. Imaging bare metal nodes is still restricted to Nutanix sales engineers, support engineers, and partners.
Until next time, Rob…
With NOS 4.1.3, Nutanix has released a Fast Clone plugin for SCVMM. The plug-in has the ability to provide space efficient, low impact clones from SCVMM and quickly. The plugin is a wrapper around Nutanix powershell commands for Fast Cones. The plugin does need proper access rights to the Hyper-V hosts and SCVMM and already should be setup for most environments that have Nutanix with Hyper-V deployed. You will need to install the plugin on the SCVMM host along with the Nutanix powershell command-lets.
Once you have the SCVMM Fast Clones plug-in installed, you can start creating Fast Clones right away. Installation is quick and easy and creating clones is just as easy as shown below.
If you want to check out Fast Clones for your environment, you can download Fast Clones from the Nutanix Portal at https://portal.nutanix.com.
Below is a demo video shows traditional cloning vs Fast Clones that my buddy @mcghem created. It shows the awesome benefit of Fast Clones.
As always, if you have any questions please post a comment.
Until next time….Rob