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.
“Often, you hear about something weird and un-supported, and feel like you have to share it”.
I often get calls and questions regarding backups and Exchange Server, and most backup technologies are not always working as required or as you would expect, but that’s off-topic.
In my various blog series, you need a SQL 2012 server setup for hosting databases with different Microsoft Solutions. Testing out on a SQL AlwaysOn AG will give you a feel of a real world scenario.
If you want to understand SQL 2012 Always-On Availability Group, check my blog post on SQL 2012 AlwaysON Feature – What is it? How does it work?.
To learn more about SQL Server on Nutanix Check out the Microsoft SQL Server on Nutanix Best Practices!
To give credit, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s blog. He did a series on Configuring SQL Server on VMware ESXi that is awesome and I altered it for Hyper-V and added more details for installing.
In the following blog post, I’ll go over how to install and configure a test lab Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn AG with Hyper-V on Nutanix.
Deploying and configuring Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2012 R2 for Office 365 can be broken down into 4 blog posts:
Identity is always something of a taboo subject and is still not clearly understood out there and the IT security landscape keeps evolving.
One of the recent changes past few years is a move away from (Access Control Lists) ACLs on files in the NTFS file system to an access control system that is based on claims.
Claims based authentication is an industry standard security protocol to authenticate users. This is the underlying WS-* standards that describe the usage of Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) tokens. Claims based auth requires these tokens, and by extension an entity that can issue the token.
This is the Secure Token Service (STS). The STS server can be based on Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) or other platforms that provide this service. This is where ADFS comes in and the highlight of this series.
Hi Everyone…I love to show off the cool Microsoft integrations that Nutanix has and most recently Nutanix released System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 R2 Fast Clones plug-in.
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
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Hey everyone…I wanted to share a very cool update (and maybe a little of hero-worship 😀 ). Well, anyways, my job at Nutanix had another highlight recently. As many of your know, I love reading, breathing, consuming Microsoft technology. During my consumption of education, there number of people I follow, but there are few that stand out…and one that I spent a lot of time listening to via podcasts; Symon Perriman
He takes complex technology subjects and explains it extremely well on many levels so everyone understands..He believes in the community….all things as technologists, we can all strive to achieve.
I recently had the lucky chance to interview him for the Nutanix .Next Community Podcast. It was great honor to interview him with my colleaguebuddy @NutanixTommy as we both had different points of views.
Symon joined 5nine Software earlier this year as Vice President, Business Development & Marketing and is how I came to meet Simon as part of my job in Technical Alliances at Nutanix.
For those of you who are not familiar with 5nine Software, 5nine has a great alternative management product for Hyper-V with benefits of simplified vCenter type management without the footprint of System Center. They also are the only vendor with agentless security product via the Hyper-V extensible virtual switch. Think vShield for Hyper-V…Very cool… 😎
For those that are not familiar with Symon…a brief history…
With more than 12 years of experience in the high-tech industry, Symon is an internationally recognized expert in virtualization, high-availability, disaster recovery, data center management, and cloud technologies.
As Microsoft’s Senior Technical Evangelist and worldwide technical lead covering virtualization, infrastructure, management and cloud. He has trained millions of IT Professionals, hosted the “Edge Show” weekly webcast, holds several patents and dozens of industry certifications, and in 2013 he co-authored “Introduction to System Center 2012 R2 for IT Professionals” (Microsoft Press). He graduated from Duke University with degrees in Computer Science, Economics and Film & Digital Studies.
Enjoy the show……
Until next time, Rob…