What’s your plan when the cloud fails?

Over the last few years, cloud computing has moved into the mainstream.  More and more companies are adopting ‘cloud-first’ initiatives and moving more infrastructure over to public clouds, such as AWS and Azure.  These clouds should not be underestimated – they are such powerful tools that even entirely on-prem solutions are using the agility and flexibility they offer.  This agility – the ability to say ‘I want a VM’ and have one running in minutes – helps keep IT users in house and avoids shadow IT springing up.  The flexibility allows applications of all sizes and use cases to run from a single pane.  Companies are able to move from "thought" to "action" faster then ever.

With all of the cloud goodness available, it’s no wonder that AWS grew 63.8% last year.  Even with this, a public cloud is not a panacea.  It’s not a replacement for your IT paradigms, and it’s certainly not a replacement for proper planning.

OpenStack and Nutanix

Openstack Integration in 5 minutes:

The following post was originally written for the Nutanix community blog

OpenStack is a powerful tool for many organizations, especially those looking to give their IT users the Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) experience they would get with the public cloud.  It also provides a neutral ground for your infrastructure, allowing you to integrate your entire stack into a single automation plane no matter how many vendors are involved.  Starting in AOS 4.6 Nutanix AHV offers full integration with your choice of OpenStack controller, as long as you run version Kilo. Let’s take a look at how this works!

Changes to Hyper-V Setup

In 4.5 we've completely overhauled the Setup_hyperv.py scripts and moved most of them into Prism! Check out the new workflows:

One note - SCVMM setup is still done from the command line, so if you're using SCVMM in your environment simply login to one of your CVMs after running through these steps and run "setup_hyperv.py setup_scvmm"

Advantages of the whitebox appliance model

Recently I saw the following tweet from a well-known VMware blogger

And had flashbacks to some nightmares I had back while working at Cisco.  At Cisco we commonly had to build custom ISOs to handle a variety of custom drivers (Nexus 1000v VEM, VIC drivers for Eth/FC, VM-FEX driver, etc).  If you didn't do this right you were SOL, and if you did choose "ignore compatibility warnings" to upgrade anyway, then you were likely going to have to reinstall.  Looking at the official guide to creating a custom ISO, you've got a lot of steps to get right and won't know if you were successful until you try to install.

Tech TopX: ESXi performance troubleshooting

One of our RTP SREs covers ESXi Performance troubleshooting in this episode of Tech TopX!

Tech TopX: Erasure Coding

In this most recent episode of Tech TopX, I cover our new technology Erasure Coding.  Check it out!

Acropolis - Installing a Windows VM

Check out Sean Watkins in our newest TechTopX - installing Windows as an Acropolis VM!