Virtual Ramblings

Category: Virtualization

5 min read

Describe and differentiate technologies used in conjunction with a Distributed Storage Fabric, including snapshots, clones, high availability and disaster recovery

Snapshots + Clones DSF provides native support (VAAI, ODX, etc) Leverage redirect-on-write algorithm VM data consists of files (vmdk/vhdx) which are vDisks Snapshot taken = vDisk marked immutable New vDisk created as read/write Both vDisks have same block map Metadata mapping to corresponding extents Since each vDisk is its own block map, it eliminates need…

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11 min read

Determine what capacity optimization method(s) should be used based on a given workload

Erasure Coding Similar to RAID where parity is calculated, EC encodes a strip of data blocks on different nodes to calculate parity In event of failure, parity used to calculate missing data blocks (decoding) Data block is an extent group, and each block is on a different node belonging to a different vDisk Configurable based…

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5 min read

Identify methods for creating a Storage Container

A storage container is a defined subset of available storage within a storage pool. Storage Containers allow you to apply rules or transformations such as compression to a data set. Logical segmentation of SP containing groups of VM’s/files (vDisks). Typically have 1:1 mapping with datastore VMware Storage presented via NFS (default) or iSCSI AHV Storage…

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4 min read

Utilize the Health dashboard and its major components

The Health dashboard displays dynamically updated health information about VMs, hosts, and disks in the cluster. To view the Health dashboard, select Health from the pull-down list on the left of the main menu. Screen Details The Health dashboard is divided into three columns: The left column displays tabs for each entity type (VMs, hosts, disks, storage…

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2 min read

Configure Alert e-mail settings for a cluster

Configuring Alert Emails Prism Central allows you to configure the alert messages sent by Prism Central. To configure alert settings, reporting rules, and message templates, do the following: Configuring Alert Policies The system monitors a variety of conditions and sends an alert whenever one of the alert conditions is detected (when alerting is enabled). There…

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10 min read

Identify dashboards and monitoring tools that can be used to resolve cluster issues

Advanced Pages CVMIP/DNS:Port 2009: Stargate page to monitor backend storage Check QoS Queue and OpLog QoS queue (admitted/outstanding IO’s) Cache hit rates should be 80-90%+ if workload is ready heavy for best possible performance Check Avg Latency, Avg Op Size, Avg. Outstanding 2009/latency: Stargate page backend latency 2009/vdisk_stats: Stargate page histograms of I/O, latency, writes…

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2 min read

Use the Image Service to deploy a VM

Select the image that you have created by using the image service feature. This field appears only when Clone from Image Service is selected. It specifies the image to copy. Creating the Image Creating the VM Select Clone from Image Service to copy an image that you have imported by using image service feature onto the disk.

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5 min read

Perform a Self-Service Restore of a VM

The Nutanix administrator should deploy NGT on the VM and then enable this feature. For more information on enabling and mounting NGT, see the Enabling and Mounting Nutanix Guest Tools. After the feature is enabled and a disk is attached, the guest VM administrator can recover files within the guest operating system. If the guest…

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