Adding Nutanix CE CVM nodes & Prism Central VM’s to ControlUp

Take note: at the moment of writing I am preparing to upgrade my Nutanix #vCommunity Edition to the latest version so I am still at version 20191030.415 of AHV. Also be aware that I can’t do any promises on if what I am doing is supported to do on your production Nutanix systems but as long as you don’t install any extra packages it’s just an ssh sessions that pulls some data.

Today I had a call with Samuel Legrand and a potential ControlUp customer where they had some questions about the Nutanix CVM resource usage. Because of that I tried to add the CVM of the Nutanix Community Edition in my lab and that resulted in this tweet:

So yes it’s possible to add the CVM as a monitored Linux Machine in ControlUp and it’s rather easy to do so. Let me show you what to do. To make sure that I don’t try to potentially mess with any CentOS packages I disable the installation of missing packages on Linux machines in the ControlUp console.

Next up is defining a (shared) credential I choose a shared credential so I get to see the data in Insights as well. You do this under Monitor Settings > Domain Identity

Click Add Credentials, use .\nutanix as username (so it’s seen as a local account and not a domain account), fill in the password and make sure the Friendly name is clear for what it is.

Next up we’ll actually add the machines by configuring a Linux Data Collector. Click Linux Data Collector in the ribbon, make up a name and select the credential you just created.

After this click add and use an IP range to scan or work with single IP’s, press scan and click add for the correct systems and hit ok.

Strongly advisable is select a dedicated data collector instead of the Console/Monitor this can be any system that has the ControlUp agent installed. In the Linux Data Collector screen click the arrow for the Connector Options, select ControlUp Console / Monitor and click remove.

Now click add and select the machine you want to use as data collector and click ok twice.

The machines will now be added to the bottom of the tree

Before the next screenshot I moved them into a folder but you can clearly see that things like OS, memory utilization are working. CPU is not and when we tried it with the production systems from the customer they actually gave an error this is most probably caused by the fact that not all required rpm’s are installed. It’s better than nothing though!

When drilling down on the machines to the processes it’s clear what the biggest consumers of processes are for the CVM.

And for Prism Central CE

So with this we could monitor the Nutanix pieces and create triggers for if or when one of the processes would become unavailable or when the entire machine goes down.

Report out of the second Dutch Nutanix User Group Meeting

Last week the second Dutch Nutanix Use Group meeting was held at the Dutch Nutanix offices. I think we managed to get a nice agenda together and even my own session worked great despite it being an experimental way to do, the last one of the day and right after pizza. For the rest I really enjoyed all the presentations and so did the audience from what I gathered. With 41 signups and 27 people showing up it was about what I expected this time of the year.

The agenda with the slidedecks where available:

  • 14:00 –14:30 Registration & Welcome
  • 14:30 –15:00 Keynote: Ruben Spruijt
  • 15:00 –15:45 Community Speaker: Vishwapreet Mahabir (PQR) – Xi Leap & Xi Frame with demo’s – Slidedeck
  • 15:45 –16:00 Break & Refreshments
  • 16:00 –16:45 Community Speaker: Bart Donders (ICT Partners) – Data Management in the real world – Slidedeck
  • 16:45 –17:30 Nutanix Support: Martin Miedema and Mustafa Gulkara – Slidedeck
  • 17:30 –18:30 Networking & Dinner
  • 18:30 –19:15 Interactive Session: Favorite Tooling, Wouter Kursten – Slidedeck
  • 19:15 – 19:30 PM Take-aways & Closing

I am planning on doing the next meeting somewhere in May or June so if you would like to present please contact me. I would also love it if someone would be able to create our own logo because I suck in that department.

For the rest I can only share a boatload of tweets with pictures and the video that Preet made.

https://twitter.com/rspruijt/status/1200108366846201857

https://twitter.com/VNMahabir/status/1200142664114544640

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dutch] Inschrijvingen voor de tweede Nederlandse Nutanix User Group meeting zijn geopend

Op 28 november zal in Hoofddorp in de tweede Nederlandse Nutanix User Group meeting gehouden worden. In het mooie nieuwe kantoor van Nutanix hebben we een mooi programma samen kunnen stellen.

Schrijf je hier in: https://events.nutanix.com/event/?id=1571327994-5da88ffab8960-5db058b9652ac

  • 14:00 –14:30 Registration & Welcome
  • 14:30 –15:00 Keynote: Ruben Spruijt
  • 15:00 –15:45 Community Speaker: Vishwapreet Mahabir (PQR) – Xi Leap & Xi Frame with demo’s
  • 15:45 –16:00 Break & Refreshments
  • 16:00 –16:45 Community Speaker: Bart Donders (ICT Partners) – Data Management in the real world
  • 16:45 –17:30 Nutanix Support: Martin Miedema and Mustafa Gulkara
  • 17:30 –18:30 Networking & Dinner
  • 18:30 –19:15 Interactive Session: Favorite Tooling, Wouter Kursten
  • 19:15 – 19:30 PM Take-aways & Closing

Hopelijk zie ik je 28 november in Hoofddorp!

Nutanix .Next 2019 Copenhagen Day 2

And Nutanix .Next 2019 is already over. Today I enjoyed the first Keynote again from the Executive lounge and hit the community booth afterwards. I don’t think there was a lot of really new tech in the keynote but I liked seeing it anyway. The interview with Caroline Wozniacki was great she sound like a very humble and down to earth person to me.

In the community area we had way too much fun distributing the 100’s of Nutanix Design Guides that where shipped to Copenhagen. So much fun that I actually forget to go to the sessions where I wanted to go but hey I met some nice people and really felt like Operah with giving away those books.

The closing keynote had two parts, the first with Dr. Katie Boumann who worked on creating the image of the black hole the last few year. I barely understood 20% of what she was saying but I loved hearing about the process. The second part was with Kit Harrington from Game of Thrones, while I never really liked the show I loved hearing all of his stories.

And see you next year in Paris!

Nutanix .Next 2019 Copenhagen Day 1

Having arrived in Copenhagen on Sunday I have had plenty of time to go for some sightseeing but yesterday things really started for me at the Nutanix .Next event in Copenhagen. I haven’t done any sessions to be honest but had a full schedule anyway. First we started of at the keynote with the NTC’s getting a shoutout from marketing Chief Ben Gibson and one of us on just before at the celebration of 10 years of Nutanix: Andrea Mauro. Several announcements where made during the keynote like Metro availability for AHV, one minute RPO for Xi Leap and ESXi availability for Xi Leap as well. For me the highlight was Julie O’Brien (VP of marketing ) doing a tech demo on stage.

What followed after the keynote was a lot of networking and offcourse the yearly NTC lunch. While it was only a small group it actually was great to catch up with everyone. Too bad Angelo didn’t have a microphone because he was singing with the music as usual.

In the afternoon I did a roundtable session about a new type of certification that Nutanix is exploring. This was with a small group of ntc’s and I have to say the discussions where great and what is actually the future of us engineers and what does an engineer actually do?

For the evening keynote Angelo got us in the executive lounge (that hadn’t been used a lot during the day according to some of the staff). Too bad the part with Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike wasn’t broadcasted but they made up for that at the awesome party in the evening. They did a great set with lots of oldskool music that got the croud really going.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3aJOdWBeIK/

(yes my smartphone can’t handle 120+db’s of music)

 

Looking forward to Nutanix .Next in Copenhagen

This year will mark my third visit to the European Nutanix .Next conf, this time in lovely Copenhagen. This year though will be my first time as the Nutanix User Group Champion for The Netherlands. While the sessions will be awesome I am mostly looking forward to meeting the international #vCommunity once again.

My trip will start Sunday evening since the airfield closes to home only flies to Copenhagen on Sunday evening or Monday morning at cr*p o clock. This means I have spare time on onday and Tuesday that I will spend sightseeing if the weather permits. Hopefully I can get some people together to do a guided bicycle ride through town.

If you want to meet up during the event than hit me p on Twitter or look at the community area, there’s a good chance of seeing me there. I will be trying to visit a variety of sessions from architectural deep dives to new technology like Nutanix Mine with a side meal of IoT and the Edge. And I am certainly looking forward to the closing keynote because it sounds like it will be awesome. Maybe not as awesome as the keynote with Dr. Jane Goodall but that one is hard to top anyway.

So will I see you at .Next for some coffee and stroopwafels?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BquUHs3DRSj/?utm_source=ig_twitter_share&igshid=s4ney1w19k2y

 

 

Recap of the inaugural Dutch Nutanix User Group meet

Last Thursday we had our inaugural Nutanix User Group Meeting. After Sibo Attema said why don’t we have one in the Netherlands last fall I jumped on it and together we made sure to have a great day. Originally it was planned to take place at the new Dutch Nutanix offices but the move sadly couldn’t be completed in time so we moved to the Novotel right across the road from the old office in Hoofddorp. Out of 40 sign ups we had 26 people who showed up and that’s very good for a free and first event in my opinion. Add all the Nutanix people who dropped in and the room was packed!

This was our schedule for the day:

This doesn’t list the coffee breaks or the Login Techcast crew that paid us a visit and recorded some interviews.

Content wise I think we had a good mix of topics with the Data Science as a good alternative to to pure tech talks. It’s awesome to see what can be done with all the data we constantly generate. There was a lot of interaction with the audience which was very good to see, we also might have managed to convince a couple of people to speak at the next event. The next won’t be a full day event but most probably an afternoon somewhere in the fall.

If you are interested in presenting than please contact me or Sibo and I will always make sure that there is a free spot for someone presenting for the very first time! There is no better place to give presenting a try than at User Groups because no one will judge you on it. The worst thing to happen is that you will learn and improve!

I want to thank Martijn Bosschaart, Danielle Tomakin and Brittany Hoisington for their great support!

Some pictures:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bua53upAyWd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bua9oqoASSA/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bua-Lzdgwg-/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/BubFcY7gges/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/BubMggZgdFG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/BubRcqtglHj/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/BubYGvhg9_j/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

 

Honored to be named Nutanix Technology Champion once again

Just like in 2017 and 2018 I have been named a Nutanix Technology Champion for 2019. While I haven’t been involved with the tech as much as in 2017 at least I tried to keep up to speed in 2018 by playing with the community Edition. Besides that I started two things on the Nutanix front in 2018: getting an NPX bootcamp to The Netherlands which I attended in September and trying to start a Nutanix User Group in The Netherlands and that will have it’s first meeting the 1st quarter of 2019! Besides that I attended the Nutanix .Next on tour event in Utrecht and of course .Next EU 2019 in London.

Being an NTC is for me all about the vCommunity, we try to help others but if we need a hand others will help you as well. Just ask Nutanix’ awesome community manager Angelo Luciani and he will tell you all about it 😉

 

2018 has been awesome but I am 100% sure that 2019 will be even better!

The second (and last :( ) day of Nutanix .Next London 2018

The second day of .Next London started with a good keynote mainly about IoT and what Nutanix brings to the table in that area of expertise. There where some issues before the keynote started but everything ended up really going smoothly. Session wise I did two sessions, both about VDI: deepdive into Xi Frame and the VDI supersession at the end of the day. In between there was a really inspirational keynote with Julie O’Brien interviewing Dr Jane Goodall. At age 85 she still travels the world convincing people they need to work at keeping our world healthy. In between all of this I spent some time at the Community lounge and browsing the solution expo.

The VDI supersession was a good mix of Horizon and Citrix that was very open for questions of the audience. It covered two time slots with a short break in between and it was good to see a couple of former EUC Champions + a Nutanix NTC on stage. The day ended for me walking into a restaurant that had a table filled with speakers & audience of the VDI supersession who immediately invited me over to join them.

The first day(s) of Nutanix .Next 2018 London

please remember this is article is written while I was still waking and sobering up from last nights party at The Tobacco Dock.

The last couple of days where a blast. I came in on the Eurostar on Tuesday and while others had issues with flights being cancelled I had no issues crossing The Channel by train. At 3 PM we started the rehearsals for Wednesdays opening act where we had to juggle a bit with balls. We where being trained by 4 pro’s including brand new World Champion Aguska Mnich that showed how things are done on stage. Too bad they didn’t have a lot of time on stage because backstage they where showing some amazing tricks.

Watch Aguska winning the championship from about minute 49

After this I finished the evening meeting some great community people at the Welcome reception and a dinner with some Dutch Nutanix employees and customers.

Wednesday started at 7.30 am with the last rehearsals for our opening act. It was great fun doing this though the stage was even warmer than the keynote room (usually keynote rooms are cold due to their size, over calling it warm was an understatement). When the keynote ended I went out to Angelo’s awesome community lounge before we went out to the NTC lunch where it was great meeting all the other ntc’s. It was quite a big group this time compared to last year.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BquVX2lDHP3/?utm_source=ig_twitter_share&igshid=bhp25uxujgo7

In the afternoon I visited my first breakout about Nutanix files and it’s awesome to see how this product has grown over the years. It’s a full-fledged nas replacement now that’s just as easy to scale out as a Nutanix cluster with the same performance.

closing keynote was by Bear Grylls. I expected a bit more energetic person on stage but in fast he even looked a bit shy at some points. His main point: never give up!

This years party had an old style circus theme at the Tobacco Dock and while some of the music and smells where a total sensory overload for me I ended up in the saloon enjoying the (mostly) acoustic music.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqvONXNn1wB/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqvY-fHn33E/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqvSv40gfKg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link