dell xc vlab guide - cloud object storage | store & retrieve …€¦ · · 2016-04-061.3 lab...

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Dell XC vLab Guide

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Dell confidential

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Document version 2.0

Date: July 2015

Dell



Table of Contents

Dell XC vLab ................................................................................................................................... 3

1.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 3

1.2 Preparing the Environment for a Successful XC Deployment – Talking Points .................... 4

1.2.1 IPv6 Multicast Enablement ..................................................................................................................... 4

1.2.2 Prepare the Rack Space .......................................................................................................................... 4

1.3 Lab 1: Introduction to the PRISM Interface ............................................................................................ 5

1.3.1 – Introduction / Customer Challenge .............................................................................................. 5

1.4 Lab 2: Configuring the Cluster ..................................................................................................................... 7

1.4.1 – Naming the Cluster ............................................................................................................................... 7

1.4.2 – Setting the Cluster External IP Address ....................................................................................... 7

1.4.3 – Access the cluster from the new Virtual IP ................................................................................ 8

1.5 Lab 3: Configure Storage ................................................................................................................................ 9

1.5.1 – Create a Storage Pool and Container ........................................................................................... 9

1.6 Lab 4: Working with PRISM.......................................................................................................................... 12

1.6.1 – Viewing System Health ...................................................................................................................... 12

1.6.2 – Viewing Virtual Machines .................................................................................................................15

1.6.3 – Working with Storage ........................................................................................................................ 16

1.6.4 – Viewing Cluster Hardware............................................................................................................... 19

1.6.5 – Analysis Charts ..................................................................................................................................... 20

1.6.6 – Viewing and Configuring Alerts ................................................................................................... 22

1.6.7 – Overview of Data Protection ......................................................................................................... 23

1.7 Lab 5: Overview of Nutanix (NOS) Configuration Options ........................................................... 24

1.7.1 – Expand Cluster Overview / Demo ............................................................................................... 24

1.7.2 – Software Upgrade ............................................................................................................................... 24

1.7.3 – Authentication ...................................................................................................................................... 24

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 24



Dell XC vLab

1.1 Introduction

Overview of Solution

The Dell XC Series web-scale is a truly converged and infinitely scalable compute and storage solution for VDI, private cloud, test and development and big data.

It’s important to note that the Dell XC Series web-scale converged appliance is more than just storage. This must be highlighted throughout the training and presentation to ensure that it’s not misunderstood.

A Dell XC Series cluster is managed by the Nutanix Prism User Interface (UI). The goal of this

lab is to show the features and functions of Nutanix Prism and illustrate the value of the XC

platform.

Nutanix Prism design framework delivers a user centric single-pane graphical interface with

the following benefits:

1. All information is organized and presented to facilitate easy consumption of operational

data.

2. Elegant vantage points provide an at-a-glance view of server, storage, and network

operations without the need to search through multiple screens.

3. Intuitive and direct navigation from high-level summary views offer easy access to more

detailed, ‘drill down’ information when needed.

Overview of Lab

This document provides details on HOW to deliver an effective XC Series Solutions Summit Lab.

In this lab you will cover the following subject areas;

Preparing the Datacenter for an XC deployment

Introduction to the PRISM Interface

Configuring the Cluster

o Naming the Cluster

o Creating the Virtual IP for a Cluster

Configure Storage

o Create a Storage Pool and Container

Working with PRISM



o Viewing System Health

o Viewing VMs

o Working with Storage

o Configure Compression

o Configure Deduplication

o Viewing Hardware

o Analysis Charts

o Viewing and Configuring Alerts

o Overview of Data Protection

Overview of Nutanix (NOS) Configuration Options

o Expand Cluster Overview / Demo

o Software Upgrade

o Authentication

1.2 Preparing the Environment for a Successful XC Deployment – Talking Points

1.2.1 IPv6 Multicast Enablement

Explain that when getting ready to deploy XC / Nutanix in a customer’s environment, it

behoves the customer to enable IPv6 multicast on the management VLAN that the XC

appliances will sit on. This will help to speed up the initial deployment and enable the

customer to expand (scale up) their cluster with minimal effort.

o Explanation of Admin Machine Deployment Requirements

o Windows – Need to Install iTunes / Bonjour to utilize IPv6 zeroconf

o Mac OS

o Linux – Need to install the Avahi service to utilize IPv6 zeroconf

1.2.2 Prepare the Rack Space

Explain that for the best XC deployment experience preparing the rack for installation ahead

of the arrival of the XC appliances will enable the customer to get up and running in no time.

This includes having the network drops and power ready to go for deployment.

A typical deployment requires the minimum:

o 2 x 10Gb Network Drops

o 2 x Power Connections

o 3 x 1U Rack Space for R630XC or 3 x 2U Rack Space for R730XC



1.3 Lab 1: Introduction to the PRISM Interface

1.3.1 – Introduction / Customer Challenge

This lab is familiarize the sales team for a conversation aimed at the CIO/CFO level and IT management staff, it also provides a useful quick introduction to value of Dell XC. Provisioning any production IT infrastructure from bare-metal to fully-functional infrastructure is a complex task that typically requires a high-level technical resource operating full-time for an extended period of time. This is a technical demo (but not a technically-detailed installation) that illustrates how the Dell XC can significantly reduce the workload on this type of technical IT resource. The demo is compelling in terms of demonstrating the productivity and management benefits of the Dell XC. In this lab you should highlight:

The single pane of glass interface that eliminates the need to have a storage team

manage storage for virtual resources.

Monitoring, Alerting and Analysis built into the interface

Software Updates built into the interface as well

Data Protection and Disaster Recovery

Lab instructions:

1. On the Desktop click on the “First Node” icon on the desktop

2. When prompted for your username and password type “admin” for the username and

“password” for the password.

Login to the PRISM console and point out the different elements of the console to the

students.



Talking points

HTML5 – no Java or multiple consoles to manage

No impact on existing hypervisor management layer, results are collected from the hosts

Can tie into Active Directory (ability to add to an Active Directory farm or create a new directory.)

Insight into your all of your infrastructure o Hypervisor

Can have different versions across the cluster, IE ESXi 5.1, ESXi 5.5 Same look and feel regardless of your hypervisor

o Storage Performance o Cluster Health

Quick drill down insight for potential issues No additional costs to run

o Hardware Summary

Daily administration tasks are broken up to the left and configuration tasks to the right

The Prism UI is reachable from any one of virtual storage controllers; the cluster external address provides a Highly Available address



1.4 Lab 2: Configuring the Cluster

In this section we will give the cluster a unique name that will be used to identify the cluster

and a virtual IP which will be used to access the cluster.

Talking Points:

Cluster Name: The cluster name is an arbitrary name that a customer can apply to the

cluster. It can by the DNS name of the cluster IP or another nomenclature that the customer

would like to use to organize and document their gear with.

Cluster External IP Address: Is a virtual IP address for the entire cluster and the IP Address

that will be used here on out to access the PRISM interface for the cluster. This address is

assigned to all of the CVM’s (Controller VM’s) and provides high availability, redundancy and

auto failover. Should one node go down another CVM on a different node will assume the

primary role of answering requests sent to the Cluster External IP Address.

1.4.1 – Naming the Cluster

1. Click on the COG icon and click “Cluster Details”

2. In the “Cluster Name” field enter in a name you would like to give the cluster.

1.4.2 – Setting the Cluster External IP Address

1. Click on the COG icon and click “Cluster Details”

2. In the “Cluster External IP Address” enter in 172.20.0.110

3. Click “Save”



1.4.3 – Access the cluster from the new Virtual IP

1. On the desktop of your lab machine double-click on the “Nutanix” shortcut.

2. Login with the username “admin” and the password “password”.

The Prism UI is reachable from any one of Controller VM’s; the cluster external address is highly available and auto load balanced across the cluster.



1.5 Lab 3: Configure Storage

The storage on the XC Series Nutanix appliances is presented in 2 layers. “Storage Pools” and

“Containers”. The purpose of this lab is to show how easy it easy to configure storage for the

Dell XC Series with Nutanix.

Storage Pools: All of the disks (SSDs and HDDs) in the cluster are abstracted into a “Storage Pool”

which is a collection of all the disks in the cluster.

Containers: A “Container” is a partition that is abstracted from the “Storage Pool” and presented to the

Hypervisor as an NFS mount (ESX and KVM) or SMB (Hyper-V). Most customers only create one

container, although there may be a need to create more than one if some data needs different policies

around compression, deduplication or replication factor.

1.5.1 – Create a Storage Pool and Container

1. On the main PRISM page under “Storage Summary” click on the link that says “Create

a Container”



2. Notice that there is no “Storage Pool” so we must first create a “Storage Pool” before

we can create a “Container”. Click on the icon to create a “Storage Pool”

3. Give the “Storage Pool” a name and click “Save”



4. Give the “Container” a name and click “Save”

The storage is now configured and ready to be used, in fact the storage has already even

been mounted on the Hypervisor, so no further configuration is needed by the administrator.

No iSCSI or Fibre Channel adapters or connections to configure and setup in ESX, KVM or

Windows Server, it’s 100% ready to go.



1.6 Lab 4: Working with PRISM

As stated at the end of the last lab, it’s 100% ready to go. You can start deploying virtual

machines right away in vCenter, KVM or Hyper-V and start enjoying the benefits of a truly

converged software defined solution.

The PRISM interface also provides a robust, feature rich interface for troubleshooting issues,

configuring advanced features, and monitoring and alerting to enable proactive problem

resolution.

Why is this important?

In traditional infrastructures there is often a disparate system used for monitoring and

alerting. The monitoring system in many cases will not be redundant or highly

available. Nutanix solves that problem by placing a CVM on each node so that

monitoring and alerting is always available is a node goes down in the cluster.

Traditional infrastructures involve several consoles used for troubleshooting issues

and resolving problems. The PRISM interface provides one console to troubleshoot

storage, hypervisors and hardware compute nodes all in a single pane of glass.

Pulse: The feature is enabled by default and sends cluster status information

automatically to Nutanix customer support through customer-opened ports 80 or

8443. With this information Nutanix can apply advanced analytics to optimize your

implementation and to identify potential problems. This allows the ability for phone

home support and email support directly from Nutanix. This only sends analytics

back to Nutanix and no customer information.

1.6.1 – Viewing System Health

1. In the PRISM interface click the down arrow on the top left of the screen and click on

“Health”



Talking points:

1. Wealth of information, host name, serial, access to iDRAC\IPMI, disk information. This would also display weather the Nutanix box is using a 12G (720XD) or a 13G 730XD server. No longer have to drag out the spreadsheets and manually track. All information is stored in Apace ZooKeeper.

2. Ability to Turn on LEDs\On Off – seems simple but lots of hyper-converged solutions can’t do this today.

3. All performance graphs can be clicked on and brought into the Cluster Analytics section.

2. Click on “Manage Checks” on the top right of the screen

3. Talk about the variety of different checks available to the administrator

4. Click on check, show how you can disable it or change the schedule if needed.

5. Click “Back to Entities”



6. Drill down into Hosts, VMs and Disks to show how you can see the details of each

entity

Talking points

In the table section of hardware it’s a good time to talk about Nutanix’s Hot Optimized

tiering. SSDs are kept around 75% full before down tiring data to the cold storage

which is on HDD. All writes go to SSDs by default. Data is brought back into the SSD

tier based on access patterns.

If you click on the levels you can see that data is evenly distributed on all of the HDDs.

This allows for low impact and fast recover of components.

If you select the disk usage summary graph with your mouse, you can drag this data

into the analysis page.



1.6.2 – Viewing Virtual Machines


“VM”

2. Explain that this is the dashboard that shows usage statistics of VMs running in you

cluster. If you have a live cluster with VMs running on it perhaps show that to the

students so they can see what a dashboard looks like that has load running on it.



3. Switch to table view and place a check in “Include Controllers VMs”, instruct the

students on how to do that by following along.

4. Highlight the controller VM and show how you can see a summary of the VM,

including performance characteristics, disk configuration, networking configuration

etc.

1.6.3 – Working with Storage


“Storage”



2. Explain that this is the dashboard that shows storage related items such as

performance, capacity, de-duplication savings and compression savings.

3. Switch to table view, instruct the students on how to do that by following along.



4. Select your container and click the “Update” link.

5. Click “Advanced Settings” the compression and deduplication options

a. Why is this important? We often hear from storage administrators that they shy

away from compression and deduplication because of the performance hit

their controllers take when using these features in their SAN environment. So

they resort to either not using the features that will save them money on

storage capacity or they schedule it in the middle of the night and hope that it

completes before the workforce shows up in the morning. Because Nutanix is

truly a distributed file and compute infrastructure, it can leverage the power of

all the nodes in the cluster to perform deduplication and compression which

eliminates the issue of one controller de-duping and compressing all of the

data.



1.6.4 – Viewing Cluster Hardware


“Hardware”

2. Explain that this is the dashboard that shows items related to the physical server

nodes such as the number of nodes in the cluster, number of disks in the cluster (SSD

vs HDD), Disk IOPS, Disk IO Bandwidth, Memory Usage and CPU usage.

3. Switch to table view, instruct the students on how to do that by following along.



4. Click on the physical host, show the summary information and talk to the information

displayed on the screen.

5. Explain that here you can non-destructively remove a host or add a host to the

cluster.

a. Why is this important? Nutanix is a true scale-out architecture with the ability

to add and remove nodes non-destructively. As new XC Series node types

come out that can be easily added to the cluster and nodes that are ready to

be retired can be easily removed. It’s a true pay-as-you-grow infrastructure

and because it’s all software based it eliminates the need to rip and replace to

add new hardware and features.

1.6.5 – Analysis Charts


“Analysis”



2. The “Analysis” dashboard allows you to create charts that can dynamically monitor a variety of performance metrics.

3. Highlight the range picker and demonstrate creating a new analysis charts, allow the

students to create one to their liking. For example you have the ability to create

custom charts for analysis of the performance of your cluster, hypervisor, VM’s etc.

collecting statistics and correlate the results along with the useful charts available by

default.

Talking points

“Solve issues with the right side of your brain instead of diving into log files”

1. Ability to grab both Cluster and hypervisor stats and correlate the results. 2. Change color on the graphs to match your own personal preference. You can also

export the graphs to a csv or json file. 3. A slider coordinates all of the results for the time series selected. The exact metrics

can be found on the right-hand side of the graphs. 4. Cause and Resolution – depending on the alerts you will be presented with possible

corrective action to take to resolve the issue

5. Stats are saved for 90 days with no pruning. Very responsive, good time to pick out some pain points with the customer. Typically other platform have high delay\response times.



1.6.6 – Viewing and Configuring Alerts


“Alerts”

2. Demonstrate the Alert and Event Views

3. Show how to configure Alert Policies



4. Show how to configure Alert Email Settings

1.6.7 – Overview of Data Protection

This is purely a live demo because NutanixCE does not have the Data Protection options. It’s

an important demo and needs to be shown.

Demonstrate how easy it is to configure Data Protection within Nutanix and explain

replication and how there is a variety of replication topologies that can be used to meet the

customer’s needs.

The Dell XC Appliance Powered by Nutanix offers built in Data Protection. Many traditional

infrastructures have a disparate back up system such as BackupExec, IBM Tivoli Storage

Manager, etc… These systems often don’t meet the modern need of reducing RTO to an

acceptable time frame. Many strategies include rebuilding virtual machines from the ground

up and restoring data to the newly created VM. This can cause issues when just getting the

data back isn’t enough.

Using replication with Nutanix can give you the ability to get your VMs back just the way they

were. Also it can cut your RTO down to minutes from days. Virtual machines won’t need to

be rebuilt and data restored to them. If you lose your primary infrastructure you can simply

just start your VMs at the replication site to bring your systems back online within minutes.



1.7 Lab 5: Overview of Nutanix (NOS) Configuration Options

1.7.1 – Expand Cluster Overview / Demo

Guide the students through the process of expanding a cluster. They will not be able to do it

because of the lack of hardware for the lab. This is to demonstrate how an administrator can

easily add nodes to the existing cluster. I will be demonstrating this from our lab in NYC on

the screen.

Why is this important? Nutanix is the only true pay-as-you-go infrastructure, this allows you

to scale up infinitely with no limit simply by adding new nodes. Nodes can be mixed and

matched as new nodes come out or as the need to have more powerful nodes for certain

workloads arise.

1.7.2 – Software Upgrade

Guide the students through the interface to update the Nutanix software. Show how the

software update not only includes the Nutanix PRISM software but also the Hypervisor, Disk

Firmware and Nutanix OS.

Why is this important? Again this illustrates how the Nutanix interface is a true single pane of

glass management tool.

1.7.3 – Authentication

Guide the students through the process of adding a directory server for authentication within

the PRISM interface. This illustrates how Nutanix is plug and play with modern directory

service products for authentication and authorization.

Conclusion

Management of most enterprise IT solutions is not simple, and not at all intuitive. Typically,

this is a by-product of management consoles and user interfaces designed with very little

regard as to how users interact with technology in the real world. A fresh approach to IT

management is required.

Management tools should be simple and intuitive, yet powerful enough to support advanced

feature sets. Navigation must be tailored to fit the real-world workflows of datacentre

managers to maximize operational efficiency, and the overall user experience should match

that of popular consumer products.

Prism is the Key to unlocking OpEX inside of the modern datacenter.

dell xc vlab guide - cloud object storage | store & retrieve …€¦ · · 2016-04-061.3 lab...

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