Rick Gouin

Author: Rick Gouin

Nutanix CE Memory Requirements

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix CE has a bunch of powerful features, and new ones are coming out all the time.  Some of them, however, require the CVM to have additional RAM in order to work properly. For example, in version 5.0 of both the commercial and CE product, Nutanix added a cool new self service portal that provides great multi-tenancy features as well as self service file restore straight to your internal customers.  This portal, however, requires at least 24Gb of RAM.  Other features, such as DeDupe or replication also recommend an increase in CVM memory. As these features come out, you may […]

Nutanix CE 5.0 Released

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix 5.0 Asterisk was released in the commercial version about 2 weeks ago.  Then, about a week ago, it became available in the CE version.  I have already upgraded my home lab to run CE 5.0, and wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some of the key updates in this new release.  There have been a LOT of changes, but I’m just going to focus on the things that I think are big news.  Most of this stuff applies to both the commercial and the CE release. For those of you that are wondering, I have this […]

How to Install Crashplan on Your Headless NAS

· Rick Gouin

One of the most popular articles of all time on this blog has been an article on how to get CrashPlan running on a headless server.  Crashplan changed some things in how this needs to be done, so my old article was no longer correct.  I went through the process and updated this blog, so as of today, this process is working correctly. Many of you run a NAS of some sort at home.  Crashplan is a great choice to backup these devices, but its not terribly intuitive to do so, and it’s technically not supported to use Crashplan in […]

Nutanix Android App Released!!

· Rick Gouin

I’ve finally released my Nutanix Android App on the Google Play app market. You’ll find it here.  You may have read about this project on the Nutanix blog here: https://next.nutanix.com/t5/Nutanix-Connect-Blog/Using-the-REST-API-to-Power-an-Android-App/ba-p/14072. The app gives you the ability to perform many of the management features that you can do via Prism from a convenient Android app.  This includes things such as: View your VMs, their power state, vCPU, Memory, NICs, NGT status, Current host, and more Clone VMs (AHV only, as the Nutanix API does not support this for other hypervisors yet) View your Storage Pools, along with free and used capacity […]

Nutanix: How to Create a New Storage Container with PHP

· Rick Gouin

I recently had a need to create a new container in an existing Nutanix storage pool from a web interface.  I did it using PHP.  I figured since I wrote the code, which is very similar to the cloning script I posted here, I may as well post this as well. The script itself is pretty self explanatory.  Put your variables in the top, and the script posts the required data to the Nutanix REST API to create the new container. One thing to note is that the API call to create a container requires you to include the UUID […]

Dell Releases New SC7020

· Rick Gouin

** UPDATE ** This platform is no longer unified.  Dell has removed the ability for the SC7020 to provide NAS services.  The system has also had its scalability limited from a drive count perspective.  Now at 500 drives.  I will keep my comments on these changes to myself.   *** A couple weeks back, Dell made a new storage platform available with very little fanfare.  This new array, the SC7020, is positioned as a refresh for the SC8000 series.  You may recall this post, where we talk about how the SC9000 is not meant to replace the SC8000.  This is […]

Make Changes to Your Nutanix Cluster using PHP and cURL

· Rick Gouin

In my last article, I showed a simple way to read data from a Nutanix cluster using PHP. This method was simple because it didn’t have to send any data to the cluster, just retrieve it. We simply fetched a JSON file to show the data we wanted to show. That would be a perfect solution for making a pretty, end user consumable dashboard to show select pieces of system information. What if you wanted to take action against your Nutanix cluster, however?  For example, what if you wanted to clone a VM, or create a new one, straight from […]

Get Data From Your Nutanix Cluster Using PHP

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix has a nice complete REST API.  Its well documented right inside the Prism interface via a REST API explorer.  The other day, I found myself needing a way to quickly dissect the JSON output, for which I used PHP to present it in a particular format. Once I did that, I decided I also wanted a way to display key metrics on a website.  My native tongue for web projects is PHP, so I whipped up a quick script to grab data from the API and display it via PHP. I think the one part that might not be […]

Running Nutanix CE on the Lenovo TS140

· Rick Gouin

I’ve been meaning to setup a box running Nutanix CE for a while.  I’m not going to use it for my “production” services at home, because I don’t need 3 nodes, and 1 node doesn’t provide me with any fault tolerance.  That said, I thought I might be able to use it for customer demos, presentations, and lab type activities.  I especially want somewhere to play around with AHV. I have an IBM TS140 hanging around, which I talked a bit about here.  I decided to try and get CE up and running on that system.  There are just a […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2016 Announcements

· Rick Gouin

I’m on the plane on my way home from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Las Vegas.  This years conference certainly lived up to the high standard set last year in Miami, and should be top of your list for future years.  Last year the big news was that Nutanix was going to make its own hypervisor, it was a huge announcement.  There were other things as well, but AHV took the cake.  This year, there were so many announcements, that I’m having a hard time remembering them all!  Maybe none of them were quite as big as AHV, but they […]