Rick Gouin

Category: Tech Soup

Hybrid Architectures: Let’s Talk Availability

· Rick Gouin

Hybrid architectures are popular.  As I look across the organizations that I consult with, I am hard pressed to point out many that aren’t working in some flavor of hybrid environment, even if they don’t realize it.  One of the things that can become confusing is the overall availability of a solution when parts of it reside on-premise and parts of it reside in a public cloud.  Fully understanding the implications as it relates to your overall availability is going to affect how you architect these systems.  We are going to get our arms around availability here, and maybe do […]

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 […]

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 […]

Nutanix Acropolis Block Services – .NEXT 2016

· Rick Gouin

Day 2 of the 2016 Nutanix .NEXT conference at the Wynn in Las Vegas. This morning brought out a couple interesting announcements, as well as the delivery of some features that were announced last year in Miami. Acropolis Block Services is the most interesting one to me.  I expect some fun conversations around this in the months to come.  This is an extension to the in-cluster iSCSI services previously released that was primarily targeted to address some specific workloads.  The way it works now is that the cluster will get a Data Services IP (DS-IP) which will be a cluster […]

Use Powershell to Edit MP3 Tags

· Rick Gouin

Here is a bit of a change from the usual datacenter type posts. A nameless friend of mine recently plugged her Ipod into a different PC that was set to auto-sync. It appeared to erase all of her MP3s from her Ipod without prompting or intervention.  I am not familiar with iTunes, iPods, or any Apple products, but a quick search suggested this was a common occurrence.  There are even a few software packages out there to recover the information, as the files don’t actually get deleted.  It seems just some meta data gets removed.  After running one such software […]