all right thank you guys for joining my name is uh William King I will be your presenter today on behalf of TV cult TV Consulting's livestream services today presentation I will be doing is are you getting the most out of your new tannic sin vestment we gave this presentation this talk at dot next a couple weeks ago and if you were unfortunate and unable to attend you know we'd like to just redo the presentation that we had there so real quickly just gonna go through a little bit about the company itself so TB consulting has been around for twenty years my founders were originally you know Accenture consultants and they moved on to start their own business our business employs over a hundred professionals focused on strictly business best-in-class strategy and support managed services Nutanix specifically we have over 60 professional certifications and hundreds of nodes under our management with all advanced features and capabilities a lot of this stuff is you know marketing gimmicks and stuff like that so I'm not going to go into too much detail on these slides here but you can get the gist and TV consulting here like we provide we take all of these versus Nutanix team logarithm all the different vendors can just you know wrap into a bundle here what we provide is the you know the people the process and we utilize the tech and we got a lot a little bit here in marketing things you can read through them if you want to hear more of our marketing spiel you know we can we can always set that up for you but that's not really what the focus of the talk today today we're talking more about getting the most out of you Tanning's alright we just experiencing some slight technical difficulties slides don't want to transition one second folks it wouldn't be a live stream if everything went smooth all right so yeah like I said we got a lot of little marketing gimmicks and gizmos here yeah we have a lots of different service offerings around IT Service Management detainees cloud infrastructure manage security backups things of that nature and then the idea is that you know we try to work and build your business you know towards the higher end but really today what we're gonna focus on is Nutanix so as far as the change goes before I get started and go too far into here I just want to state that this stuff is meant to be sort of like a high-level overview it's not meant to be anything super groundbreaking these are just issues and pitfalls that our clients have experienced when first purchasing and Nutanix and things that you need to consider as you're managing and maintain your name loot annex infrastructure and so these are just service I hope that if you're neat annex expert that you look at these things and be like we'll these are all common sense things and I hope that's the case for you but if not hopefully you're now thinking about these things as you work towards your business and you bring Nutanix infrastructure into your environment so the first thing here is a upgrading a OS so as simple as as simple as newt annexes are it's very easy to just set it and forget it when the greatest benefits of Nutanix is that it just works but then you run into issues if you're not doing your regular scheduled a OS upgrade so if you're not moving to the latest versions or at least within two revisions of the latest version you'll start having issues where you can't get support from Nutanix one of the biggest benefits of Nutanix is their customer support they have a great engineering staff and support team that helps you manage and maintain your device and if there is you the only way they will be able to get support is if you are on the latest version of OS X is great in that they will you know they'll provide you as much assistance as they can with the version that you're on but like you're looking at the last screenshot here of this system it's about five revisions old and if there was a critical bug with this system they wouldn't be able to support that so making sure to get into that regular scheduled maintenance cadence of upgrading AOS and providing those services is key another big feature of Nutanix is the remote sites and protection domains it's a it's a free feature that's added in to your Nutanix the ability to set up offsite dr replication with another dns cluster additionally the protection of the data the remote sites and protection domain services can sort of act like a backup service although it's not exactly recommended one of the key things here is making sure that you properly configure your remote sites and your replication targets Nutanix storage is expensive and using your replication services as your only means of backup is not exactly recommended however it is great for rapid recovery dr events so the ability to take your Nutanix and replicate your data from one site to a remote site in a different state and quickly restore and failover is essential when you're doing this when you're setting up your remote sites and your protection domains remember that you need to set up one-to-one storage mappings that is a common gotcha that we see is that your storage containers that you've designed and configured on your Nutanix cluster do not exactly match the remote site and that you need to have enough storage in both sites in order to handle the nightly snapshots and things of that nature and make sure that when you properly configure your snapshots that you're really going through your schedule when you're really evaluating how much storage you're going to be taking if you're going to be doing hourly snapshots and you're going to be storing them for a long period of time you could quickly use your available storage on your Nutanix so really just making sure you have that dr set up is is key like I said with the protection means they're not really intended to be backups so one of the big things with a Nutanix cluster one of the big gotchas is people not because Nutanix is work that work really well sometimes people forget that they you still need to backup your vm's you still need to backup your data a Nutanix can't really protect you from your end-user so you need backup services that will function with your Nutanix there's several offerings but we particularly enjoy beam don't just rely on protection domains always make sure that you're splitting your protection between regular backups and your replication services this also this helps for your storage cost because you can use you can use cheaper storage for your backups and it also helps you to you know protect yourself against those end users if you need to do those restorations and its really and like I said it's part of the well balanced recovery solution and with beam now they actually support HB so you can use beam to help backup your legacy infrastructure your three-tier infrastructure and your Nutanix infrastructure without having to use multiple backup solutions another thing is the storage configuration I'm harping on Nutanix is storage being expensive but it really is that little graphic there at the bottom on the front of your new tan X dash board is very inaccurate I could harp for days on that but I'm not going to remember that when you're sizing your Nutanix cluster if you have a 4 node appliance and you have RF 2 enabled you need to be able to withstand the loss of one of your nodes so you need to take your storage split it up into four parts remove that remove a quarter of your storage for RF 2 and now you only have 3/4 of your storage available for data however every bit of data that you have is replicated the metadata is replicated for resiliency so in reality you only have half of that 3/4 so you really only have about 33 35% of your available storage of your total storage as available storage for your data for your VMs if you're running a four node cluster with RF 2 now the more nodes that you had the higher percentage that you'll get but still you're going to be around that 30 percent range that 30 to 40 percent range so making sure that you properly configure your storage containers to take full advantage of that is essential now luckily Nutanix has a lot of tools built into it such as a racial coding and compression that you can turn on to help reduce the overall storage but they're not a one solution that fixes all if you have data that has high levels of read and write such as a sequel database server or anything of that nature and the erasure coding can actually hurt your performance and cause issues with your storage container so you need to make sure that you're properly configuring your storage storage containers for the right applications if you have applications that don't have a lot of writing then you can put those off in one storage container enable racial coding and caching so that way it reduces the overall beta required on your disk and then the other thing is making sure that you know your sequel servers are on their own storage containers now one thing that I like to do as a managed service provider is I actually like to make sure that my disks are thick provisioned Nutanix says you don't need to do this which is true there is no there is no performance benefits of running thick disks on any Tanners cluster but there is a sort of an auditing benefit of still running thick disks and if you have a lot of different departments that have committed resources running the thick this allows you to properly budget your storage for your Nutanix cluster so you don't need to do it but not every solution fits everybody but certain things will help you and as long as you're thinking about them they can make sure that you're getting them janek's asset management is another big thing I don't know how many people you know raise your hand of course you can see it of how many of you are currently tracking your Nutanix clusters in an Excel spreadsheet Nutanix cluster especially a4 if you think about a four node appliance it has 13 IP addresses associated with that just got one IP address for each CDM one IP address for the idrac and the one IP address for the host for each and then the VIP for the ster as a whole thirteen IP addresses for just one appliance makes it really difficult for most asset solutions to auto discover it in fact it's almost impossible we cancel things partnered with ServiceNow and one of the issues that we had is when we're trying to track all of our assets and service now is that we couldn't properly identify or discover the Nutanix and I don't know if you've ever had to do it but it is a very uncomfortable conversation when you have to tell your CEO that you have no idea where $200,000 Nutanix appliance went so making sure that you track your blocks and know where they're located is usually required for auditing for if you have any compliance regulatory restrictions you need to make sure that you can maintain this for security and just for budgetary purposes in that and just tracking in general so making sure that you have a proper solution and that you're thinking about how you're going to track your neat annex cholesterin now one of the things slightly low sales pitch that we have is we actually developed a little product and plugin called NX fusion this allows us to track an attempt to use service narrows auto discovery to properly categorize Nutanix and add it into the asset management and CMDB of service now and fully integrating the cluster I'm going to show you a quick little video real fast just sort of what the what gets built out out of round X fusion so here you have the the collector view and it goes through and they can drill down into the specific node install the network devices all they ask all the aspects of the device configured and they can drill down a little bit further and see even more information oh this is some develop for ourselves in order to manage our own intimacies because we were in that place of having mental spreadsheet and we just wanted to make sure that we had something to make this you know more ITIL friendly and so as you're going through and managing your Nutanix and buying in tangency Nutanix infrastructure make sure that you're considering these things another big thing is monitoring Nutanix has some amazing alerting capabilities built into it however they can be very noisy and some of the alerts don't necessarily match up with how I personally would perceive the lords and I'm sure that a lot of you are going to have the same issues for example Nutanix sees a single node failing as a warning and I don't know about you but if I have one of my notes fail that's critical alert no matter what even if the Nutanix is still resilient and it's still functioning under RF - having a node down is something that I need to make sure that I'm addressing right away but Nutanix seeing a single node failing as a warning doesn't necessarily in you know convey the criticality of that issue Nutanix has a lot of information in their alerts going through and fine-tuning those alerts and picking and choosing the correct notifications is going to be essential also don't just rely on the prism alerting also use other tools such as Nagios and SolarWinds we use those in-house for monitoring our meet annex clusters and it allows us to get the external monitoring if prism if you have an issue with with prism and your C VMs go down there has been times where it doesn't properly send out the notifications and if you don't have a third-party tool that's monitoring those things and you can run into those issues and also like again I can't stress it enough make sure you're filtering those alerts because you do not want to cause beware blindness if you just enable all of the default alerts in prison you will be spammed with a lot of things that are just erroneous you don't want to make sure that you cut those out so that way you're getting those essential alerts to yourself and also make sure that you are enabling the pulls now a lot of this stuff folks I mean they're really there in the best practice guides read those guides go the Nutanix portal see how to read the guide on setting up a hve read the guide on setting up ESX there's a lot of information out there and then tannic support portal you can go and read the newt annex Bible there's these documents are essential for making sure that you've properly configured your environment there's lots of different settings in there and it's and we often forget with how easy and Ute annex is to use and the versatility of the product there's there's a lot of little gotchas there and these guides they really help show you that information and go through and you can figure out the best practices for you and your environment all right well I think that's all I have for you guys normally would go through some Nutanix case studies at this time but we're not going to do that today so if you have any questions feel free to hit us up post it in comments go if you got an invite to your email for this please reply back with any questions and we'll get back to you and I hope you have a good day you