Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Nutanix Complete Cluster

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I was just reading up and noticed an article about Nutanix. Nutanix is a “new” company which just came out of stealth mode and offers a datacenter in a box type of solution. With that meaning that they have a solution which provides shared storage and compute resources in a single 2u chassis. This 2u chassis can hold up to 4 compute nodes and each of these nodes can have 2 CPUs, up to 192GB of memory, 320 GB of PCIe SSD, 300 GB SATA SSD and 5 TB of SATA HDDs. Now the cool thing about it is that each of the nodes “local” storage can be served up as shared storage to all of the nodes enabling you to use HA/DRS etc. I guess you could indeed describe Nutanix’s solution as the “Complete Cluster” solution and as Nutanix says it is unique and many analysts and bloggers have been really enthusiastic about this… but is it really that special?

What Nutanix actually uses for their building block is an HPC form factor case like the one I discussed in May of this year. I wouldn’t call that revolutionary as Dell, Super Micro, HP (and others) sell these as well but market it differently (in my opinion a missed opportunity). What does make Nutanix somewhat unique is that they package it as a complete solution including a Virtual Storage Appliance they’ve created. It is not just a VSA but it appears to be a smart device which is capable of taking advantage of the SSD drives available and uses that as a shared cache distributed amongst each of the hosts and it uses multiple tiers of storage; SSD and SATA. It kind of reminds me of what Tintri does only this is a virtual appliance that is capable of leveraging multiple nodes. (I guess HP could offer something similar in a heartbeat if they bundle their VSA with the DL170e) Still I strongly believe that this is a promising concept and hope these guys are at VMworld so I can take a peak and discuss the technology behind this a bit more in-depth as I have a few questions from a design perspective…

  • No 10Gbe redundancy? (according to the datasheet just a single port)
  • Only 2 nics for VM traffic, vMotion, Management? (Why not just 2 10Gbe nic ports?)
  • What about when the VMware cluster boundaries are reached? (Currently 32 nodes)
  • Out band management ports? (could be useful to have console access)
  • How about campus cluster scenarios, any constraints?
  • …..

Lets see if I can get these answered over the next couple of days or at VMworld.

Dell Firmware updates

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I was experiencing some issues with one of my Dell R610 servers. (Fans never spin down.) After doing some research I noticed people suggested it was due to bad firmware of iDRAC Express. So I figured why not update it, should be a simple process and something I should be able to do in a couple of minutes. After scavenging the Dell website for hours I literally found nothing useful. Yes I found a Windows update package but it won’t run, it craps out with an “this update package is not compatible…” error. So I figured why not try to download a bootable ISO that contains all the firmware for a Dell R610…. I was astonished that I couldn’t find it.

After another hour I figured out I needed to download the Dell Server Update Utility. I downloaded that and figured I could just boot it and update the firmware, well not quite yet. It appears you need to also download a Repository Manager. A what? I don’t want to manage a repository, I expect my hardware vendor to manage it and just offer an ISO which contains all firmware I could possibly need. But anyway, I decided to download the repository manager and just see what I could get done. So I created a repository for the R610 and figured it would be nice to have the Server Update Utility combined with the Patches. So I clicked export and figured it would start exporting, well not quite yet… Dell Repository Manager told me I needed to have a plugin, what the heck give me the plugin… 190MB for a plugin to create an ISO? Are you serious?? I needed to upgrade the system so I downloaded it. After waiting for a couple of minutes I finally managed to start exporting the ISO.

While I was waiting I figured I would boot up my second R610 and try to use the Unified Server Configurator that someone pointed out on twitter. This server was experiencing no issues so update would be fairly simple. I needed to enable System Services through iDRAC before I could use USC though, funny as USC doesn’t seem to use the iDrac network configuration etc. Why not make it part of the normal Bios? But anyway, I booted into USC by pressing F10 when the Dell logo popped up and configured the network. (Click Settings on the left and Network Settings on the right) Next go to “Platform Update” and click “Launch Platform Update”, select the FTP option and you are good to go… After a couple of minutes it asks you if you want to apply the updates, so you click “apply” and wait for a while… (progress bar anyone?) after waiting and waiting it came back with a nice error that my selected repository was corrupt. Yes indeed corrupt, but wasn’t I using the Dell ftp server? Same player shoot again, reboot, same procedure, apply, and waiting… waiting… waiting… I don’t know what I am waiting for, no progress bar or status updates it seems to have just frozen up. After 1.5hrs I gave up and pulled the power cable.

Lets get back to the server that had the issues… It didn’t allow me to use USC as iDRAC fails during boot and I need to enter the iDRAC bios to enable it. So as said I exported the ISO and burned it. It took a while but I finally succeeded. Now for some weird reason this DVD is not bootable, no you need to run it within Linux/Windows first. So I decided to install Windows, but only to find out that the iDRAC firmware update was not included. Weird as I did make sure to select every single component out there, but that is not enough apparently or is it because iDRAC is disabled and if that is the case, why not just tell me that?

Anyway, I had enough for today… after some random tweets about upgrading Dell firmware a Dell representative contacted me. Lets hope he can figure out what is happening and why, I will keep you up to date. If not, well then I will need to buy a couple of HP Servers instead I guess, or just use a whitebox as I don’t need all those components like iDRAC anyway. Before anyone asks, yes I was slightly frustrated when I wrote this.

Top-25 virtualization bloggers

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Eric Siebert just published the results of the Top-25 bloggers poll. Over 700 people voted and several bloggers entered the top-25 like Frank Denneman and Alan Renouf. I would like to thank everyone for voting on me. It’s a true honor to be part of a list like the following, let alone being voted as the number one virtualization blogger…

  1. Yellow Bricks – Duncan Epping – 158 #1 votes – total score of 4,191
  2. Virtual Geek – Chad Sakac – 111 #1 votes – total score of 2,938
  3. Scott Lowe’s Blog – Scott Lowe – 56 #1 votes – total score of 2,889
  4. NTPro.nl – Eric Sloof – 22 #1 votes – total score of 2062
  5. RTFM Education – Mike Laverick – 7 #1 votes – total score of 1,734
  6. Virtualization Evangelist – Jason Boche – 13 #1 votes – total score of 1,482
  7. VM/ETC – Rich Brambley – 5 #1 votes – total score of 1,138
  8. Gabe’s Virtual World – Gabrie van Zanten – 8 #1 votes – total score of 1,096
  9. Virtual Storage Guy – Vaughn Stewart – 58 #1 votes – total score of 990
  10. Virtu-Al – Alan Renouf – 18 #1 votes – total score of 831

I borrowed the list from Arnim who blogged about it yesterday, for the full list with all 66 Bloggers check Eric’s new article.