Tag Archives: data centre

Nutanix Deployment Delight with “Zero-Touch” Foundation Central

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With remote working now the new normal, it is challenging to send skilled IT professionals to data centers to install new equipment. Although Nutanix clusters have always been quick to install and configure, there was still a requirement to send a trained IT technician to site to run the Foundation software for deployment, usually connected to a local laptop. For large-scale or multiple sites, this can be a costly exercise.

How could we make this even easier in a ‘work from home’ world? 

With the launch of Nutanix Foundation Central 1.0 with Prism Central 5.17, this specialist requirement is now removed. 

Zero-touch deployments are now a reality for factory-shipped appliances from Nutanix, Lenovo, HPE, Dell, Fujitsu, and Inspur…. all will be Foundation Central ready out of the box. 

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Nutanix Foundation Central is a service on Prism Central 5.17+

Foundation Central (FC) is an at-scale orchestrator of Nutanix deployment and imaging operations. After the initial network prerequisites are met, new nodes ordered from the factory can be connected to the network and receive Foundation Central’s IP address via DHCP assignment. Since nodes are shipping from the factory, they will have either a functional CVM (running the CVM Foundation service) or DiscoveryOS (for NX International shipments) inbuilt.  

The nodes (no matter the location) send their “I’m ready” heartbeat status to Foundation Central. 

“Location” can be within the same Data Center and/or a remote site as an example. 

Once the nodes are detected by Foundation Central, the administrator can create a deployment task and then send that task to the locations and the configuration job is conducted by the nodes themselves. The nodes send their job status back to Foundation Central for the administrator to monitor. 

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Foundation Central Home Screen with 15 discovered nodes. Nodes can be running different AOS and/or Hypervisor and can be re-deployed into clusters with a new AOS/Hypervisor of choice

Foundation Central never initiates a connection to the nodes. The nodes are the source for all communications and are awaiting to receive their orders on what task to do. 

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Unconfigured nodes send heartbeats to Foundation Central

Foundation Central receives these node heartbeats and then will display the nodes as available to be configured. By default this could take up to 20 minutes to appear in the Foundation Central UI. Heartbeats are sent until the nodes are configured and part of a formed cluster. 

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Unconfigured nodes send requests to FC and receive their configuration orders

Foundation Central is only receiving status updates until job completion. It receives these status updates from the coordinating node.

After a successful configuration/re-imaging process is done on one node, the original ‘coordinating node’ hands over to that new 100% completed node, and now this node takes over as the new (permanent) coordinating node for the remaining nodes.

If re-imaging to a different AOS or Hypervisor is required, Foundation Central will ask for the URL where these images can be found. These can be anywhere on the network, but given the file size it is recommended they be local to the nodes where possible. 

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Changing AOS and Hypervisor Type if required

Once the administrator configures the Foundation Central jobs as desired, Foundation Central will await the specified nodes to request their configuration task. 

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Imaging and Configuration tasks are always local to the nodes/location

Configuration tasks are then fully handed off to the local nodes and Foundation Central becomes a ‘passive partner’ in the process from here. The nodes elect a ‘coordinating node’ for the entire operation and will be responsible for keeping Foundation Central updated on the status of the tasks.

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Deployment Complete in parallel with different AOS/Hypervisors no matter the location

 

Foundation Central Requirements 

  • Nodes must be running Foundation 4.5.1 or higher (bundled with a CVM or DiscoveryOS). It is advisable to run the latest Foundation on the nodes
    (upgrade using APIs is very easy before imaging) 
  • Networking requirements must be met (see below)
  • Prism Central must be minimum version 5.17  

Networking and DHCP Requirements to use Foundation Central

The factory nodes need to be connected to a network that has a DHCP scope defined which allows for specific DHCP options. This is to ensure the nodes automatically receive the Foundation Central IP address and API keys specific to your environment. 

  • DHCP server must be present and must be configured with vendor-specific-options:
    Vendor class: NutanixFC
    Vendor encapsulated options (DHCP option 43):

    • Option code: 200, Option name: fc_ip
    • Option code: 201, Option name: api_key
  • L3 connectivity from remote nodes to Foundation Central must be available 
  • L3 connectivity between ‘starting’ and ‘destination’ subnets if IP addresses are to be changed as part of the node configuration process
  • Remote CVMs must be configured in DHCP mode (default from factory) 
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Option 1: Nodes are discovered and configured to remain in the same subnet

The factory nodes need to be connected to a network that has a DHCP scope defined which allows for specific DHCP options. This is to ensure the nodes automatically receive the Foundation Central IP address and API keys specific to your environment. 

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Option 2: Nodes will be re-deployed to a different subnet. DHCP is not required for the 2nd subnet.

For more information contact your Nutanix SE or check the Foundation Central Guide on the Nutanix Support portal.

Special thanks to Foundation Engineering (Toms, Monica, Toshik, YJ and extended team) for the development of Foundation Central…they are already working on some improvements for v1.1 !

Please reach out with any feedback or suggestions and I trust this helps in making your working-from-home life a little easier.

The Rise and Rise of Nutanix

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It’s a pretty exciting time in IT right now, but it has been a struggle recently it is fair to say.

My place of work has gone through several restructures in recent years resulting in headcount reductions. The standard rate of employee turnover was still there and continues to be. Additionally, the current economic environment means cost cutting is the new norm for IT budgets; an yet the modern data centre has some very complex and expensive systems that allow the business function as it should – and costing some serious coin to run!

All these things are combining to place pressure on the remaining staff to continue to deliver the IT outcomes the business has come to expect (perhaps even take for granted). But what about innovation? When is BAU and ‘keeping the lights on’ not going to be enough? Does IT management simply expect to keep the same old technology and renew maintenance contracts for these expensive systems without paying a much bigger price in say 2-3 years?

I was pondering this about 8 months ago when I saw where this trend was heading – and I didn’t like it. Something had to change.

The data centre world is converging in terms of technology *and* personnel – and it will benefit both the employee and business as a result. Good people are hard to find and even harder to keep. Consequently, the traditional idea of skill ‘silos’ must start to break down to drive efficiency (and to overcome the fact that there are less people to do the same work) but with the side effect that staff who are keen to learn new skills will get the opportunity to expand their knowledge – perhaps in areas they had not previously considered. Personally, I’ve never wanted to be ‘siloed’ (is that even a word?), nor wanted to be a one-skill engineer. All the best people I’ve worked with were of the same mindset.

While the people side of the equation is important, a lot of this is ultimately up to the individual to have the drive and ability to improve. The business can certainly help by creating a good environment – but that is a deep subject for another time. The point is that as much as the technology will converge, so too must people. Perhaps it is the age of the technology ‘generalist’ who can get the best out of the equipment for a reliable, functioning solution for the end-user within the business (so they can get on with making money).

But what about the technology?

I decided to find out about the technology options around ‘converged infrastructure’. The same-old way of providing compute, storage and networking really wasn’t delivering benefits in terms of cost and certainly not simplicity for the administrator. EMC/VMWare have been saying that they want to see one sysadmin for every 10,000 VM’s but with the current crop of technology from the big vendors I really could not see how that could be a reality.

Then I stumbled on a company that I thought might have the answer.

I’ve been following the rise and rise of Nutanix for a while now. I think they are on a winner. I’m very partial to their primary message of “NO SAN”, if nothing else that it promises to help eliminate a massive recurring and yet growing part of data centre budgets. No one is reducing their storage footprint even after staff are cut! When has your storage budget ever reduced in the last 10 years? Do you expect anything different? Didn’t think so. So when I saw a company saying they could ‘eliminate the SAN’ from your data centre I was going to pay attention.

Nutanix offers an all-in-one appliance. Think Cisco UCS for the compute side, but also heaps of storage integrated into the same appliance. And it has been designed from the ground up for virtual environments. And it provides a SAN-like distributed storage for that environment. And it is easy to administer (could this finally realise EMC/VMWare’s vision?). And it all comes in a 2RU block. And it has inbuilt data redundancy. And – well… I was keen to check it out.

If you’ve never heard of Nutanix, head over to their web site and view their 90 second summary video.

Last week I got my hands on our first Nutanix block for our End User Computing trail – one of the first in Australia. I’m proud to be involved.

A few things have impressed me on the Nutanix journey thus far.  I’ll be going into detail here in the coming weeks, but as a summary:

  1. Simplicity of the administration/setup of the block – up and running in minutes
  2. From sales to support staff, there is a level of responsiveness and eagerness to please I have not seen from a vendor in a long long time
  3. The technology solution is elegant, simple and priced well especially when you consider you get the storage included. It is modular, scales out extremely well if not infinitely (according to their whitepapers)

Nutanix is the duck’s nuts. Do yourself a favour and check them out. I’m lucky enough to be visiting their headquarters in San Jose to get the full story via some technical training and I’m looking forward to meeting some of the smart people behind it all.

I think it will be like visiting the future.