Technology

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is an open-source, RESTful, distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene.  Since it was released in 2010, Elasticsearch has quickly become the most popular search engine and is commonly used for log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics, and operational intelligence use cases.

Why do you need Elastisearch?

Cu…

Welcome back to my Splunk series.  Let’s continue our journey with Splunk.

Splunk 101

What data can Splunk ingest?  Let us take a view of Splunk at 1000 feet.

                One thing that Splunk strives for is they can ingest any data.  Splunk software collects and indexes data from virtually any source, whether structured in databases, unstructured in a data lake, or previously unknown…

I have decided to start writing again.  I am going to start with the three main big data platforms and add more as time allows.  As you can see by the title, we are going to dig into Splunk today.

What is Splunk?

Splunk is a software technology that is used for monitoring, searching, analyzing and visualizing the machine-generated data in real-time. It can monitor and read different types of log…

How to fix or change the VCSA root password that has expired 6.5 or above

As I was going through the process of updating my VCSA from 6.5 to 6.7, I ran into the issue of my VSCA root password being expired.  After a couple of minutes of research, this was the final solution.

Solution:

Log into the VCSA website http://yourVCSA:5480

When prompted, type in root and the root password (it should work, even if expired)

Note: Even though there is an option here to change…

Why should you virtualize Splunk?

I get asked that question all the time.  Let us first take a look at a typical Splunk installation on bare metal servers.

What information do we even need to collect to size a Splunk?

We need to start with the following questions:

How much data are you going in ingest into your Splunk environment?

How many days of data do you want to be stored in the hot/warm…

Manual AWS to AHV migration

This is going to be the first of two blogs. This first blog will be the manual migration from AWS to AHV.  The second will use a product called Sureline.

Prerequisites Make sure that you have an Amazon EC2 Windows instance that has a volume that is large enough to accommodate the size of the machine you are wanting to migrate. This secondary drive must be excluded from the conversion. Make sure…

Storage vMotion of an Oracle RAC Cluster with minimal downtime

Over the last couple of weeks, I was asked to migrate an Oracle RAC environment from ESX to ESX on Nutanix.

This procedure is for Development, QA, and Pre-Production RAC clusters which are not constrained by the 100% uptime business SLA’s. Administrators can choose to go another route of storage vMotioning Oracle RAC with minimal downtime in a very short time.

Use these high level steps for…

[New Blog] LACP Configuration in vSphere 6.5

Well, we get started with configuring LACP, let’s talk a bit about few networking terms.

Link Aggregation Group (LAG): The simplest definition of LAG is bonding two network interfaces in order to achieve greater throughput.

Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP): This is a protocol for the collective handling of multiple physical ports that can be seen as a single channel for network traffic…

[NEW BLOG] Nutanix Cloud Connect and S3 Encryption

Over the last week, I have been asked questions about how to set the cloud connect feature in Nutanix.  One question stuck out.

How do I keep my data secure?

We need to first look at the requirements for cloud connect.

You need to follow ports on your file

TCP ports 2009/2020 – AOS communications

UDP port 53 – DNS

HTTPS port 443 – AWS communication

TCP port 22 – SSH communication to Nutanix…

{New Blog} NPX take 1

Over the past couple of months, I have been lacking in my blogs.  At first, I was writing an NPX design with a colleague, then I decided that I needed to write my NPX on a design that I had completed without any outside help.  So now, it is time to start writing again.

Let’s start with the basics.

You have to have a design.  It does not have to be an overly complex design.  It does have to be…

{NEW BLOG] How to delete Nutanix AFS

I have been asked a couple times this week about how would you remove AFS from a cluster.  To be honest it is really easy.

To delete a file server:

Caution: Deleting a File Server VM (FSVM) can result in data loss. Be sure that you archive or back up data stored on a FSVM before you delete.

Remove the file server from the domain

In the Prism web console, go to Home > File Server and select…

Install NGT on a Linux machine

Mount NGT on the Linux VM. The graphical Linux deployments auto-discover the CD-ROM and mount the CD-ROM appropriately. For non-graphical Linux deployments, use the following procedure.

Prerequisites

Python 2.6 or 2.7 has been installed

python-setuptools has been installed

Install Process

Log into the Linux VM.

Create a temporary folder and mount the content of the CD in the temporary…

[New Blog Post] Load Nutanix VirtIO on Linux #Nutanix

Linux VirtIO drivers for Linux

Modern Linux Kernels have VirtIO drivers installed but they might not be registered if VM was originally created on ESXi.

Login as root (or a sudo user)

Run “dracut –add-drivers “virtio_pci virtio_blk virtio_scsi virtio_net” -f -v ” command

Make sure the output does not show any errors.

This applies to CentOS, RHEL, SUSE Linux versions.

How to upgrade Windows vCenter 6.0 to the 6.5 Appliance #VMware #VCSA

In this blog post I will be upgrading and migrating a Windows vCenter 6.0 deployment to a vCenter Server 6.5 Appliance.

Before you Start:

You will need computer not counting your Windows vCenter server

Ensure you have the SSO password for your Windows vCenter

If you are going to deploy the VCSA on a ESXi server make sure it has a Standard Switch port group that can talk on the same IP as your…

VCSA 6.0 installer for MacOS Sierra does not work #VMware

Yes, you read the title correct. This is not officially supported. Here is what I experienced:

Mount the CDrom > vcsa-ui-installer > mac > Installer

I completed steps 1 through 5

I can across this error on step 6

Based on the message, I thought I might have downloaded a corrupt OVA file, however the MD5 checksum on the file was correct. I clicked the “Show all” button:

OK, the issue looks like…

Is there an easier way to migrate a workload into AHV? #Sureline #nutanix

DoubleTake, Sureline, VMware Converter, Disk2vhd

Over the last couple month I have been working on migration strategies for P2V and V2V into AHV (Nutanix Acropolis). During this time I found the following products:

Double Take

VMware Converter

Disk2vhd(Hyper-V)

Sureline

So here is the current break down.

Disk2vhd (Hyper-V)

This software works great for Physical to Hyper-V. It was originally…

Windows 2012 DFS – Replication

DFS Replication is an effective way to replicate data between data centers across the building or somewhere on the other side of the world. DFS Replication uses remote differential compression (RDC) to replicate changes in a file on a block by block basis instead of replicating the entire file. This replication is very efficient even across limited bandwidth connections.

Before setting up…