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September 2017

Home lab – Part 4

Hi all,

So, this is part 4 of my series and a post where I reflect a bit about my current setup.

I now have a Nutanix cluster running and I have also gotten a simple Active Directory, SQL and Citrix environment running. The setup is running fine, but I am thinking a bit about why I am using Nutanix for the home lab. It is obvious that Nutanix has some great features like deduplication, file server and self-service portal. These are cool features, but when you are running a home lab like me these features takes up a lot of memory. For instance, if I want to run a Nutanix file server I need 3 file server VM’s with 12GB of RAM for each, this will take up more than half the RAM I have in my machine. If you also add the CVM VM that needs 16GB RAM that makes 52GB of RAM used by features in Nutanix and leaves me with 12GB of RAM for running virtual machines.

Another example if I want to run deduplication, this requires my CVM to have 32GB of memory which then leaves me with 32GB for VM’s…. if I don’t want to run any other features from Nutanix.

From what I have seen with Nutanix so far, the hypervisor has simplicity in mind for the admin/user that are using the GUI for VM administration. The regular hypervisor admin (VMware/XenServer) will be missing some of their standard tasks in the GUI, like for instance adding a disk or a LUN to the host. I haven’t been able to find anything in the GUI to rescan for devices, but I have found a small script on the CVM called ce_add_disk that is supposed to add my newly insert SSD drive. The script however fails on my host, so I haven’t been able to add the additional drive. One of the things I wanted to test with an extra drive is moving a VM to the new storage so the old disk could be remove. This might not be a big deal right now, but from what I have seen some larger customers is that VM’s a regularly being moving to new LUN’s because disks are getting filled with VM’s so some must be moved afterwards. These challenges might well be because I am using the community edition of Nutanix, but none the less it is basic tasks that I can’t figure out.

I still haven’t given up on using Nutanix, mostly because I like the GUI and VM console, but also because it is new to me and it is fun to learn new stuff.

/Martin

Home lab – Part 3

Hi all,

This is part 3 of my home lab series, but it is going to be a quite short post. The reason for the short post is, that I have tried to create two videos which are now online on YouTube and the videos shows how I configured my home lab after Nutanix CE was installed. In the description on the first video there is a link showing how to install Nutanix CE if help is needed on that.

Video 1 is about the first configuration I made after installing Nutanix CE, you can see the video here:

Video 2 is where I create my first VM on the Nutanix single node cluster. The first VM will later become my domain controller. Video 2 can be seen here:

Hope they are useful and as always, any feedback is very welcome.

/Martin

Nutanix first experience

Hi all,

This will be a post about the first things I have noticed about Nutanix in my home lab.

First thing is that the GUI looks amazing and feels quick and smooth, so a positive first encounter with this.

Overview

When that is said the GUI also seems to be lacking some of the usual information that I find in a vCenter or XenCenter. For instance, how can I set up a management NIC and team up other NICs, these steps might not be needed on a Nutanix cluster, but that is something I need to read up on to make sure. Another thing that I find a bit weird is that not all information on the overview (Home) page are links but some are, why not make them all links so the information links to the resources? An example is “VM Summary” right now that is telling me that I have 6 VMs, but I can’t click anywhere to get a list of those VMs. When I need to manage a VM you need to go the “VM” page, click on “Table” and then you can see a list of VMs, that is also quite a long way I think.

Another thing that sort of bothers me in the GUI is when you create a new VM you need to add a disk and network card each time, these two should be standard since a VM without network and disk seems kind of useless to me. When you do add a disk to the VM the “Create VM” wizard jumps down to the bottom so added another disk or mounting an ISO requires me to scroll up again to do so. These might be small things, but they could probably be fixed quite easy.

After a few “bad” things, lets focus on some of the good things. As I first said the GUI looks amazing and it is easy to find what you are looking for. The menu items all makes sense so even for a first-time user creating a VM won’t take long. It is also cool that you can see some key performance indicators right on the VM table view like shown below.

VM Overview

If I shift focus a bit and talk about the performance I get out of my new home lab with Nutanix I must admit that I am impressed. Everything feels fast and nice and the possibility to remote control a VM directly from the webpage is awesome. I haven’t done and specific performance tests, but the feeling of the whole system is great. I have still a lot to dig into about the Nutanix CE edition and I hope to have the time for it as well now with Synergy coming up soon.

The last thing I want to mention in this post is Powershell for Nutanix. The download of the cmdlets is easy since it is placed on the web portal for Nutanix CE, and the MSI file installed without any issues. After installation, I got a new icon for Nutanix cmdlets, but I didn’t do anything for me, a short blink is all I got. When going into my normal Powershell prompt I could go to the folder and find a file that said install cmdlets. After changing my execution policy, I could get the import done and as it turns out it is a PSSnapIn and not a module. For me the PSSnapIn is pretty old so I don’t get why vendors haven’t shifted to modules yet. Citrix is also a vendor that has been a long time doing the shift, but most Citrix software haven’t been converted to Powershell modules instead of snapins. The help files for the cmdlets could also use a brush up since there are no examples and the descriptions could also be a bit better.

After writing this post you might think that I don’t like Nutanix, but that is far from the case. I really like using it and for normal hypervisor tasks it works excellent, running VMs and providing performance data is something that really seems to have been a priority from Nutanix and that is something I really appreciate. I also expect that the more I use Nutanix the easier it will also get to find my way around in the GUI and Powershell cmdlets.

I hope that this post can be useful for others and please comment here or via twitter if there is something I am wrong about or if you just have a something I need to look at.

/Martin

  • in Homelab
  • 3 min read

Home lab – Part 2

Hi all,

So, part two of the blog series about my home lab was intended to be about installing Nutanix Community Edition, but because of my choice to go with an AMD Ryzen CPU that wasn’t possible since AMD isn’t a supported CPU for Nutanix.

It was possible to bypass the CPU checks and get Nutanix CE installed, but running any Microsoft OS newer that Windows Server 2008 R2 wasn’t possible. I did get a 2008 R2 server running and a new Ubuntu server, but that doesn’t really suit what I need in a home lab so I had to find something else to run my home lab.

The next thing I tried was to install Citrix XenServer 7.1. XenServer installed just fine and I could also install Windows Server 2016 without any issues. After creating my domain controller and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) server I thought it was time to get my Citrix NetScaler imported so I could do some remote access to the home lab. The import of the VPX appliance went without any issues, but the configuration failed from the start. I could not get passed the getting started wizard. I tried with three different versions of the NetScaler VPX, two 11.1 versions and one 10.5 all got stuck at the license step. I couldn’t upload a license and nor was it possible to skip the step and do it later. So once again I needed to find something else to run my home lab.

The obvious next step was to install VMware ESXi 6.5 on the server so that is what I did. The install went smooth and first thing I tried after it was up and running was to test out the NetScaler VPX appliance. This time everything went well with the import and configuration so I thought I was home safe with running VMware for a bit. Next step with the VMware setup was to get a domain controller up and running, but here is where the next odd thing shows up. Installation of Windows Server with client mapped ISO was slow so I aborted that after 20 mins where the installation still wasn’t completed. I then tried to upload the ISO to the datastore but this was also slow and failed at 73% and a reboot of the host didn’t give a new result. I then decided to upload the ISO with WinSCP and that went fast but the installation of Windows Server 2016 still takes over 1 hour to completed on a SSD disk.

Thinking about all the issues and bumps I have seen over the last four days, it seems that my new home lab server just isn’t up for the job. It might change if any of the hypervisors gets support of the Ryzen CPU, but given that it is a consumer CPU I won’t hold my breath for that.

For now, I think I will make the Ryzen a gamer PC for my kids and then get a new motherboard and CPU for the home lab sometime after Citrix Synergy. Maybe a good night sleep with get me to try and return the Ryzen CPU and the motherboard, and if so I will keep you posted.

  • in Homelab
  • 2 min read

New home lab – Part 1

Hi all,

For my first post on the new home lab, I thought I would start with the hardware I have purchased and show you how the assembly is done.

The hardware:

Motherboard: MSI B350 PC MATE Bundkort – AMD B350 – AMD AM4 soc

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Wraith Spire CPU – 3.6 GHz – AMD

Case: AeroCool Aero-500 – Kabinet – Miditower – Hvid

Power supply: Inter-Tech Energon EPS-650W Strømforsyning – 650 W

SSD: Crucial MX300 SSD 2.5″ – 525GB

HDD: Two older HDD on 1TB that I already had at home but didn’t use.

RAM: HyperX Savage Black XMP 64GB [4x16GB 2666MHz DDR4 CL15 DIMM]

All the hardware except for RAM was bought at www.proshop.dk