Rick Gouin

Category: Virtualization

Run a Windows 10 Instance in AWS EC2

· Rick Gouin

You want a Microsoft Windows 10 instance in your EC2 environment.  Maybe its for a jump box, maybe its for direct access to some RDS instances or other services.  Whatever the case, you went to AWS figuring you’d launch a new Windows 10 instance, and then you realized: Windows 10 isn’t one of the choices. Its true, Windows 10 is not one of the pre-built AMIs offered by AWS.  So how do you get yourself a Windows 10 instance running up there?  Fear not!  Thats what this guide is for.  I’ll show you all the steps to get a Windows […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: Rollup

· Rick Gouin

Coming out of .NEXT 2017, we saw 3 major strategic announcements from Nutanix, as well as a number of smaller updates.  Some of these had been previously announced, and some were all new.  In this article, I’d like to give a quick overview on some of those smaller announcements or changes that didn’t get the press they may have deserved. First, lets review the big 3: Calm Xi Xtract These 3 updates are the ones you’ll find all over the trade papers if you search on Nutanix.  They are stealing the spotlight, but there are some other noteworthy things that […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 Announcements: CALM

· Rick Gouin

Today marks the end of the 3rd US Nutanix .NEXT conference.  When I think back to the first .NEXT that I attended in 2015 in Miami, everything starts to click.  At that very first .NEXT conference, there was lots of hinting towards integrations with cloud providers.  At the time, all the talk was about AWS and Azure, but we all saw a vision of the future where Nutanix enabled customers to easily deploy hybrid cloud solutions.  That future is now! There were 3 strategic announcements coming out of Nutanix .NEXT 2017, as I see it.  In this article, I’m going […]

Nutanix AOS 5.1 Available!

· Rick Gouin

Just a quick note about Nutanix AOS 5.1 that was just released on 5/1/17.  There are a few things in this update that I’ve been waiting for, so I thought I’d outline a couple of the more interesting changes here.   User Defined Alerts.  This is really cool.  As a long time Compellent user and employee, I really like the “threshold alerting” that the product has had built in for years.  This is very similar to that.  You can define criteria that triggers alerts.  For example, trigger an alert if a certain guest VM exceeds 99% CPU utilization.   Support […]

Nutanix CE Memory Requirements

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix CE has a bunch of powerful features, and new ones are coming out all the time.  Some of them, however, require the CVM to have additional RAM in order to work properly. For example, in version 5.0 of both the commercial and CE product, Nutanix added a cool new self service portal that provides great multi-tenancy features as well as self service file restore straight to your internal customers.  This portal, however, requires at least 24Gb of RAM.  Other features, such as DeDupe or replication also recommend an increase in CVM memory. As these features come out, you may […]

Nutanix CE 5.0 Released

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix 5.0 Asterisk was released in the commercial version about 2 weeks ago.  Then, about a week ago, it became available in the CE version.  I have already upgraded my home lab to run CE 5.0, and wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some of the key updates in this new release.  There have been a LOT of changes, but I’m just going to focus on the things that I think are big news.  Most of this stuff applies to both the commercial and the CE release. For those of you that are wondering, I have this […]

Nutanix Android App Released!!

· Rick Gouin

I’ve finally released my Nutanix Android App on the Google Play app market. You’ll find it here.  You may have read about this project on the Nutanix blog here: https://next.nutanix.com/t5/Nutanix-Connect-Blog/Using-the-REST-API-to-Power-an-Android-App/ba-p/14072. The app gives you the ability to perform many of the management features that you can do via Prism from a convenient Android app.  This includes things such as: View your VMs, their power state, vCPU, Memory, NICs, NGT status, Current host, and more Clone VMs (AHV only, as the Nutanix API does not support this for other hypervisors yet) View your Storage Pools, along with free and used capacity […]

Running Nutanix CE on the Lenovo TS140

· Rick Gouin

I’ve been meaning to setup a box running Nutanix CE for a while.  I’m not going to use it for my “production” services at home, because I don’t need 3 nodes, and 1 node doesn’t provide me with any fault tolerance.  That said, I thought I might be able to use it for customer demos, presentations, and lab type activities.  I especially want somewhere to play around with AHV. I have an IBM TS140 hanging around, which I talked a bit about here.  I decided to try and get CE up and running on that system.  There are just a […]

Nutanix .NEXT 2016 Announcements

· Rick Gouin

I’m on the plane on my way home from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Las Vegas.  This years conference certainly lived up to the high standard set last year in Miami, and should be top of your list for future years.  Last year the big news was that Nutanix was going to make its own hypervisor, it was a huge announcement.  There were other things as well, but AHV took the cake.  This year, there were so many announcements, that I’m having a hard time remembering them all!  Maybe none of them were quite as big as AHV, but they […]

Nutanix Acropolis File Services – .NEXT 2016

· Rick Gouin

Last year at .NEXT 2015 in Miami, Nutanix announced scale out NAS services which was for Acropolis only.  In version 4.7, which was announced at .NEXT 2016 in Las Vegas, this feature will be available on AHV and ESXi.  Its pretty cool.  Check out the official feature page here. Here is the basic idea.  You can deploy scale out file services straight from Prism (the Nutanix UI) without creating any front end VMs or rolling out any images.  What happens is you create a file server via the Prism interface (see below).  You can create multiple separate file server environments. […]