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Do you know how everyone just loves client side Java? Yeah, exactly. That’s why a lot of Nutanix customers will be quite happy with the IPMI firmware update for our latest systems. You will no longer have to rely on java to use the lights-out management, but you can simply use HTML5 to manage your systems.

Unfortunately, this update isn’t available to older systems. After cursing at Java again in my home lab, I decided to see if there was no way around it. Fortunately, I noticed that on GitHub, a developer called “kelleyk” posted a port of noVNC that adds support for ATEN iKVM, which is used in quite a couple of Supermicro servers.

So, after a bit of fiddling, I managed to get this to work on my Mac. First things first, download the fork from here: https://github.com/kelleyk/noVNC

Next up, make sure you have the xcode command line tools installed. If not, just run:

xcode-select --install

Also, since we will need a web socket bridge to forward requests to your IPMI interface (which encrypts traffic), make sure you have a certificate named self.pem, or generate one by issuing:

openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out self.pem -keyout self.pem

Once that is done, the rest is simple. Open a terminal and go to the directory where you copied the noVNC fork, and go to the “utils” directory. From there, run the launch.sh shell script, and provide it with the IP-address of your IPMI interface and use the default VNC port as the port number:

./launch.sh --vnc 192.168.10.10:5900

This will launch the script, and give you a link that you can open in your browser:

Using local websockify at ~/noVNC-bmc-support/utils/websockify/run
Starting webserver and WebSockets proxy on port 6080
WebSocket server settings:
 - Listen on :6080
 - Flash security policy server
 - Web server. Web root: /Users/basraayman/Downloads/noVNC-bmc-support
 - SSL/TLS support
 - proxying from :6080 to 192.168.10.10:5900

Navigate to this URL:

 http://Bass-MacBook-Pro-Retina.local:6080/vnc.html?host=Bass-MacBook-Pro-Retina.local&port=6080

Follow the link in your browser, leave the values as they are, and in the password field, input your IPMI username and password separated by a colon, so in the following format (note that ADMIN is both the default username and password in this case):

ADMIN:ADMIN

Once that is done, click the connect button, and you are now able to connect to the lights-out interface using your browser, no java needed. And while this might not be super ideal (no forwarding of iso images and such), it should make day to day administration a bit easier.

So, give it a whirl, and let me know if this works for you in the comments. 🙂

Nutanix announced version 4.7 of its AOS, basically the operating system for the controller VMs. One of the things that is new, are the so called Acropolis Container Services. Basically allowing the Nutanix cluster to act as in such a way that you can for example use the docker-machine command (with a corresponding driver) to create new Docker instances that deploy automatically on your cluster.

While we are still waiting for the Docker Machine Driver to be posted to our portal, I’ve dug up an internal version of the driver, and decided to test it and post my experiences.

Right now it’s relatively simple to get started. You need your Nutanix cluster running AHV and some working credentials for the cluster. Also, you need a system that has Docker machine installed.

Once you have that, download the Docker machine driver for your platform from Nutanix (once it is posted that is). We should be offering a driver for OSX, Windows and Linux, so you should pretty much be covered.

On OSX the the procedure to get started is relatively simple. Copy the file you downloaded, and if it has an .osx extension in the filename, remove that extension. Modify the file to allow it to be executed (chmod +x), and then move it to the directory that contains your docker-machine executable/binary.

Now, you can start docker-machine and call the Nutanix driver, and that will give you a couple of additional options:

docker-machine create --driver nutanix 

Usage: docker-machine create [OPTIONS] [arg...]
 Create a machine

Description:
 Run 'docker-machine create --driver name' to include the create flags 
 for that driver in the help text.

Options:
 .... 
 --nutanix-endpoint Nutanix management endpoint ip address/FQDN [$NUTANIX_ENDPOINT]
 --nutanix-password Nutanix management password [$NUTANIX_PASSWORD]
 --nutanix-username Nutanix management username [$NUTANIX_USERNAME]
 --nutanix-vm-cores "1" Number of cores per VCPU of the VM to be created [$NUTANIX_VM_CORES]
 --nutanix-vm-cpus "1" Number of VCPUs of the VM to be created [$NUTANIX_VM_CPUS]
 --nutanix-vm-image [--nutanix-vm-image option --nutanix-vm-image option] The name of the VM disks to clone from, for the newly created VM
 --nutanix-vm-mem "1024" Memory in MB of the VM to be created [$NUTANIX_VM_MEM]
 --nutanix-vm-network [--nutanix-vm-network option --nutanix-vm-network option] The name of the network to attach to the newly created VM
 ....

Now, to create for example a VM based on an ISO image that is stored in your image configuration, you simply use one command:

docker-machine create --driver nutanix --nutanix-username 'docker-deployment-user' --nutanix-password 'P@ssw0rd' --nutanix-endpoint '10.0.0.50:9440'  --nutanix-vm-network production --nutanix-vm-image CentOS-7 Docker-CentOS

And you can obviously also add things like VM memory and CPU information. Once you hit enter, the driver connects to the Nutanix cluster and tells it what to do.

The result?

And you can manage your systems using docker-machine like you are used to. Now there is obviously more you can do, but I just wanted to give you a quick way to get started. So, have fun playing with it. 🙂

If you are reading this title and am wondering how I managed to flunk that test. First, thank you for your confidence in me. Secondly, there was one basic thing that was missing from my preparation:

rest

During VMworld in Barcelona (and also during VMworld in the US), there was a 50% discount for people trying to obtain their VCP, or one of the VCAP certifications. Since I thought I would save the company some money, I went ahead and scheduled the test during the conference, and boy was that a mistake.

While there are certain key elements to preparing for a test like the VCAP5-DCD (some of which I’ll go in to a bit further down in this post), there are basics that you won’t be able to get around.

I was actually working during they conference, working at the VMworld Hands-on Labs. If that wasn’t enough, working for a vendor at a conference usually also means that you have more appointments, combine that with meeting up with customers during the parties, or going to dinner with folks, and all of the other stuff surrounding the conference, and you will end up just being tired at a certain point.

I made a major mistake of underestimating how fit I would be, which meant that I was actually starting to nod off after about 2 hours in to my certification. 4 hours is a long time to sit an exam, and folks like Jason Boche reported have described several tips on how to prepare for the exam. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fit enough and only scored 290 points, which means I missed the 300 point passing grade. So my top tip? Make sure to rest up and be fit for the exam!

There are plenty of resources describing the exam itself, and you can find some useful tips on blogs like thesaffageek.co.uk or the vBrownbags, but trust me, being well rested before the exam is one of the key things. All in all, I think the exam is very fair. You will encounter Visio like parts of the test where you are designing a solution or mapping out dependencies, there are drag and drop parts to it where you will drag boxes with keywords or design parts to their counterparts. And finally, there are the normal multiple choice parts.

You will be reading for 3.5 hours, up to 4 hours for non-native English speakers, and that means that there is just a massive amount of text to get through. Also, if you are not designing environments on an everyday basis, there is a thing that will bite you in the proverbial rear end, and that is being comfortable with 4 major categories that you will encounter in almost every question in the test.

¿Habla design?

Yes, Habla is Spanish, and when it comes to the 4 major categories, if you don’t use them every day, this may come off as Spanish to you. Here they are:

• Requirement
• Risk
• Assumption
• Constraint

Seems easy enough, doesn’t it?

“I require you to wear your seatbelt. If you don’t, you risk your life when getting in to an accident. Thats because, if you don’t, I’m assuming you’ll fly out the window when you get in to a crash. And yes, wearing the seatbelt will constrain your movement in the driver’s seat, but who would want you moving all over your car while driving anyway?”

If you put it like that, most people will comprehend what is meant. Then, when you talk to a customer, things get more vague, and quite a few people who I’ve spoken to, will have the biggest problem in distinguishing between a requirement, a consumption and a restraint. If a sentence actually start with “I assume that…” or “I require you to…” things are relatively simple.

I’ve been trying to bulk up on the definitions that are used by VMware in their certifications, and what was of help to me was for example the “Designing VMware Infrastructure” training videos by Trainsignal.

Scott Lowe, actually takes you through the various steps in creating a logical and physical design. He gives you a headstart on things to consider when you are actually designing (including some tools you can use like mind mapping software), and he goes over the design terminology.

The latter part is actually what I personally think is missing for a lot of people. They know what the technical limitations are, and will be able to look them up. They’ll be able to get their head wrapped around the physical design, and there are a lot of smart folks out there that grasp how things interact and can give a holistic overview.

But then you get to the actual lingo, and that’s where some small things may help you make it click up in your head. 🙂

An example I found very striking was the notion that an assumption is always coming from the view of the architect, not the business:

The business will be able to tell you what the Vendor is that you are going to use for your network gear (there’s a constraint for ya), and tell you that they want to have an availability of 99.99% for their HR application (there’s your requirement). But you may need to assume that the bandwidth that is available to you for replication, won’t be shared by environments that were out of scope for your design (and that could also be a risk). It is something that you might be able to eliminate by asking further questions, but it could be an assumption for a final design.

Since this is a topic that I’m dealing with in preparation for my re-take of the VCAP5-DCD, I’ll be posting some updates here with the resources I’ve used, and just put some things out there for you to take a stab at, and then I’ll see if I’m any good at design, and I’ll find out where I can improve. Also, if you think I already botched it in the example I gave here, let me know and leave a comment. It will help me prepare better.