Author: Angelo Luciani

We announced the release of community edition on June 8, 2015, and the community response has been tremendous. Enterprise IT professionals and tech enthusiasts are able to deploy the leading hyper-converged technology in their home labs and development/test environments.

The latest version of community edition has support for nested virtualization. Nested virtualization is a virtual machine contained within another virtual machine. The real benefit here is that you can run multiple nested nodes on one physical box. There are many examples of running community edition in a nested environment on blogs and in our forums.

I have collected several blog posts from the community on setting up a nested environment. These posts will get you on the fast track for deployment. Have fun!

How to Setup NutanixCE on VMware Workstation 11

Ryan Harris is an Infrastructure Engineer and has installed community edition on VMware Workstation 11. He has outlined his deployment with lots of very useful installation screenshots. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this post does not disappoint. (@vRyanH)

How to create a nested virtual NutanixCE cluster

Ryan Harris has made the list again as he outlines how to create a nested cluster using community edition. He continues his awesome collection of screenshots and how to configure the cluster in his VMware Workstation 11 environment. (@vRyanH)

Step by Step How to install Nutanix CE nested on VMware ESXi

Kalle Pihelgas is an Infrastructure Engineer and installed Nutanix Community Edition nested on VMware ESXi 5.5 U2. (@kalle_pihelgas)

Joep Piscaer is a CTO and Nutanix Technology Champion (NTC), he had a first look at community edition as he participated in the early alpha and beta. As a mac user, his post outlines how to get started using VMware Fusion. (@jpiscaer)

Nutanix: Install Nutanix Community Edition in VMware Fusion and first contact with Acropolis (Spanish)

Jorge de la Cruz Mingo is a System Administrator and has also installed community edition on VMware Fusion. Plenty of screenshots to get you started. His blog is in Spanish, but if you use chrome you can translate the post to English. (@jorgedlcruz)

Ramy Mahmoud is a Wintel Systems Engineer and has also installed community edition on VMware Workstation 11. I like the use of screenshot, as it helps walk you though an installation. (@RamyMahmoud)

If you have written a post on how to get community edition up and running in a nested environment, let me know and we can profile it. Email me at community@nutanix.com and there is no better time than now to get started with CE, download your copy today.

Let me know on Twitter what your system hardware is so others in the community can get some guidance. Thanks for reading!

It’s 4:45 pm on a Friday before a long weekend, your manager stops by your cubicle and has a last minute task for the team that needs to be done before everyone leaves for the day. You’ve just been told that the team needs to add another network card to each server, add a new IP address, and test connectivity before the network team make their changes. Your manager has already submitted the change records and communicated with the other teams about the change.

“With Great Power comes Great Responsibility”

Uncle Ben

Your co-workers are looking at each other scratching their heads and wondering when and where to start. You have 8624 VMs, and the three of you. Jonathan, your co-worker, mentions “there goes the long weekend”, and Alex begins to divide the work.

The three of you discuss an action plan, but it seems to involve a lot of manual work. Jonathan asks, “There has to be a better way?”. You have an idea, you rush to your desk and begin to type furiously. Alex and Jonathan start the manual process and hope you will engage shortly.

It’s now 4:56 pm and Alex and Jonathan have not started yet; you call them over to your desk, you have just written some code that will perform the change. You ask them to watch as you hit the return key, and away it goes. Looks like you will get a chance to enjoy the long weekend.

Alex and Jonathan remark, “How did you do that? Where did you learn those skills? After confirming all the changes, you smile, it’s now 5:10 pm and you still have time to catch your train.

Does this sound familiar? Have there been times when you saved the day? Do you have superhero coding skills? If you do, then consider participating in the Nutanix Coding Challenge – Total Recode.

Nutanix Total Recode Challenge

Build a script in your favorite language which solves a real-world problem. You can test your script using the NX or XC product (if you are a customer or partner), or through using our free Community Edition. We are looking for scripts in the following use cases:

• Provisioning/orchestration
• Reporting
• Data protection
• Disaster recovery and runbook automation

We have some super awesome prizes as well

• Best Overall – DJ1 Inspire 1 Drone (Valued up to $4000) or $4000 cash prize
• Most Impactful – Home Lab ($2,500 value) or $2,500 cash prize
• Most Creative – $2000 cash prize

Code will be judged on the following criteria – Real-world applicability (30%), Creativity (25%), Minimal end user interaction (25%), Quality and efficiency of code (10%), Documentation (10%). Do you think you have what it takes?

You can find out more about the challenge here. Total Recode challenge entries are submitted to the Nutanix NEXT community. You can also find step by step instructions outlined in the Contest Guidelines.

This challenge is open to our customers, partners and anyone else who has saved the weekend for their team. Participating in this challenge is an excellent way to learn and share with the broader community. You need to hurry, the contest closes: Aug. 20th, 2015 and the winners announced at the end of August.

Follow Nutanix on Twitter for the latest news and announcements on the challenge. Also let me know if I can help on Twitter. Happy coding.

The long-awaited vSphere 6 was announced, and I know many in the community that are eager to upgrade to the latest version, including myself. I always encourage folks to read the official documentation from VMware before you start an upgrade.

You want to ensure you have everything covered, and if you are one of the lucky ones with a dev or test environment for your infrastructure, I would always start there first. I know it seems like common sense, but you will be surprised how many folks skip this step.

I’m going to touch on a few of the new features I think are worth mentioning, and that impacts the majority of users.

Hypervisor Improvements

vSphere 6 can now scale to 64 hosts in a cluster, and that’s an increase from the previous 32 hosts. I’d be interested in knowing what a typical cluster is for most folks. Let me know on Twitter what size your cluster is.

Of course, with the additional hosts, vSphere can now host 8000 VMs in a single cluster. This can help bring down the TCO with fewer clusters and more density in the new cluster.

This has become a regular occurrence, as vSphere 6 can support 480 logical CPUs, 12TB of RAM and 1,024 VMs. One thing to keep in mind is that you will likely need newer hardware to take advantage of these increases but it depends on the age of your hosts.

Security Improvements

You can now leverage vCenter to manage local accounts on your hosts. In the past, you had to connect to each host to make any updates.

Host Advanced System Settings will now help with the management of account failed login attempts and account lockout duration on the host. SSH ad vSphere web services connections are affected but not the DCUI and console shell access. Password complexity i also centrally managed for all hosts in a cluster.

All administrator activities are logged against a host and help with better audit trails.

Two new lockdown modes – normal lockdown mode, users on the DCUI access list can access the DCUI. Strict lockdown mode is when the DCUI is stopped.

NVIDIA GRID Support

Geographically dispersed organizations can leverage NVIDIA GRID vGPU with Horizon. It feels like you have dedicated hardware. Commands from the VM pass straight through to the vGPU and bypass the hypervisor.

Virtual Machine Improvements

vSphere 6 will move you to virtual machine hardware version 11 which will also provide you with support for 128 vCPUs and 4TB of RAM.

Expanded Guest OS Support

You have additional support for some of the latest OS, like Ubuntu 14.04.1, Unbuntu 12.04.1 Oracle Linux 7, FreeBSD 9.3 and Mac OS X 10.10.

Windows Server Failover Clustering Improvements

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 have been added. This includes support for both WSFC and AlwaysOn Availability Groups. vSphere 6 includes support for the PVSCSI adapter with virtual machines running WSFC. VMware vSphere vMotion is now fully supported with Windows Server 2008 and later when using WSFC virtual machines that are clustered across physical hosts using physical-mode RDMs.

vCenter Server Architecture Improvements

We have two deployment models. The first, embedded, deploy the new Platform Services Controller (PSC) and the vCenter Server system on the same machine. The second, external, deploys the PSC and the vCenter Server instance on separate machines. All vCenter Server services—such as VMware vCenterTM Inventory Service, VMware vSphere Web Client, auto deploy, and so on—are installed along with vCenter Server. There are no longer separate installers for these components.

Both deployment models support use of an embedded PostgreSQL database. For external database use, Windows vCenter Server deployments support SQL Server and Oracle Database; VMware vCenter Server ApplianceTM supports Oracle Database

Certificate Management

The PSC contains the VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA). The VMCA is a root certificate authority (CA) that issues signed certificates to all vSphere 6.0 components via the solution users. This secures the environment by using a CA to generate certificates as opposed to using self-signed certificates as in previous releases.

The VMCA can also be configured as a subordinate CA, enabling it to issue certificates based on an existing enterprise CA. Organizations that have an investment in a CA can easily incorporate the VMCA into their existing infrastructure.

vCenter Server Appliance

vCenter Server Appliance now has the same scalability numbers as the Windows installable vCenter Server: 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines. This is supported with the embedded PostgreSQL database or an external Oracle Database

vSphere Web Client

vSphere Web Client includes significant performance and usability improvements which This puts vSphere Web Client on a par with the standalone VMware vSphere Client.

vSphere vMotion

vSphere vMotion capabilities have been enhanced in this release, enabling users to perform live migration of virtual machines across virtual switches, vCenter Server systems, and long distances of up to 150ms RTT. vSphere administrators now can migrate across vCenter Server systems, enabling migration from a Windows version of vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance or vice versa, depending on specific requirements.

vSphere Network I/O Control Enhancements

vSphere Network I/O Control Version 3 enables administrators or service providers to reserve—that is, guarantee—bandwidth to a vNIC in a virtual machine or an entire distributed port group.

Let me know what you think about the lastest release 6.0. Will you be deploying this in the next 60 days? What feature are you looking forward to, let me know on Twitter and thanks so much for reading.