Demo Lab Guide Dell XC - Amazon S3 · Demo Lab Guide – Dell XC XC-Series Web-Scale Converged...

1 Dell Demo Center – https://demos.dell.com | Dell Inc., 2016

Demo Lab Guide – Dell XC

XC-Series Web-Scale Converged Appliance

Product Domain: Storage

Author: Joseph Correia

Version: 1.01 Date: 24/01/2016

https://demos.dell.com/


Table of Contents 1 Product Overview ............................................................................................................................................ 3

1.1 Lab Preparation Considerations and Caveats ................................................................................. 4

2 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 5

2.1 Lab Topology and Essential Information .......................................................................................... 5

3 Nutanix Walk-through ................................................................................................................................... 6

3.1.1 LAB 1 - Basic Navigation of Nutanix Prism – [Step by Step] ........................................................ 6

3.1.2 Monitoring .............................................................................................................................................. 7

3.1.3 Advanced talking points ................................................................................................................... 25

3.1.4 Maintenance ....................................................................................................................................... 30

3.1.5 Upgrade Software ............................................................................................................................... 31

3.1.6 Automation ......................................................................................................................................... 32

4 Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................... 33



1 Product Overview

Consolidate compute and storage into a single chassis with Dell XC Series web-scale converged

appliances, powered by Nutanix software. XC Series appliances install quickly, integrate easily into any

data center, and can be deployed for multiple virtualized workloads including desktop

virtualization, database and private cloud projects. With Dell XC Series appliances, your enterprise can:

- Grow incrementally with pay as you grow, scale-out expansion

- Increase capacity and performance one node at a time

- Meet future needs without over-provisioning

- Deploy desktop virtualization infrastructure up to 6 times faster-and at up to 27% lower cost

over a three-year duty cycle-than traditional white box solutions1

.


http://www.dell.com/mc.ashx?id=technotes:technote1-xc-series&c=ie&l=en&s=bsd&modalwidth=400&modalHeight=150&ovropac=0&modalscroll=yes&modaltarget=div&modaltype=tooltip&position=bottom&title=Important%20Details&flip=false&eventType=rollover


1.1 Lab Preparation Considerations and Caveats

It is in your best interests to ensure the demo environment you will be demonstrating is clean & tidy

before you begin. For this reason we would recommend, where possible, you log in to your demo at

least 15 minutes prior to delivery and check the following;

1. Familiarize yourself with the environment during this time and check any specific features you are

expecting to demo.

2. Most importantly, be crystal clear with yourself on what it is you plan to show. A full demo of every

feature described below (with questions) can take several hours. If you only have a short time slot

be sure to focus on the key points that address the customer’s pain points and will drive value

home to them.

3. Ensure that you have scheduled the demo for sufficient time so as not to have the demo end

before you are finished with the customer.

4. This demo provides read-only access to the Nutanix Prism UI only

a. Please do not

i. Remove/Change the Demo Storage Pool

ii. Remove / Change the Dell World01 container

iii. Remove / Change the landing machines container

iv. Change any user passwords

v. Remove / Change the banner

Any other guidance on how the user should prepare for the lab can be added here. If there are

limitation or something the user should be aware of call out also.



2 Introduction

This document provides details on HOW to deliver an effective live demonstration of the

Dell XC to customers.

In this demo you will cover the following subject areas;

- Monitoring

- Configuration

- Data Protection

- Maintenance

.

2.1 Lab Topology and Essential Information



3 Nutanix Walk-through

3.1.1 LAB 1 - Basic Navigation of Nutanix Prism – [Step by Step]

Normally you type the Nutanix Web console (Prism) IP address into a web-browser (preferably Internet

Explorer).

1. Enter the following details when prompted:

a. Username: demouser

b. Password: password

Note: If necessary explain to the customer that the Nutanix Prism Element is the central point of

management and is a single pane of glass management console for the Dell XC.



3.1.2 Monitoring

Main Dashboard

Figure 1. Main Dashboard

Talking points

HTML5 – no Java or multiple consoles to manage

No impact on existing hypervisor management layer, results are collected from the hosts

Can tie into Active Directory

Insight into your all of your infrastructure

- Hypervisor

> Can have different versions across the cluster, IE ESXi 5.1, ESXi 5.5

> Same look and feel regardless of your hypervisor

- Storage Performance

- Cluster Health

> Quick drill down insight for potential issues

> No additional costs to run

- Hardware Summary



Daily administration tasks are broken up to the left and configuration tasks to the right

The Prism UI is reachable from any one of virtual storage controllers; the cluster external address

provides a Highly Available address

1. To illustrate Active Direction integration, click on the COG Icon, on the top right of the screen and

scroll down and click on Authentication.

2. Click on Client in the Authentication Configuration menu to illustrate the ability set up SSL

certificates if needed.



3. Click on heart icon on the screen or Health from the pull-down list on the left of the main menu.

a. The Health dashboard displays dynamically updated health information about VMs, hosts, and

disks in the cluster.



Figure 2. Over 55 Health Checks that are configurable

Talking points:

View of all of your infrastructure, virtual machines, hosts and disks.

Taking local storage and forming a storage fabric spread out over many nodes/servers can be very

complex. As the cluster size grows, the chances increase of getting faults. Quick isolation and

resolution of a problem are important to maintaining high availability. Without the need to dig into

the CLI or get Support on the phone you have the ability to use highly functional visual aids.

If you want to show some tests, show them some of the disk tests to explain how we have insight

into both HDD and SSD latency and track accordingly.

If you show guest VMs, focus on the per-application instead of infrastructure. Finding the needle in

the haystack for performance issues has never been so easy!

4. On the right hand pane, click on Disk Metadata Usage under the CVM | Disk field to examine

more details.



Note: If there was any issues here they would show up as either yellow or red, green signifying that

everything is okay.



Talking points

Hover your mouse over both the Cause and Resolution, demonstrating to the customer the

helpful feature for troubleshooting along with calling out the impact any failures are currently

having. These are also located in the Alerts tab in the drop down menu under Home.

This is all part of the software and there is no additional licensing required for this.

5. Click on the Go Back button on the top right hand side to go back to the main Health dashboard.

6. Next click on VM’s to illustrate the grouping Nutanix applying to quick view of all of your hosts. As

an example we can see that under the Operating System group we have some Microsoft, CertOS

and RedHat.



Note: You can also do the same for memory, reserved memory, disk capacity and overall health.

7. Next click on Hardware under the pull down list on the far left of the main menu. The Hardware

dashboard displays dynamically updated information about the hardware configuration in a

cluster.



Talking points:

Wealth of information, host name, serial, access to iDRAC\IPMI, disk information. This would also

display weather the Nutanix box is using a 12G (720XD) or a 13G 730XD server. No longer have to

drag out the spreadsheets and manually track. All information is stored in Apace ZooKeeper.

Ability to Turn on LEDs\On Off – seems simple but lots of hyper-converged solutions can’t do this

today.

All performance graphs can be clicked on and brought into the Cluster Analytics section.



8. Next click on Diagram, to view a picture of the host and nodes with how they are laid out

physically along with a nice view of disks (SSD, SAS etc.). Scroll down if you have more than two

hosts to view additional hosts.



Notes: Additional information includes, host performance, host usage, host alerts and events.

9. Next click on Table view which gives the same information but laid out differently. This view is

especially useful if you have a large number of hosts and you wanted to scan through them quite

quickly, as it also contains IMPI IP address along with iDRAC IP Address of any selected host.



Talking points

In the table section of hardware it’s a good time to talk about Nutanix’s Hot Optimized tiering. SSDs

are kept around 75% full before down tiring data to the cold storage which is on HDD. All writes go

to SSDs by default. Data is brought back into the SSD tier based on access patterns.

If you click on the levels you can see that data is evenly distributed on all of the HDDs. This allows

for low impact and fast recover of components.

If you select the disk usage summary graph with your mouse, you can drag this data into the

analysis page.

10. Next click on VM from the pull down list on the far left of the main menu. This is the best place to

view performance on the Dell XC, especially if a user is concerned about performance on an

application or a VM.

Note: The virtual machine (VM) dashboard displays dynamically updated information about virtual

machines in the cluster.



From the VM overview you have a nice view of usage, IOPS and latency, as well as viewing any critical

alerts, warning alerts or VM events.

11. Click on the Table view, where you can see all your VM’s listed quite neatly here. You have the

ability to page through them here, with color coded graphs illustrating each VM’s performance.

Additional details here includes, the name, what host its sitting on and the Operating System it is

running on the right hand side of the screen.



Highlighting the application layer, use both the Google-like search to find your virtual machine or

navigate through the table view.

12. Click on the magnifying glass symbol at the top of the screen and type in one of your VM names

(i.e. CVM). Get all of the necessary statistics and the location of your virtual machine whether you

have 20 or 20,000 VMs. Once again all graphs can be brought into the Analysis section. Traditional

storage loses insights into these metrics because of IO blender affect. These metrics are natively

built into Nutanix from the very start from 2009.



13. Next click on the Analysis from the pull down list on the far left of the main menu.

14. The Analysis dashboard allows you to create charts that can monitor dynamically a variety of

performance measures.



This displays a number of useful charts by default along with the ability to create custom charts for

analysis of the performance of your cluster, hypervisor, VM’s etc. collecting statistics and correlate the

results.

Talking points

“Solve issues with the right side of your brain instead of diving into log files”

Ability to grab both Cluster and hypervisor stats and correlate the results.

Change color on the graphs to match your own personal preference. You can also export the

graphs to a csv or json file.

A slider coordinates all of the results for the time series selected. The exact metrics can be found

on the right-hand side of the graphs.

Cause and Resolution – depending on the alerts you will be presented with possible corrective

action to take to resolve the issue

Stats are saved for 90 days with no pruning. Very responsive, good time to pick out some pain

points with the customer. Typically other platform have high delay\response times.



Note: You can scroll down the centre pane to view all the charts, along with ability to remove a chart

you may not want to see. Move to the right pane and click on the x button on Cluster CPU Memory.

Click OK to confirm on the pop up message.



15. On the right hand pane we have a list of any Alerts, along with a link to the Cause and Resolution.

Note: you have a range picker at the top which allows you to look at a day’s view, a week’s view, or

even a month’s view to assist in isolating any pain points you might be having.

16. Next click on Storage from the pull down list on the far left of the main menu.

The Storage dashboard displays dynamically updated information about the storage configuration in a cluster.



This area is really like a stock ticker if you will and allows you to correlates events and alerts with any

performance metrics within the cluster and so regardless of the hypervisor we have the mechanisms

in place to pull the data off the hosts themselves and pick a serious of dates throughout the cluster.

Again a familiar view of Cluster IOPS, Cluster IO Bandwidth, Avg I/O latency. Move between the

Diagram view for storage summary (SSD/SATA Usage). The Table view illustrates a breakdown of

information of both container and storage pool.

Talking points

This is where you can configure your containers for compression and deduplication (note this is

not possible in the read only version of the demo available on demos.dell.com).

There is no limit on the amount of VM’s you can place on a container or how many containers you

can create.



3.1.3 Advanced talking points

3.1.3.1 Advanced Settings

Replication Factor

A good time to talk about the pitfalls of RAID:

Write penalties due to Parity

Degradation during rebuilds

RAID Controller being the bottleneck

Today’s large drives could take a week for a rebuild to occur

Compression

Nutanix utilizes algorithm from Google called Snappy. Snappy is a compression/decompression

library. It does not aim for maximum compression, instead, it aims for very high speeds and

reasonable compression so overhead is low.

MapReduce is used to spread out the load across the whole cluster to where there are no hot

spots.

Inline Dedupe for Performance

Fingerprints data on ingestion utilizing code from the Intel SHA extensions from the CPU. Later if

data in written again, Cache from RAM and SSD can hold more data logically for performance.

MapReduce for Dedupe

Leveraging MapReduce like compression, the virtual storage controllers reuse the fingerprints that

have already been calculated and dedupe the data. No data needs to be re-read for this to occur.

Dedupe is container-wide across the cluster.



Next click on Data Protection the pull down list on the far left of the main menu.

The Data Protection dashboard displays dynamically updated information about the data protection

configuration in a cluster.



In the table view, we can see a number of already created protection domains within the environment.

Talking points

A protection domain is a group of VM’s that you want to be able to protect. This can be done by

scheduling replication on the domain to other clusters or even snapshots for example.

Scheduling is very flexible with Nutanix, it can be done daily, weekly or even hourly if needed, along

with ad hoc.

Utilizing this feature you can have different SLA’s for different VM’s without having to set them up

on different data stores.



Finally one excellent resource within the Prism menu is the Help or Help Tutorial section. Move you

mouse to the demouser drop down menu and select Help.



Talking points

This is a fantastic portal that gives you a pleura of information on all things Nutanix, including

documentation and guides.

The Health Tutorial takes you to a welcome page and actually steps you through a simulation.



Since most people will come to Nutanix because of a storage issues, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on

the remaining configuration options. I would briefly highlight:

Active Directory support via Authentication in this drop down menu gives the customer the ability

to add to an Active Directory farm or create a new directory.

Pulse: The feature is enabled by default and sends cluster status information automatically to

Nutanix customer support through customer-opened ports 80 or 8443. With this information

Nutanix can apply advanced analytics to optimize your implementation and to identify potential

problems. This allows the ability for phone home support and email support directly from Nutanix.

This only sends analytics back to Nutanix and no customer information.

Remote Support

Licensing: A good way to talk about some of the advanced features like VSS support, and Metro

availability.

Metro cluster is already available and can be used on ESXi. Good idea to mention. Some unique

features as synchronization over any L3 link (5ms RTT -> up to 400km). Virtually all other vendors

requires FC (dark fiber) and normally able to sync up to 120km only.

- Dell XC customers can use different Dell models in remote and local datacenter (we don’t

have a requirement to use identical hardware), or use Nutanix hardware in once DC and Dell

appliances in another.

3.1.4 Maintenance

Great time to talk about why operating in the user space is a must. Click on the cog Icon on the top

right hand side of the screen.



3.1.5 Upgrade Software

Figure 3. Rolling Upgrades because code lives in the User Space

Fault isolation: If storage has a bug, it won't take compute down with it. If you want to quickly

upgrade storage, you don't have to move VMs around. Converging compute and storage should

not create a toxic blob of infrastructure; isolation is critical, even when sharing hardware. That is

what made virtualization and ESX such a beautiful paradigm.

Pace of innovation: User-level code for storage has ruled for the last 2 decades for exactly this

reason. It's more maintainable, it’s more debuggable, and it’s faster-paced. Bugs don't bring entire

machines down. Exact reason why GFS, HDFS, OneFS, Oracle RDBMS, MySQL, and so on are built

in user space. Moore's Law has made user-kernel transitions cheap. Zero-copy buffers, epoll, and

O_DIRECT IO, etc. makes user-kernel transitions seamless. Similarly, virtual switching and VT-x

technologies in hypervisors make hypervisor-VM transitions seamless.

Rolling upgrades: Compute doesn't blink when storage is undergoing a planned downtime.



3.1.6 Automation

Anything that can be done in the UI can be automated with:

Nutanix CLI

PowerShell

Rest-API

Show them the Rest-API Explorer under the Admin section.



4 Conclusion

Management of most enterprise IT solutions is not simple, and not at all intuitive. Typically, this is a by-

product of management consoles and user interfaces designed with very little regard as to how users

interact with technology in the real world. A fresh approach to IT management is required.

Management tools should be simple and intuitive, yet powerful enough to support advanced feature

sets. Navigation must be tailored to fit the real-world workflows of datacenter managers to maximize

operational efficiency, and the overall user experience should match that of popular consumer products.

Prism is the Key to unlocking Opex inside of the modern datacenter.


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