ExploreVM Podcast Short - Camp Rubrik: Insiders Edition

This special episode of the ExploreVM Podcast was recorded live at Camp Rubrik - Insiders Edition at the Rubrik Headquarters in Palo Alto, California. I was one of 15 influencer "Campers" to participate in this day long event featuring unprecedented access to the Rubrik Staff. In this round table discussion, I am joined by Byron Schaller, Brett Guarino, and Matt Crape as we chat about the day's events. Watch for a full blog post about the event to follow soon!



Listen to "Camp Rubrik: Insiders Edition" on Spreaker.

Photo Courtesy of Sean Massey

My Guests:
Twitter: Matt Crape
Twitter: Brett Guarino
Twitter: Byron Schaller

Blog: www.ExploreVM.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ExploreVM
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/explorevm/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-woodward-jr


Do you have an idea or a topic for the show? Would you like to be a guest on the ExploreVM podcast? If so, please contact me on Twitter, Email, or Facebook.

Looking Through the (Cloud)Lens with Ixia

As data centers evolve, utilizing multiple cloud locations is becoming more common place. Whether its on-premises, hybrid cloud, or public cloud, monitoring this data is becoming a more difficult task. Cloud providers do not allow packet level inspection due to their architecture. Direct access to the hardware is prevented as well. Ixia looks to address these issues with their public cloud monitoring tool CloudLens.

Ixia CloudLens is a two part solution that offers end to end monitoring, down to the packet level, in multi cloud environments. CloudLens SaaS management pane runs in the cloud on  serverless architecture. The management portal is coupled with either a CloudLens Sensor Container, running on a Docker container, or CloudLens Sensor Agent for Windows based solutions. 

How Does CloudLens Work?

Starting with installation of the CloudLens Containers or agents, metadata about the cloud environment is collected. This data includes what cloud provider the sensor is running on, the resources being utilized by the instances, regions, and applications running on the instance. After this information is categorized by CloudLens, collection and tracking of relevant information will begin while disregarding unnecessary data. 

Configuring visibility into cloud traffic utilizes an easy 5 step workflow:

• Identify source instances
• Create source groups based on metadata
• Identify tool instances
• Create tool group based on metadata
• Create secure visibility path from source to tools with intelligent filtering

In the above example, source groups are broken down into a typical 3 tier application use case, and the tool groups are the various methods utilized to monitor the health of the application.

Connections are made to each group utilizing drag and drop via the CloudLens Dashboard. This creates a secure peer to peer VPN connection. These connections can be one to one, or one to many. By utilizing groups, new instances created in the cloud are automatically detected and added to their corresponding group within CloudLens. No extra configuration is necessary, making scaling easy.

As the Ixia CloudLens is a container and SasS based model, the solution can be ran on AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Bluemix, Alibaba Cloud, CentryLink, and the on-premises datacenter. Sensor agents and containers can be spun up in the in house datacenter and report back to the same dashboard as the public cloud solutions. Another benefit to the deployment model of CloudLens is that no additional security configuration is necessary. As the components live in the cloud environment, they ingest the existing security profiles.

One final benefit of CloudLens is container visibility. Docker container network namespaces map to the same host network namespace, but they operate independently to each other. This proves to be troublesome for traffic monitoring. By invoking the host namespace for the CloudLens Sensor namespace, the traffic can be easily monitored as it passes through the Docker host to the external network. The CloudLens Container namespace can also be configured to share the same namespace as the desired application. The "sidecar container" configuration allows for traffic monitoring of a single app given the shared network namespace. 

For more information on CloudLens, and other Ixia offerings, take a look at their Tech Field Day 15 Presentations, or visit Ixiacom.com 

Disclaimer: I was invited to participate as a Tech Field Day Delegate as a guest of Gestalt IT. All expenses, including food, transportation, and hotel were covered by Gestalt IT. I did not receive any compensation to write this post, nor was I requested to write this post. The above post is written of my opinion and not that of Gestalt IT. 

Nutanix Next 2017 Wrap Up: Adding Google Cloud & Veeam to the Party!

As the Nutanix Next conference wrapped up for another year, there were a few more announcements since the Wednesday evening keynote, which I originally wrote about HERE. Attendance numbers looked to be around 3800 or so. In 2018, .Next will travel to New Orleans, Louisiana on May 8-10th.

Nutanix & Google Partnership

Nutanix and Google Cloud announced a strategic partnership at Next 2017. The primary focus of this partnership appears to be application mobility and the integration of hybrid cloud solutions. The Nutanix features which will first be available with this partnership include Xi Cloud Services for GCP, Calm for GCP, and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS with Kubernetes. 

This partnership allows users to traverse data stored in GCP,  Xi Cloud Services Disaster Recovery, and locally without the need to migrate to one location. Using Calm for GCP, administrators could have one-click deployment of applications across both in house Nutanix environments and Google Cloud Platform locations using application blueprints. Enterprise Cloud OS will be able to utilize Acropolis Container Services (ACS) & Google Container Engine (GKE) to deploy Kubernetes workloads, using Calm Blueprints, either locally or in Google Cloud.

Veeam & Acropolis Hypervisor Integration

Adding another vendor to it's backup and recovery space, it was announced Friday that Veeam will now support the Acropolis Hypervisor. Veeam will utilize a virtual appliance to call AHV APIs. This will allow for agentless backups, as well as application consistent backups utilizing Nutanix Guest Tools. Veeam will utilize native AHV snapshots, and AHV Change Block Tracking (CBT) for periodic image level backups. Veeam Explorers will also be able to be utilized in an AHV environment.

Nutanix X-Ray

Nutanix X-Ray has been introduced as benchmarking and testing tool for on site and cloud based workloads. Some of the initial use cases being proposed by Nutanix include: workload simulation, node failure simulation, snapshot impacts over the long term, and database workload interference. A trial download of X-Ray can be found Here. 

If you were not able to make it to the conference this year, several videos have already been uploaded to YouTube. There will also be an Online .Next airing some of the breakout sessions which were recorded during this years conference. That should be live in the next month or so, keep an eye on the Nutanix social media accounts for updates. 

For more details on the major announcements from .Next 2017, take a look at the Nutanix News page. 

The Nutanix & GCP press release can be found here

If you'd like to join the conversation about Nutanix's new offerings, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on my podcast, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.