In 2022, I had the opportunity to take the Nutanix Certified Expert — Multicloud Infrastructure (NCX-MCI) certification exam, and in this article, I would like to talk a little about the certification and give some tips for preparation.
Notice: This is a translated version of my original post, written in 2022 after I passed this exam. Since then, a few things have changed, but the overall process is still the same.
As I wrote a few months ago, Nutanix released a new training and certification related to Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) – Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration.
To get Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration 6 status, and badge, you don’t need to take both exams, but just one of them. So, schedule an exam today using a discount code and take an exam after April 30.
It’s not a common situation, but it does happen sometimes, especially in test clusters.
To change the admin password we need to connect to the CVM, for example, using the nutanix user, and reset the password:
$ ncli user reset-password user-name=admin password=MyStrong@Passw0rd
Password of user 'admin' reset successfully
Please login again with new credentials.
The password should be strong and between 8 and 255 characters. It should differ by at least 4 characters from previous password and it should not be from last 5 passwords.
Now you can connect to Prism and use the password you just set.
I have previously written about how to connect VBR to a Nutanix cluster, as well as how to create backup tasks and restore.
In this article, we will talk about a very important VBR functionality – Instant Recovery, support for which was added with the release of Nutanix AOS 6.0 STS and AOS 6.5 LTS.
VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 2b is out and contains a lot of bug fixes. One of the fixes I want to mention is a bug in CBT:
Changed Block Tracking (CBT) might not work as expected on a hot extended virtual disk:
In vSphere 8.0 Update 2, to optimize the open and close process of virtual disks during hot extension, the disk remains open during hot extend operations. Due to this change, incremental backup of virtual disks with CBT enabled might be incomplete, because the CBT in-memory bitmap does not resize, and CBT cannot record the changes to the extended disk block. As a result, when you try to restore a VM from an incremental backup of virtual disks with CBT, the VM might fail to start.
As a workaround, there were two options: not to use hot extend and perform disk extend operations when the VM is powered off, or create periodically full backups to reset the CBT.
So, if you’re running ESXi version 8.0 Update 2, you should consider updating to the 8.0 Update 2b as soon as possible.
With this article, I close the series on the basics of Ceph deployment. Previously, we looked at how to deploy Ceph, and how block and object access is provided.
This article will briefly describe the procedure for providing file access in Ceph using CephFS. This topic is very extensive and a lot may be missed, so please refer to the official documentation for more information.
In addition to block and file data access, Ceph also supports object access via the S3 or Swift protocols.
In this case, we will look at what settings need to be made on the Ceph side to provide clients with the ability to store data using the S3 protocol.
Let me remind you that I previously described the procedure for installing Ceph Reef from scratch in this article. In this case, I use the same platform, as well as a client based on Rocky Linux 9.
Also, I previously wrote about connecting block devices using RBD here.
On the 00:00 1st of March 2024, Kazakhstan changes the clocks to a single time zone UTC +5 for the whole country. It will affect two time zones: Asia/Almaty and Asia/Qostanay, which are in UTC +6 and need to be adjusted.
And the question may arise – what to do?
As this blog is more about Virtualization, one thing to mention: there are not many problems. Most hypervisors work in the UTC +0 time zone, and the time zone should be correct inside the Guest Virtual Machines.
Many people ask: Will the NTP server move my clock back for an hour? The answer is no. NTP servers work in the UTC +0. And on the 1st of March, they won’t move your clock backward.
In this article, we will look briefly at Linux systems and how to change the time.
RBD, aka RADOS Block Device, as you might guess from the name, allows you to allocate space from Ceph and present it to clients as block devices (disks).
RBD can often be found in conjunction with virtualization, in Kubernetes, where disks are connected to containers as PV, and also inside the client OS.
In this case, we will look at how to connect block devices with Ceph to a regular Linux host.
