nutanix Archives | n0derunner

How to performance test Nutanix on AWS with X-ray

Published: August 18, 2020 (Updated: August 20, 2020) in X-Ray, aws, nutanix, xray by gary. Leave a Comment on How to performance test Nutanix on AWS with X-ray.

End to End Creation of a Nutanix Cluster on AWS and Running X-Ray

How to download and Install Nutanix X-ray on an AHV cluster

Published: August 10, 2020 (Updated: August 10, 2020) in X-Ray, nutanix, x-ray by gary. Leave a Comment on How to download and Install Nutanix X-ray on an AHV cluster.

Impact of Data locality on DB workloads.

Published: July 23, 2019 (Updated: October 8, 2020) in Nutanix, nutanix, postgres by gary.

Do database workloads benefit from data locality?

Install a bitnami image to Nutanix AHV cluster.

Published: June 28, 2019 (Updated: June 28, 2019) in Nutanix, ahv, benchmark, database, nutanix, postgres by gary.

One of the nice things about using public cloud is the ability to use pre-canned application virtual appliances created by companies like Bitnami. We can use these same appliance images on Nutanix AHV to easily do a Postgres database benchmark Step 1. Get the bitnami image wget https://bitnami.com/redirect/to/587231/bitnami-postgresql-11.3-0-r56-linux-debian-9-x86_64.zip Step 2. Unzip the file and convert […]

X-Ray scenario to demonstrate Nutanix ILM behavior.

Published: October 25, 2018 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in X-Ray, nutanix, x-ray by gary.

Specifically a customer wanted to see how performance changes (and how quickly) as data moves from HDD to SSD automatically as data is accessed. The access pattern is 100% random across the entire disk. In a hybrid Flash/HDD system – “cold” data (i.e. data that has not been accessed for a long time) is moved […]

HCI Performance testing made easy (Part 4)

Published: September 27, 2018 (Updated: October 4, 2018) in X-Ray, nutanix, resilience, x-ray by gary.

What happens when power is lost to all nodes of a HCI Cluster? Ever wondered what happens when all power is simultaneously lost on a HCI cluster? One of the core principles of cloud design is that components are expected to fail, but the cluster as a whole should stay “up”. We wanted to […]

Your IO performance benchmarks are BS and so are mine.

Published: December 27, 2017 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in Performance Engineering, hci, nutanix, tpc, tpcx-hci by gary.

When it comes to assessing fitness of purpose, even audited benchmarks are quite useless unless they incorporate failure testing alongside the load test. I helped develop the TPCx-HCI benchmark which mandates the simulation of a node failure. Who cares about infrastructure benchmarking?

The return of misaligned IO

Published: May 25, 2017 (Updated: December 27, 2017) in Debugging, fio, linux, nutanix by gary.

We have started seeing misaligned partitions on Linux guests runnning certain HDFS distributions. How these partitions became mis-aligned is a bit of a mystery, because the only way I know how to do this on Linux is to create a partition using old DOS format like this (using -c=dos and -u=cylinders)

Creating compressible data with fio.

Published: October 18, 2016 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in fio, benchmark, compression, fio, nutanix by gary.

Today I used fio to create some compressible data to test on my Nutanix nodes. I ended up using the following fio params to get what I wanted. buffer_compress_percentage=50 refill_buffers buffer_pattern=0xdeadbeef buffer_compress_percentage does what you’d expect and specifies how compressible the data is refill_buffers Is required to make the above compress percentage do what you’d […]

SATA on Nutanix. Some experimental data.

Published: June 16, 2015 (Updated: March 15, 2020) in Storage Hardware and Devices, nutanix, sas, sata, scsi by gary. Leave a Comment on SATA on Nutanix. Some experimental data..

The question of why Nutanix uses SATA drive comes up sometimes, especially from customers who have experienced very poor performance using SATA on traditional arrays. I can understand this anxiety. In my time at NetApp we exclusively used SAS or FC-AL drives in performance test work. At the time there was a huge difference in performance between […]

Designing a scaleout storage platform.

Published: June 12, 2014 (Updated: March 5, 2017) in Nutanix, distributed-systems, nutanix by gary.

I was speaking to one of our developers the other day, and he pointed me to the following paper: SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services as an example of the general philosophy behind the design of the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS). Although the paper uses examples of both a webserver and a gnutella client, […]