With the announcement of Citrix supporting Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor in August 2015 we’ve started developing the first integration points for XenDesktop 7.6 FP3 (first supported VDA on AHV) and we started of with phase 1 (and yes, there’s more to come!) which is Citrix Power Management on AHV.

As I’ve wrote before the Aug 12th announcement brings the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform running Acropolis Hypervisor into the Citrix Ready family for Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp in addition to the already certified Citrix NetScaler VPX and ShareFile, you can read up on this topic in this blogpost: Nutanix and Citrix: Citrix App delivery on Nutanix Acropolis.

As Nutanix started of with limited integration we provided you with some tips and tricks to get your Citrix XenDesktop on Nutanix AHV up and running:

• ‘Mass’ sysprep your Windows VMs for Nutanix AHV
• Setting up Citrix XA/XD with an Acropolis Hypervisor cluster

Logically we started working on some integration points and that’s what I’m showing in this video, what we’re seeing here is a Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 Feature Pack 3 environment running on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor, two VMs in a Machine Catalog are running on AHV and in this demo you can see that we’re able to do power management on these VMs.

On of the things I really like in this video is that this integration allows us to utilize the Nutanix Cluster IP address, this cluster IP address is able to talk to the Prism service on the CVM that is elected as Prism leader, to clarify this I’ve included some of the wise words from the Nutanix bible:

A Prism service runs on every CVM with an elected Prism Leader which is responsible for handling HTTP requests.  Similar to other components which have a Master, if the Prism Leader fails, a new one will be elected.  When a CVM which is not the Prism Leader gets a HTTP request it will permanently redirect the request to the current Prism Leader using HTTP response status code 301.

Here we show a conceptual view of the Prism services and how HTTP request(s) are handled:

When using the cluster external IP (recommended), it will always be hosted by the current Prism Leader.  In the event of a Prism Leader failure the cluster IP will be assumed by the newly elected Prism Leader and a gratuitous ARP (gARP) will be used to clean any stale ARP cache entries.  In this scenario any time the cluster IP is used to access Prism, no redirection is necessary as that will already be the Prism Leader.

By using this mechanism you won’t have the dependency that you would normally have with vCenter or SCVMM where that specific instance can become a single point of failure in your design. Because of the ‘distributed by nature’ architecture of Nutanix you don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Want to get started with this power management plugin? The Plug-in is available to download from: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/static/supportTools.

Remember, this is just the first part of our integration. There’s more to come so stay tuned for more!

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is a Staff Solutions Architect for End User Computing at Nutanix. Kees has driven numerous Microsoft and Citrix, and RES infrastructures functional/technical designs, migrations, implementations engagements over the years.

Latest posts by Kees Baggerman (see all)

• Nutanix AHV and Citrix MCS: Adding a persistent disk via Powershell – v2 - November 19, 2019
• Recovering a Protection Domain snapshot to a VM - September 13, 2019
• Checking power settings on VMs using powershell - September 11, 2019
• Updated: VM Reporting Script for Nutanix with Powershell - July 3, 2019
• Updated (again!): VM Reporting Script for Nutanix AHV/vSphere with Powershell - June 17, 2019