After writing this blogpost on Adding a persistent disk via Powershell with Citrix MCS running on Nutanix AHV I got an email from one of our senior system architects, he asked me about this configuration so I shared the blogpost with him and his customer to find out that this customer enhanced the scripting part by using powershell and ControlUp to initialize format and assign a drive letter to the disk. Smart usage of available tools!
Yesterday one of our SEs mentioned he was talking to a customer and this customer is using MCS between two separate clusters. They were looking for a way to only keep one image updated and they are then looking to use our Protection Domain to replicate it over to the other cluster. Now, they are looking for some automated way to promote that snapshot to a full VM, luckely this is something we can achieve with the Nutanix Powershell commandlets.
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One of the customers I was engaged with ran into an issue where Citrix Studio was throwing out power commands towards Prism and Nutanix AHV but the VMs didn’t always respond properly. After some investigation it turned out we ran into the issue described here. Now obviously Citrix has best practices to disable screensavers on the VM side and optimize power managent but if you’re doing persistent desktops you might want a way to report which desktops aren’t optimized before taking any action, right? In my case I decided to write a short powershell script to get those VMs.
Ok ok, a new version of this Powershell script? Yeah, in the latest addition I’ve added CPU RDY % and Working Set Sizes for Read/Write IO. This time I’ve added a colomn that shows if the VM has a CD-ROM and if so, what ISO file is mounted to the CD-ROM. This was based on a chat with Lee Pryor, thanks for the idea Lee!
After a great meeting with a current Nutanix customer they asked if we had a tool that could provide them with some more background on their current cluster utilization and report on that. While Prism/Prism Pro will give you excellent reporting I try to automate as much as possible so I decided to alter the excisting Reporting Script I had written before to have working set size for read/write IO and potential CPU RDY times in the reporting as well.
Here I found myself wondering around the twitter sphere where I found this little gem posted by Aaron Parker: “Out-HtmlView – HTML alternative to Out-GridView #PowerShell https://buff.ly/2UBPq6x “. This made me modify the current VM Reporting script for AHV and now the script will output to this HTML view when the PSWriteHTML module is installed and otherwise it will output to CSV.
