Prism Central SAML auth with Azure AD

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Using an external Identity Provider (IDP) is a great way to further secure your Prism Central deployment. In a previous post, I detailed how to integrate your on-premises ADFS with Prism Central. However what if you have Azure AD and only want to use Azure AD for authentication purposes? In this post I’ll be guiding you through configuring an Identity Provider within Prism Central to leverage Azure AD authentication. So let’s get to it! Prerequisites The first thing we need to do is create a Non-Gallery Application in your Azure Portal. Navigate to https://portal.azure.com/ When logged into Azure, go to…

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Nutanix AOS 5.11 (STS) and more!

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Nutanix have finally taken the wraps off the Acropolis 5.11 Family and boy is it a juicy update! There is a lot to look at in here so lets get to it. The Acropolis 5.11 Family includes new and updated features for Prism Central (5.11), AHV ( 20170830.301), AOS (5.11) as well as the introduction of Nutanix Objects (1.0). Below I’ve outlined some of the new and updated features from the Acropolis 5.11 Family. Note: AOS 5.11 is a Short Term Service (STS) branch so it is advised that you only hop to this STS if there is a feature…

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Nutanix AOS 5.10.4 (LTS) is now available

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Nutanix have released AOS 5.10.4 out into the wild as of the 21st of May 2019. This particular release is more of a bug fix release rather than a feature release so no new features are included in this update. AOS 5.10.4 also brings a new AHV version (AHV-20170830.270) which is also a fix release. This AOS release brings the version number up to the same as Prism Central (5.10.4) which was released about a week ago (14th of May, 2019). Resolved Issues in AOS 5.10.4 AHV-Management ENG-73536 – Improved traceability of VMs affected by a High Availability (HA) event…

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Xi Frame – End User Compute for the Hybrid Cloud

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End User Computing has been a staple for businesses for a long time. With the current shift in infrastructure, where we are moving from purely on-premises Data Centres to more hybrid and even fully cloud-based infrastructure, is End User Computing keeping up with change? Nutanix is, with its latest acquisition of Frame. Inc, by giving you an End User Computing (EUC) platform that can deploy to both your public and private clouds. Nutanix is making End User Computing, something that is typically complex, simple with Nutanix Xi Frame (Frame). Xi Frame Xi Frame is a desktop-as-a-service platform built with the…

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Nutanix Technology Champion 2019 – Second Time Around

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Each year the team at Nutanix release a list of names of people from around the globe who have been chosen to be part of the Nutanix Technology Champions. This group of IT professionals, are from every cloud, application and technology group. Their diverse backgrounds, experiences, and expertise help their organizations and the virtualization community to challenge the status quo. For the second year running I am honored to have been chosen to be part of this group of IT Pros who advocate Nutanix and the technology that is changing the IT game for 2019. This year there were a few…

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Nutanix AHV with Citrix MCS and Citrix Cloud – VMs not starting from Citrix Studio

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I found out the hard way that there are somethings that should remain untouched when it comes to Citrix MCS and Nutanix AHV. I’m hoping this post help others who may have come across similar issues. TLDR; Do not delete XDSNAP Snapshots on AHV if you are using Citrix MCS for your Virtual Apps and Desktops with the hosting on Nutanix. Background I recently deployed a Nutanix cluster to utilise Citrix Cloud with Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.8.2) as the hosting. This solution uses Citrix MCS with Citrix App Layering for the purpose of image management. The Virtual Apps and Desktops portion…

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Nutanix AOS 5.9 (STS) is here!

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AOS 5.9 (STS) is now available to download from the Nutanix Portal. NOTE: AOS 5.9 is a Short Term Service (STS) branch of AOS. This means it is covered by support for only 6 months. If this is too short of a support window for you it is recommended you stay on the Long Term Service (LTS) branch of AOS which is currently AOS 5.5.6 NOTE: After upgrading to AOS 5.9 from AOS 5.5.6, the web console Upgrade Software AOS tab incorrectly shows the current AOS 5.9 versions as an LTS (long term support) release. AOS 5.9 is a Short…

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Prism Central – Configure SAML Authentication using ADFS

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The latest version of Prism Central (v5.8) brought a bunch of new features. One of these features is the support for using an external Identity Provider (IDP) instead of or along side LDAP (Active Directory or OpenLDAP). For this post I’ll be configuring ADFS for SSO to Prism Central. Preliminary work To make this whole process easier, grab the Federation XML from your ADFS site.Head on over to https://federationURLHere/federationmetadata/2007-06/federationmetadata.xml and download the XML. You will need to substitute in your Federation URL (eg. sts.corp.com). This will download an XML document which contains the settings Prism Central needs to setup the connection. Crete an…

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How To Remove Old Snapshots on Nutanix AHV

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Sometimes when deleting VMs you can forget to check if the VM you are deleting has existing snapshots prior to it being deleted resulting in orphaned snapshots hanging around on the cluster. This can also happen when VMs are being deleted by API (when using something like Citrix App Layering) and the API call doesn’t delete the existing snapshots. Luckily we can use acli to remove these old snapshots and restore order to your cluster once more. acli To clean up your old or orphaned snapshots, SSH to your cluster IP address (or directly to a CVM). Now you’ll want…

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Nutanix Beam – Multi-Cloud Optimisation to Reduce Costs & Enhance Security

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One of the biggest and most exciting announcements to come out of the annual Nutanix .NEXT conference this year is Nutanix Beam. Beam is a new Software as a Service (SaaS) offering from Nutanix as part of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS which is designed to help customers optimise and better manage cost and security when it comes to their public clouds. Currently Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are the two supported public clouds however this could expand in the future to include Google Cloud Platform. I’m going to make this a two part blog series as there’s just too…

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Nutanix AHV Best Practices Guide Updated – v4.1 Now Available

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There are new versions of AOS and AHV in the wild and so the AHV Best Practices Guide (BPG) has been updated to cover any new features or enhancements that may have come out since the last BPG was released. The latest AOS version number depends on what release track you have decided to be on (AOS 5.6 for Short Term Support or AOS 5.5.2 for Long Term Support). The AHV Best Practices Guide covers everything from the Nutanix AHV Architecture Overview through to Live Migration, Resource Oversubscription and VM Data Protection. Here’s a quick snapshot of the table of contents:…

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Nutanix Era: It’s all about Databases

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At this year’s .NEXT conference, Nutanix pulled back the covers on a few new services they have been working on. I’m going detail a few of them here on my blog. First up is Era. An Intro to Nutanix Era Nutanix Era is a new suite of software from Nutanix which is set to bring the famous ‘One-Click’ simplicity to Database provisioning and Lifecycle Management. The first piece of Era will be Copy Data Management (CDM), which gives DB Administrators the ability to provision, clone, refresh and restore their databases to any point in time through a Prism like UI….

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Nutanix AOS 5.6

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A little over a month ago, Nutanix released a new version of its Acropolis Operating System (AOS) bringing the latest version to 5.6. I thought I would wait until the dust had settled on this release a bit before I jumped into writing about it. I feel like a month is a good amount of time to let things settle down so let’s jump on in to this release and see what’s new! Note: AOS 5.6 is a Short Term Supported (STS) Release that will be maintained till July 2018 and supported until Oct 2018. Before upgrading to this release, please…

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AHV & PVS – Together at Last

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Back in 2016 Nutanix released the AHV plugin for Citrix Machine Cretation Services (MCS) which would allow you to use your AHV based Nutanix cluster as the host resources for your Citrix MCS images. This meaned you could harness the power of Shadow Clones within your Citrix images. Fast forward two years, Nutanix has now released a plugin for Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS)! This plugin will now allow you to use your AHV based Nutanix cluster as the host resources for your PVS vDisks. This obviously allows you to harness the power of Nutanix for your PVS farm. Because of…

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Citrix NetScaler Issue With Listener Policy and File Sharing

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I came across a weird issue this week with a Citrix NetScaler that was load balancing a windows file share in active/failover mode. This particular vServer was loadbalancing a few services with CIFS being one of those services. The issue was simply that the CIFS file share was not available. All of the other load balanced services worked so I knew it wasn’t an issue with the vServer. So I began digging. A quick look at how this vServer was configured told me that it was setup with a Protocol of ANY, and a port of *. This particular vServer also had…

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