Guest blog alert! We’re excited to have our partner, Nutanix,joining us in the blogosphere today to talk about their upcomingOktoberTekfestdemo, “Nutanix Calm Demo”.DaveKeefe,Sr. The demonstration will be performed by Cloud Automation Engineerat Nutanix.
“Nutanix software unifies public, private, and distributed clouds and empowers IT with applications and data that support their businesses.”
Theirdemosession will go live in ourTekfestLearning Center on October 1st. Check out their blog to see what you can learn and register for OktoberTekfest!
Nutanix is proud to announce Nutanix Calm 3.0. This release includes a variety of new features and functionality. The full list of updates can be viewed here, but we wanted you to see a few highlights.
As you probably know, Nutanix Calm provides self-service VM management and monitoring. It also standardizes for developers and operators. Calm has been used by customers to manage IaaS virtual machines, as well business applications, in both public and private clouds, since its inception.
Runbooks
Calm Runbooks, a new addition in 3.0, helps to orchestrate automation tasks across infrastructures and applications in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Runbooks allows users to easily scale up tasks that are not covered by the Calm blueprints’ lifecycle management.
Runbooks can be manually triggered by end-users based on role-based access or hooked up via REST APIs for monitoring and service-desk tools to automate execution.
Example Use Case: Upgrades or Patch Management
It was difficult to fix a critical vulnerability across hundreds or thousands of database instances using blueprints. You would have to patch each application individually. Runbooks, or shared resources, simplify the life cycle management of hundreds of application instances. They can also be used to apply to multiple infrastructure components.
A Runbook is a collection of orchestration tasks defining “What to do” and “Where to do it.” We support shell/powershellcommands, variables, HTTP requests, delay, loops, and decision tasks, among other existing Calm constructs.
Runbooks, by their very nature, are not tied to any particular application grouping. Instead, they use an endpoint, such as an IP address, hostname, port number, or URL to run against. Runbook tasks are versatile enough to run on VMs and applications as well as categories. To get you started, we preseed a task list with over 200 ready to use tasks. Example of a Calm Runbook
Domain Specific Language (DSL) for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
For DevOps teams who want to provision Infrastructure as Code (IaC) or Applications as Code (AaC), Calm 3.0 now supports Python-based Domain Specific Language (DSL) for writing Calmblueprints-as-code. DSL provides all the Calm UI’s richness, but with the added benefit of being human-readable and able to handle complex applications.
You can define Python classes for entities such as Services, Packages, Substrates, Delivery, Deployments, Application Profiles, and Services. These are the building blocks of a blueprint. Users can define their attributes as class attributes and class methods can be used to define actions on these entities (procedural runsbooks). Calm DSL also supports native data formats like YAML or JSON, allowing for reuse in the larger context of a Calm blueprint’s application lifecycle.
Fig 2. Example of a Calm DSL
Customers can also use their existing versioning, CDI-CD and testing tools with DSL. The best part is that the DSL can be downloaded on NutanixGithub and is open-source. Find out more about Calm DSL installation, and see examples.
Xi as a Provider
Nutanix has always supported the freedom of choice for our customers, from hypervisors to hardware to clouds. Calm blueprints are used to deploy services and applications on popular public clouds such as AWS and Azure. Calm separates applications from their underlying infrastructure, and harmonizes operations across different cloud environments. Calm 3.0 has added Nutanix XiCloud to the list.
Fig 3. Fig 3.
To add Nutanix Xi to your cloud endpoint for application deployments, you must pair Xi Cloud with Prism Central.
Calm 3.0 also offers enhanced integration with ServiceNow via the Calm plugin. Customers can now automate the app lifecycle, including updates, patches, expansions and more, while also taking advantage of ServiceNow’s approval flow and audit capabilities. This press release contains more highlights.
The new features in Calm 3.0 are another important step in our automation and orchestration journey. You can view the complete list of features in this release here.
Send us an email at [email protected] if you are interested in learning more about Nutanix Calm. We’ll be happy answer any questions. IE can be reached at [email protected] To experience firsthand Calm’s elegant simplicity and powerful power, you can take a guided Test Drive.