Nutanix

Maximum Performance from Acropolis Hypervisor and Open vSwitch describes the network architecture within a Nutanix converged infrastructure appliance - see diagram above. This article will explore how the Host sFlow agent can be deployed to enable sFlow instrumentation in the Open vSwitch (OVS)  and deliver streaming network and system telemetry from nodes in a Nutanix cluster.

This article is based on a single hardware node running Nutanix Community Edition (CE), built following the instruction in Part I: How to setup a three-node NUC Nutanix CE cluster. If you don't have hardware readily available, the article, 6 Nested Virtualization Resources To Get You Started With Community Edition, describes how to run Nutanix CE as a virtual machine.

The sFlow standard is widely supported by network equipment vendors, which combined with sFlow from each Nutanix appliance, delivers end to end visibility in the Nutanix cluster. The following screen captures from the free sFlowTrend tool are representative examples of the data available from the Nutanix appliance.

The Network > Top N chart displays the top flows traversing OVS. In this case an HTTP connection is responsible for most of the traffic. Inter-VM and external traffic flows traverse OVS and are efficiently monitored by the embedded sFlow instrumentation.

The Hosts > CPU utilization chart shows an increase in CPU utilization due to the increased traffic.

The Hosts > Disk IO shows the Write operations associated with connection.

Installing Host sFlow agent on Nutanix appliance

The following steps install Host sFlow on a Nutanix device:

First log into the Nutanix host as root.

Update June 19, 2019: When you log in as root you will see a warning that installing software on the hypervisor is not supported. See comment below.

Next, find the latest version of the Centos 7 RPM on sFlow.net and use the following commands to download and install the software:

wget https://github.com/sflow/host-sflow/releases/download/v2.0.8-1/hsflowd-centos7-2.0.8-1.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh hsflowd-centos7-2.0.8-1.x86_64.rpm
rm hsflowd-centos7-2.0.8-1.x86_64.rpm

Edit the /etc/hsflowd.conf file to direct sFlow telemetry to collector 10.0.0.50, enable KVM monitoring (virtual machine stats), and push sFlow configuration to OVS (network stats):

sflow {
  ...
  # collectors:
  collector { ip=10.0.0.50 udpport=6343 }
  ...
  # Open vSwitch sFlow configuration:
  ovs { }
  # KVM (libvirt) hypervisor and VM monitoring:
  kvm { }
  ...
}

Now start the Host sFlow daemon:

systemctl enable hsflowd.service
systemctl start hsflowd.service

Data will immediately start to appear in sFlowTrend.