AHV Virtualization

Hi I’m trying to find out if anyone has tried or is running SAS Grid on Nutanix? We have a SAS consultant working with us but they have no experience of running SAS on a Nutanix cluster. Any information would be gratefully received 😃

We are in the process of setting up a new fileserver using AHV and Windows 2019. Our current physical server has one larger 2TB drive letter for all file storage with 3-4 various shares. My question is would it make any difference to keep this same setup with AHV, 2TB drive attached to the VM for storage for files, or would it be better to have 2-3 smaller attached storage drives?

Nutanix offers compatibility with all major hypervisors (Hyper-V, ESXi, XEN) to be able to host virtual machines on it and leverage the benefits of a truly distributed scale out storage fabric.Nutanix qualifies all releases of 3rd Party hypervisors in order to ensure smooth operations for customers using the respective hypervisors.From the Nutanix Support FAQs:For hypervisor releases:For Major/Minor hypervisor releases (eg ESXi 6.5, Windows Server 2016 Build 14393) the goal is to qualify within 90 days of the software GA release date. Nutanix may qualify the latest hypervisor Major/Minor release in conjunction with the latest (or upcoming) AOS release first. Nutanix advises customers to wait until any Major/Minor release is qualified by Nutanix prior to deployment.Please make sure to visit the following link in

 Physical Windows Server to Virtual conversion (P2V for AHV) Depending on the number of physical servers in your environment, you might want to convert them tovirtual servers and migrate over to Nutanix AHV.  Nutanix Image Service supports VHD, VMDK, vDISK, IMG, qcow formats for disk images. Summary:1) Prepare the Physical Windows Server - Install Virtio Drivers from:    Nutanix Portal > Downloads >  Tools & Firmware > Virtio2) Download Disk2VHD from Microsoft site:(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd)3) Convert the Disk or Disks (Make sure to select "bootable" for the appropriate disk)4) Upload the Converted Disk to Nutanix Cluster via Image service Uploading VHD to the Cluster via Image Service:1) You can upload via the browser or2) Image service also allo

Running virtual machines inside another virtual machine (also known as Nested Virtualization) is not presently supported in Nutanix AHV.  This is documented in the KB titled “Configuring VM to run nested hypervisor”

I have been trying to create a Windows Server VM. whenever I create the VM I can't see a drive where I can install the windows server. has anyone else experienced this?

We have a dozen or so VMs/appliances that do not support AHV and thus cannot be migrated over to our new AHV cluster that runs 95% of our servers. We would like to expose a container/Volume Group from Nutanix to the VMware hosts as NFS datastores to build these VMs/Appliances on. Our goal is to then replicate that Container/Volume Group to our DR Nutanix cluster and then connect our DR VMware cluster for the same VMs/Appliances to then use as well incase of failover. We have gotten conflicting information from all parties and wanted to know if anyone was already doing this and what your results are? These VMs/Appliances would have fairly high IO.

Hi, I'm currently installing ubuntu on a VM. I notice the installation process is extremely slow. The downloading of files is going fast, but the actual installing isn't. Is this common when installing ubuntu on a nutanix VM? I tried different version, but they are all very slow. Thanks!

I am migrating from ESX 6.0 to AHV 5.1.2I have successfully mounted the container from VMware and migrated a disk. When trying to start the image from the vmdk file in Prism Console than I get the following error: Booting from Hard Disk... in the boot dos screen. Regards, Onder Avcu

Hi, When using AHV, is there a way to set the black (pre-boot) screen in the VM duration longer. I was trying to press the F8 key, to get into directory restore mode/safe mode, but the black (pre-boot) screen raced by... Thanks G

Hi all, I am new to Nutanix and am looking for best practices around swap space on Nutanix AHV VMs. Having SSD drives it is understood swap (writes) will decrease hardware life. Can swap be allocated only to HDD drives only and/or is it best to use a low swappiness value to lower the amount of swaps? Thanks,

@joshodgers has posted an interesting blog on his site on a new AHV feature -- Compute Only nodes. The concept of Compute Only node will enable infra teams to give their application and DB admin counterparts more CPU/Memory per node. Nutanix clusters can now be made up of compute only and storage only nodes minimizing if not eliminating any licensing concerns they had in the past for workloads like Oracle, SQL Server etc. Best practices for setting high performance databases will be coming soon. Reply back in this thread to let our Database SMEs know if you have specific questions you'd like them to address in their best practices. Excerpts from his blog -- http://www.joshodgers.com/2019/02/20/solving-oracle-sql-licensing-challenges-with-nutanix/ >> Compute only nodes compliment the traditional HCI nodes (Compute+Storage) as well as our unique

Hello everybody, let's assume we have one Nutanix block with 3 nodes. In each node we only have 1 CPU socket with 10 Cores. A VM can only run on one node. So, in this case, wouldn't it make more sense to let a VM with 4 CPUs run on 1 VCPU and 4 Cores, instead of 4 VCPUs with 1 core, as each node has only 1 CPU socket? Or does Nutanix always recommend to use only 1 Core per VCPU not matter how much CPU sockets are available in a node? Best regards, Didi7

So how much do you run your cluster memory usage? Currently we are at 50% usage but still adding VM's. My boss wants to run this to 100% and doesn't understand why I keep telling him this is a bad idea. I am trying to keep it at 2/3 to 3/4 usage of capacity. Am I right or wrong on this? I am doing a bad job of explaining this to my boss who doesn't seem to believe me so do you guys have any resources that can help me explain this? Right now we are running application servers and no core functions but we are looking to migrate our DHCP servers. We have 1.1 TB of memory capacity running at 51% usage. CPU usage is not a problem running at about 12%. Storage is also fine. We are running 6x Dell 740XC if that helps.

Has anyone successfully been able to get HyperV(or ESXi) nested under AHV? I do see nested KVM VM's are supported but no mention of anything else. Only reason for exploring this is to get Cisco Umbrella VA's working under AHV so i don't have to re-purpose an old server to run HyperV/ESXi.

Hi I'm looking to created clustered files servers using Windows Server Failover Clustering - VMs will be in-guest, i'm using AHV. My understanding that presenting the Nutanix storage via iSCSI to WSFC servers is supported however i'm confused about how to setup the networking and the Nutanix ABS documentation doesn't make this clear. I'm used to creating a separate storage network / VLAN for all storage traffic however the iSCSI target IP address is recommended to be on the same network as the CVMs / all of the Nutanix infrastructure. So the question is do i create a separate network for storage and have it route to the iSCSI target IP address, or have the iSCSI initiators on the same network as the iSCSI target / data services IP? It wouldn't seem logical to mix the CVM traffic with storage traffic, however also not great to have to route storage traffic. Thanks Adam

We attempted to migrate our ODNS as well as setup new VM's in AHV by extracting the vmdk's but each time we get the below screen on boot. Has anyone else successfully got the ODNS VA to run in AHV? I've tried editing the vm's xml file to change the video type and vram but no luck as of yet:

Hi guys, we're planning to move/migrate my MS SQL workload from physical standalone host to a new Nutanix cluster. We already engaged with local Nutanix representative for this. However, we encountered a few hurdles in terms of performance during and we can't be sure whether we have the right sizing for our performance requirement. Current Production Physical host:- Processor: Intel Xeon E5-2690v3 @ 2.6GHz (single socket, 12C 24T) RAM: 96GB (However only 64GB usable for the MS SQL 2008R2 DB) Disks: Database MDF resides in a SSD RAID 5 diskgroup. (6 disks), OS and LDF etc resides in other disk groups, SAS disks 10K, 15K RAID 10, RAID 1 etc. Test Unit ( 3 nodes):- Processor: Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 @ 2.2 GHz (dual socket, 24C 48T) per node RAM: 512GB per node Disks: 6 x 1.6TB Intel S3610 SATA (All Flash) Hypervisor: AHV 5.9.2.4 Network: 10GbE RJ45 SQL Test VM created in Nutanix test

Keep getting an error while trying to deploy Server 2016 on AHV using SCCM. Has anything changed recently? I used VirtIO v.1.1.4. Do you have to have NGT in sccm also?

I'm trying to deploy FortiAuthenticator v5.5 VM but running into issues on AHV. I've tried creating the VM using the files from Fortinet but no instructions when using AHV per this guide: https://s3.amazonaws.com/fortinetweb/docs.fortinet.com/v2/attachments/5795878a-1f78-11e9-b6f6-f8bc1258b856/fac-vm-install-guide-43.pdf The files I've used are the following: KVM - fackvm.qcow2, datadrive.qcow2 Vmware - fac.vmdk, da

Anyone successfully running Fortinet FortiSandbox VMs on AHV in their environment. The VM itself is able to deploy, but it fails to create its on VMs to test executables on.

Can we Testing or Demo of Flow on Community Edition

Are there any VMware 6.7 "gotchas" that I need to worry about before upgrading? We're on 5.10.2 running on Dell XC series for a little context. Thanks!

I’m planning to move a Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Edition VM from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to AHV on AOS 5.10.2 today. I have created a similar (but not cloned) test VM in the environment and migrated it yesterday with no issues. UEFI worked fine. Today in my final prep I’m seeing that in newer versions of the Nutanix documentation (AOS 5+) that this migration and VM type (AHV with UEFI) is listed as Limited Support and “Not recommended for Production”. Is this a showstopper? Are other customers moving important production Gen 2 UEFI Hyper-V VMs to AHV? Scenario Support Level Generation 2 VM (UEFI) migrated from Hyper-V to AHV Limited support. For information about configuring UEFI for VMs migrated from Hyper-V, see

Hello all I'm trying to establish the optimal disk layout for a VMware MS SQL 2016 2 node guest failover cluster that will have a single SQL instance hosting multiple small to medium sized databases. Unfortunately we don't really have the funds for licensing to do the recommended approach of creating lot of small VMs to host these databases, so we need to consolidate where possible. I've been reading though the Nutanix SQL 2016 best practice guide and it's raised a few questions. I've decided to allocate multiple vdisks specifically for database files, so I'd have a few database files to each vdisk instead of one vdisk with all the database files on it. I'm assuming this approach might be better due to each vdisk having a 6GB Oplog allocation and so more vdisks would prevent a single oplog from quickly over filling? Is there any there real a benefit here to having more vdisks to spread the databases