Question

Join nutanix to existing cluster on existing vcenter

  • 17 April 2020
  • 1 reply
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Hi teams,

 

i have question about migration process in nutanix and esx,

can i joining nutanix node in existing cluster on existing vcenter, processor in my existing node and my new nutanix node is same, and evc is enable, so can i joining nutanix and general server in same cluster?


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1 reply

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Hey @randyramandani 
I’m curious about the use case for this, versus setting it up as a separate cluster under the same vCenter. 
I think you might run into issues if you’re combining non-Nutanix and Nutanix nodes in the same cluster, primarily since they wouldn’t easily share the same storage.

From a vCenter perspective your non-Nutanix nodes would not see the Nutanix datastore as the same datastore even if you set up access to it. This is because on the Nutanix nodes the datastore is (and needs to be) accessed on the internal switch at 192.168.5.2, but this address isn’t accessible externally (and really can’t be, since every host has this IP address presented by the local CVM, thus it must be an isolated network within the host to avoid IP address conflict.) 

vCenter sees an NFS datastore as “the same datastore” across multiple hosts when the datastore name, NFS server IP address, and mount path are the same. For all the Nutanix nodes they are accessing 192.168.5.2:/container-name and this means you can migrate VMs between them without storage migration.  For any other ESXi host to access that same container it would need to use the <cluster virtual IP>:/container-name and vCenter would interpret this as a different datastore. This gets a bit messy in the vCenter inventory. 

If you’re looking at attaching the Nutanix nodes to your traditional datastores for ESXi, I’d have to advise against it. See the article “3rd party storage might cause issues on a Nutanix system” for more details.