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Use Nutanix Storage for a VMware external Cluster

  • February 1, 2019
  • 8 replies
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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.

Best answer by RichardsonPorto

I am sorry to hear that, but unfortunately these are unsupported configuration. I think you may have to talk with your Sales Reps and Nutanix account manager to clarify that.
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8 replies

RichardsonPorto
Nutanix Employee
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Hi,

Nutanix Volumes do not support present volume groups to vSphere ESXi hosts. For the list of supported client OS, please refer to the following links:

https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/solutions/details?targetId=BP-2049-Nutanix-Volumes:BP-2049-Nutanix-Volumes

https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v510:wc-volumes-c.html

Also, export a container using NFS to vSphere ESXi hosts that are not part of the Nutanix cluster is only supported during the migration.

Richardson Porto - LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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  • BSchaffer
  • Author
  • Adventurer
  • 9 replies
  • February 4, 2019
What option would be supported long term for this solution? We purchased Nutanix because we were assured this was allowed and supported by our Sales Reps.

This is what I envinsioned:

Nutanix Storage Configuration
· Create Storage Container - Vmware_NFS
· Create Volume Group - Vmware_NF_VG
o Point volume group to Vmware_NFS container
o Enable external clients on VG
o Add ESXi hosts IP's to Client IP's on VG
o Enable Load Balancing on VG
· Mount NFS datastore to ESXi Hosts
o Name: Nutanix NFS
o NFS Server: ***.***.***.***
o NFS Share: /Vmware_NFS_VG
o NFS Version: NFS-4
RichardsonPorto
Nutanix Employee
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  • RichardsonPortoNutanix Employee
  • Nutanix Employee
  • 112 replies
  • Answer
  • February 4, 2019
I am sorry to hear that, but unfortunately these are unsupported configuration. I think you may have to talk with your Sales Reps and Nutanix account manager to clarify that.
Richardson Porto - LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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  • BSchaffer
  • Author
  • Adventurer
  • 9 replies
  • February 4, 2019

I think i combined two solutions into one by accident, after reading regarding the Volume Groups my envisioning would just be to the container level for the NFS Datastore to ESXi. Knowing that this does work and if we choose to do it anyways long term, would that void any warranties or support agreements? We were assured by our sales reps and account manager that this was not only doable but supported with our Ultimate License.

Is there any configuration to allow our ESXi cluster to utilize Nutanix storage long term?

RichardsonPorto
Nutanix Employee
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The only supported configuration where a ESXi host can access a container on Nutanix cluster to use as long term NFS datastore is if the ESXi is part of the Nutanix cluster, but if the ESXi host that is not part of the same Nutanix cluster, it is not supported.

Keep in mind that we have what we call "Storage Only" nodes, which is a Nutanix node running AHV that we can add to a Nutanix cluster (with ESXi hosts). In that case the Nutanix node with AHV will only be used to provide the storage capacity to the Nutanix cluster (with ESXi nodes) and no UVMs will run on storage only node.

By the way, I will recommend you open a support ticket on Nutanix to validate your query and we will be happy to help you and even include the account manager in the conversation.

Richardson Porto - LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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  • BSchaffer
  • Author
  • Adventurer
  • 9 replies
  • February 5, 2019

Thank you for the information, it seems we have some issues to go over with our Sales Rep and Account Manager then. We do have a case open for this already.

Case Number: 00483485

RichardsonPorto
Nutanix Employee
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Hi @BSchaffer 

Thank you for sending me the case number and I checked the notes and as you can see, we do not support such configuration.I hope that you can find a viable solution and I think the better place to continue that discussion is on support ticket.

Richardson Porto - LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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  • johng
  • Voyager
  • 2 replies
  • September 23, 2019
Was there ever a resolution ? I am interested as I have a similar situation mapping Iscsi at a VMware ESXI LEVEL in a Nutanix cluster .. Getting any info is seeming challenging even after we have logged a call.
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