Now that remote work holds center stage, seamless and distributed enterprise IT operations (ITOps) has never been more important. Nutanix launched Foundation Central in May 2020 as part of its ongoing goal to make infrastructure invisible.

Foundation Central extends the deployment services already available from Foundation and makes zero-touch centralized deployments scalable and easy. Once equipment has been racked and cabled, organizations do not require any IT specialists at the datacenter or remote IT site to install or rebuild any of the IT infrastructure software.

Nutanix recently launched further enhancements to Foundation Central with version 1.1.

We have made several UI improvements to provide increased information about the nodes, including ones being discovered. The image below shows nodes being discovered and the ones that are available for cluster deployment.

The following image below shows how nodes can be grouped by categories such as serial number and host type.

A customizable display enables IT administrators to choose the columns to view and resize columns as needed.

The updated Deployment History tab provides up-to-date cluster and node status information, allowing you to see status and progress at all times. You can also now archive old entries and download them for viewing later.

Foundation Central also supports VLAN tagging, which was added to CVM Foundation earlier this year. This enables users to enter VLAN tags as an input during cluster creation.

What if you missed something and need to make a change after the imaging process is underway? Fear not, FC 1.1 allows you to abort the cluster creation request as long as it hasn’t been picked up by the remote nodes.

Another cool feature that we've added is the ability to generate an ISO with a URL that points to a JSON that contains Foundation Central settings.

{
    "fc_metadata": {
      "fc_ip": "<fc_ip>",
      "api_key": "<api_key>"
    },
    "fc_settings": {
      "heartbeat_interval_mins": 10,
      "intent_poll_interval_mins": 15,
      "register_interval_mins": 10
    }
  }
The fc_settings field is optional.

Phoenix is the ISO-based installer used to perform installation and configuration tasks on a node. Once booted via either IPMI or PXE, the node uses either a static IP or a DHCP IP address (determined by the input to the generate_iso command) to download the FC settings and register the node with FC. 

This feature is platform agnostic and works seamlessly with Nutanix and OEM platforms. See for yourself with this Phoenix ISO Generation Demo.

Last, but not least, Foundation Central can be upgraded, like most other Nutanix software, via Life Cycle Manager (LCM). This ensures an easy, single method to keep all Nutanix infrastructure software up-to-date.

For further information on Foundation Central or Nutanix infrastructure deployment options, contact your local Nutanix Systems Engineer, or check the Foundation Central Guide on the Nutanix Support Portal here.

Please reach out with any feedback or suggestions. In the meantime, we’ll continue making deployments easy and remote work simpler.

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