Deployment Success

Hello, Where from i can download prism central ova (for vmware)? I used several links, but always i am redirected to support portal. But i have community account only... Regards Mindaugas

While we the topic of VirtIO drivers has already been touched in Sarab’s post on Installing Windows VM and VirtIO drivers, we would like to bring two more KBs to your attention.One is on AHV | How to install VirtIO drivers for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (KB-5666) and the other one is AHV | Nutanix VirtIO drivers for Windows Server 2019 (KB-6495).N.B! Nutanix does not release or maintain VirtIO drivers for Microsoft Windows Server 2008. However, you can still use stable VirtIO drivers available from Fedora project website.Nutanix recommends to use the Stable VirtIO-Win drivers.

In this post we will go through the steps required to shut down and power off all hosts in a VMware vSphere cluster on AOS to perform maintenance or other tasks such as physical hardware relocation. Note: Upgrade to the most recent version of NCC before proceeding with the following steps. Points to consider before attempting to shutdown a vSphere Cluster running atop AOS:Cluster health and Resiliency (Prism Dashboard) vCenter hosted on the same AOS cluster or outside? Any on-going / running protection domain replication? User Virtual Machines shutdown CVM – Controller virtual Machines shutdown Access to ESXi Hosts (SSH & ESXi Host Client)Steps to ShutdownSSH to a Nutanix Controller VM (user : nutanix) and run an NCC health check prior to the scheduled shutdown. If there are any errors or failures, check the relevant KB or contact Nutanix Support.ncc health_checks run_allShut down all the VMs in the Nutanix cluster. Verify if vCenter VM is running on the same Nutanix cluster that y

For a nutanix cluster to be able to install a newly released hypervisor, the information about it must be already in iso_whitelist file.  This file can be downloaded from Nutanix portal (search for ESXi 6.7 U3) and is required when installing/upgrading hyperviosr using prism one-click.ESXi 6.7 U3 (built number 14320388),  has been out as of Aug, 20, 2019. It is Nutanix policy to support newly release hypervisors within 90 days after they are release by the hyperviosr vendors.As of this writing (Nov 18, 2019), nutanix has released the iso file for this release and is supporting installation of this built on Nutanix clusters 5.10..6 and above.Below is a public KB regarding the support for this release:https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/kbs/details?targetId=kA00e000000CsgLCAS 

Maintaining a big infrastructure requires planning and knowing your architecture inside and out.Let's say, sometimes you need to check the upgrade history of different components in your cluster.Sometimes you want to know when you last upgraded AOS or Nutanix Files.The timestamp of the upgrade.Let's say you want to plan a future upgrade and creating a time-line and want to know when you upgraded the software last and at which version.We all need this information, either to maintain a proper record of our cluster infrastructure or to plan the future upgrade.So how can we achieve this?Give the following Knowledge base article a read to find out the upgrade history of different components in your cluster and plan your future upgrades accordingly.KB-1151 Want to know how upgrades work in Nutanix? Try going through the following Knowledge Base to understand how upgrades work in Nutanix architecture.KB-6945 Have a question regarding upgrade workflow? Drop a comment and let’s start a conversa

Could we get some more documentation on this command?Clone-NTNXVirtualMachineOne of the required parameters is -SpecListI would like some clarification on this parameter and how to use it. Is this an array of values? Am I linking to a csv or json file?An example would be nice.Using the UI, I currently clone a reference image to create vm’s and I would love to get a PS script to work to do the same. I can get it to work with the ACLI commands but PS is a bit more versatile and I believe I could get it to do more if I understood this command and specifically this parameter better.

Security is the backbone of any infrastructure, so it is always recommended to set a strong industry-standard password for different components in your environment.Let’s say you want to implement a strong security password policy and have a need to modify the CVM and IPMI password in your environment but confused from where to start.Let us break the components for you: Modifying the CVM PasswordLogin in to the CVM.Change the admin password using the commandadmin@cvm$ passwd After you have successfully changed the password, the new password is synchronized across all Controller VMs in the cluster so you only need to follow the steps on just one CVM. Want to know more about the Nutanix password policy guidelines and steps for the above procedure Modify the CVM password. Modifying the IPMI passwordLogin to the IPMI Web Interface Click Configuration -> Users -> Administrative UserClick Modify and modify the password by entering the new password. What if you don’t have access to IPMI

At the end of guest OS installation the VM is rebooted but it doesn't automatically boot to the vHDD. How can I set it to boot automatically from the disk with installed guest OS? By default, AHV uses CD-ROM as the first boot device for VMs, followed by hard disk, then NIC. Please follow steps described below to override this behavior and choose a specific boot device. Things to consider:CD-ROM or hard disk can be selected as boot device in Prism UI. Network adapter can only be configured as boot device via acli. Selecting NIC as boot device may be required to boot VM from PXE server. Power cycle is required to apply boot device change. Resetting or rebooting VM is not enough. If boot device not explicitly selected, then all VMs will try to boot from all CD-ROM devices. If all CD-ROMs are empty or do not contain bootable image, then VM will only try to boot from hard disk with lowest index. If VM is configured to boot from network and there is no PXE server available, VM will not try t

I am having an issue adding a share to a new AFS instance where it reports “iSCSI discovery of targets failed to iSCSI portal xxx.xxx.10.5. Ensure that the stargate external data services IP and the CVM IPs are reachable from FSVM.” I have confirmed the CVM IP’s and FSVM IP’s are all bound to the eth0 interface of there respective devices and are all in the same xxx.xxx.10.xxx network segment.  All devices can ping all IP’s in the range so at least basic comms are working. I am sure I am missing something obvious but not sure where to go from here.  Suggestions please!

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of November 10-16, 2019.KB 8349 - AHV | VM Goes Offline After Migration KB 8415 - Alert - A1132 - EntitiesSkippedDuringRestore KB 8512 - VM does not boot from Windows OS mounted as CD-ROM if VM already has OS installed on DISK Drives KB 8522 - LCM inventory failure "The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found" in a dark site LCM environment KB 8525 - Alert - A130202 - AtlasNetworkingHostMemoryReservationFailure KB 8526 - Alert - A130201 - AtlasNetworkingHostConfigError KB 8527 - Pre-check:test_vcenter_connectivity KB 8540 - Pre-Upgrade Check: test_version_check KB 8544 - Pre-Upgrade Check: test_co_nodes_present KB 8551 - DiscoveryOS: Cluster Expansion - Cannot add or discover nodes : IPMI console displays phoenix prompt KB 8553 - How to change TimeZone in Move VM KB 8559 - Alert - A1182 - ShellvDisksAboveThresholdNote: You may need to log in to the Support Portal to view some of these articles.

I just deployed a Witness VM (ESXi) for our first 2 node cluster and after setting the IP and reboot it gets the host name NTNX-<IP NUMBER>-A-CVM.Since it seems the witness VM is a kind of CVM I assume it wants to use the NTNX-<NAME>-CVM naming convention or it is OK to set the host name to whatever?Worked fine using  “sudo /usr/local/nutanix/cluster/bin/change_cvm_hostname <hostname>” to set the host name. 

For Files Analytics, are the ports required TCP or UDP?  I know that the ports to open are 7, 3000, 29092 but just wanted to be clear on tcp or udp. Thanks

Good Morning:We are in the process of deploying new NX-8235-G7 nodes that are connected to a pair of Cisco Nexus switch. Everything seems to be working well, with the exception of the switch occasionally receiving RX Pause frames from the servers. While this may not necessarily be a problem, I am doing my due dilligence.The switch ports the nodes are connected to are configured as follows:Connected as active/standby NICs Connected via 1 meter 10GE DAC cables 802.1Q trunk Speed/duplex auto-negotiation Flow control auto-negotiationThe nodes themselves are configured with the default network configuration that comes from the factory with the exception of anything that is necessary to support the use of ESXi and our network environment.Any suggestions or validations of how the switch ports should be configured? Thanks!

Nutanix offers a distributed data and control plane, so it’s fairly easy to start, stop and graceful shutdown a cluster. Even, in abnormal / dirty shutdowns, Nutanix cluster has powerful self-healing capabilities - as all data & meta-data is distributed across the cluster which significantly reduces the chances for data corruption or data-loss. However, as a Nutanix Cluster hosts business critical data and applications, it is important to ensure all services stop in a graceful manner and all data + meta-data is consistent. This allows the cluster to be restarted in a healthy - usable state later.There can be several reasons to gracefully shutdown a running Nutanix AHV & AOS Cluster. When shutting down a Nutanix Cluster, following order needs to be followed:User VMs Shutdown AOS Shutdown - Data services / Cluster components CVM Shutdown Hypervisor ShutdownIn this post, we will focus on the shutdown process for a Nutanix Cluster running with AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor).Points to C

A piece of good news to begin with: it is possible to perform a non-disruptive memory upgrade on one node at a time.Start with a little bit of prep work. Check cluster status. Download and install the latest version of NCC (Nutanix Cluster Checker) and execute all health checks. Resolve any issue found. Identify the node you are performing the hardware maintenance on by turning on the chassis identifier lights on the front and back of the node that you will remove using one of the following options. The lights turn on for four minutes unless you change the value. Now you can migrate VMs of the node. Shut down CVM and the host. Replace or add DIMMs.For detailed outline of the process please refer to KB-1623 HW: Upgrading Physical Memory

Hi Team, Please let me know if you can share the Detailed Migration plan from ESXi to AHV. Please share the document or the link. Regards.

Hi All I updated ahv for the prism central and now it does not show the cluster licenses - how do I correct this? ThanksEric

hello guys, I am new in Nutanix I want to learn Nutanix , take exam and I need virtual environment for testing is there anyone can help me.

Let’s say you are managing an Infrastructure and have a range of networks defined in your environment and now you have to delete a few.You go to Prism, try deleting the network but get a generic error.So what’s going wrong here?Why can’t you delete a network?Well, one possibility is that if there are NIC connected to the network, it won’t let you delete the network, kind of like a guard-rail.So what can you do to mitigate it?Try giving the following KB a read KB-8234 Want to know more about AHV Networking? AHV Networking Best Practices  Still confused about AHV Networking?Drop a comment and let’s start a discussion. 

Hello,My client has this alert "Active Directory Domain Contoller(s) or DNS servers configured on the UVMs in the cluster" due the fact that he moved his domain controller on the nutanix cluster. His environment is 100% Hyper-V, and he is totally aware that SMB3 share of the nutanix cluster, requires authentication from the domain. In order to avoid that my client created ISCSI volumes and presented them to his Hyper-V environment, on which he moved his domain controller, trying to avoid that type of failure if everything goes down after a power failure and when everything comes up, the domain controller to be able to boot prior of the authentication.Please let us know what's the best approach for this matter and what's your recommendation for this kind of setup, especially when all the domain controllers are virtualized.Regards,Adrian

Every production infrastructure knows the importance of load balancing the network traffic to increase efficiency.Let’s say you have multiple links in your environment and want to use the potential of all the links or want to have a backup configuration in case a link fails, load balancing will come to your rescue.Today we will talk about two load-balancing modesActive-Backup  Balance-slbTo know more about the load balancing configuration and AHV networking in detail, give the following document a read AHV Networking Best Practices Guide So how to make a decision regarding active-backup and balance slb?This comparison might help youAdvantages of Bond Mode for the active-backupDefault bond mode is active-backup. One interface in the bond carries traffic and all the other interfaces in the bond are used only when the active link fails.  Active-backup is the simplest bond mode that easily allows connections to multiple upstream switches without any additional switch configuration. Disadva

LACP configuration is always a tricky business for every administrator and network engineer and enabling and verifying the configuration of LACP on NX Nodes should not send chills down your spine.First, let’s understand why we need LACP What are the advantages of LACP? A single user VM with multiple TCP streams could use up to 20 Gbps of bandwidth in an AHV node with two 10 GB adapters. A traffic-hashing algorithm such as balance-TCP can split traffic between multiple links in an active-active fashion. Because the uplinks appear as a single L2 link, the algorithm can balance the traffic among bond members without any regard for switch MAC address tables. With LACP, multiple links to separate physical switches appear as a single layer-2 link.Note: To use multiple upstream switches, you must configure MLAG or vPC on the physical switch  Points to seriously consider before jumping towards configuring LACP Read the following a guide to understand AHV Networking better            AHV Networ

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of November 3-9, 2019.KB 7563 - NCC Health Check: ofpfmfc_table_full_check KB 8279 - Alert - A130116 - Automatic Promote Metro Availability KB 8326 - AHV | How to convert VM running Windows 10/2016/2019 from BIOS to UEFI KB 8413 - Alert-A1087-Metadata Volume Snapshot Persistent Failure KB 8451 - Move Migration Plan fails due to duplicate VMUuid KB 8477 - NCC Health Check: remote_site_in_same_datacenter_check KB 8485 - Alert - A130088 - Failed To Snapshot Entities KB 8487 - Alert - A130197 - VmRestorationFailed KB 8492 - Nutanix Files - While trying to update permission using Windows Explorer "Enable inheritance" is not working KB 8495 - Missing vnics after AHV Protection Domain Failover. "Failed to find a network: Unknown network" error KB 8504 - Pre-upgrade check: test_vlan_detection KB 8506 - Era - Unable to register Cluster with due to non-UTC timezone on Era Server VM KB 8520 - Alert - A130199 - VM Migration Failed KB 8521

Suppose, it is discovered that a Nutanix cluster is configured with an incorrect time zone. While like all good things in life this requires a little planning, fear not – this can be helped!First things first, what to expect:Timestamps of Nutanix logs events will remain in the incorrect time zone until cluster services are restarted or the CMVs are rebooted. Cluster services restart on a cluster with active workload may impact availability of the workload. Changing the timezone for PE and PC is the same procedure, is not disruptive, but it requires a reboot of CVMs. Reboot can be performed on one CVM at a time. For a seamless experience it is recommended to evacuate VMs from the node prior to CVM reboot. Verify cluster Data Resiliency health prior to restart of cluster services or CVMs. Ensure Data Resiliency comes back healthy prior to proceeding with another CVM reboot. It is necessary to remove DR schedules prior to the change. Schedules can be re-created post change. Command for ch

AOS is in 5.10.8, We need to install NGT on Windows Server 2016 with only VSS feature enabled and not SSR. However, after installation, even though the SSR feature is not enabled, there is the SSR icon on the desktop. It can be opened and bring us to “http://localhost:5000”. I can understand that the feature is not active but I would like to avoid having it displayed on the desktop. How to avoid to have this on the desktop ? (I’m looking for another way than deleting the icon manually after NGT installation). What about this local web server ? Could it be stopped ?