Deployment Success

I have a 3 node AHV cluster that uses 2x200GB SSD + 2x6GB HDD disks for each node. Would it be possible to add nodes to this cluster that uses 2x480GB SSD + 2x6GB HDD disks?Option is to first upgrade the 200GB SSD disks to 480GB to align all nodes to the same hardware. Maybe there is some gain in that?

Hello All, I have three NUTNANIX Cluster with below AOS versions. Are any one below is End of life ? AOS                  (updated to version 5.15.2LTS) AOS                  (updated to version 5.10.11.1.LTS) AOS                  (updated to version 5.10.11.1.LTS)

Storage ContainersA storage container is a subset of available storage within a storage pool (see Creating a Storage Container). Storage containers are created within a storage pool to hold virtual disks (vDisks) used by virtual machines.CompressionYou can enable compression on a storage container. Compression can save physical storage space and improve I/O bandwidth and memory usage—which may have a positive impact on overall system performance.Inline compression will compress sequential streams of data or large I/O sizes (>64K) when written to the Extent Store (SSD + HDD).Offline compression will initially write the data as normal (in an un-compressed state) and then leverage the Curator framework to compress the data cluster wide. Below diagram explains how inline compression interacts with the DSF write I/O path:DeduplicationDeduplication reduces space usage by consolidating duplicate data blocks on Nutanix storage. You can enable either cache deduplication only or both cache an

Executive SummaryThis document makes recommendations for designing, optimizing, and scaling Microsoft SQL Server deployments on the Nutanix enterprise cloud. Historically, it has been a challenge to virtualize SQL Server because of the high cost of traditional virtualization stacks and the impact that a SAN-based architecture can have on performance. Businesses and their IT departments have constantly fought to balance cost, operational simplicity, and consistent predictable performance.Nutanix removes many of these challenges and makes virtualizing a business-critical application such as SQL Server much easier. The Nutanix distributed storage fabric is a software-defined solution that provides all the features one typically expects in an enterprise SAN, without a SAN’s physical limitations and bottlenecks. SQL Server particularly benefits from the following storage features: Localized I/O and the use of flash for index and key database files to lower operation latency. A highly dist

Below are the top knowledge base articles for the month of October 2020.KB 7503 - NX Hardware [Memory] – G6, G7 platforms - DIMM Error handling and replacement policy KB 4116 - NX Hardware [Memory] – Alert - A1187, A1188 - ECCErrorsLast1Day, ECCErrorsLast10Days KB 1540 - What to do when /home partition or /home/nutanix directory on a Controller VM is full KB 4141 - Alert - A1046 - PowerSupplyDown KB 4158 - Alert - A1104 - PhysicalDiskBad KB 4409 - LCM: (LifeCycle Manager) Troubleshooting Guide KB 1113 - HDD/SSD Troubleshooting KB 6970 - PE-PC Connection Failure alerts KB 2090 - AHV | Host Networking KB 4519 - NCC Health Check: check_ntp KB 2473 - NCC Health Check: cvm_memory_usage_check KB 4272 - Alert - A6516 - Average CPU load on Controller VM is critically high KB 6945 - How Upgrades Work at Nutanix KB 7386 - NCC Health Check: power_supply_check KB 1863 - NCC Health Check: sufficient_disk_space_check KB 3523 - How to create a Phoenix ISO or AHV ISO from a CVM or Foundation VM KB 463

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of October 25-31, 2020.KB 10197 - Alert ID - A110260 - Remote replication of the protection domain snapshot is lagging KB 10201 - Network Validation Failing During Network Segmentation Setup KB 10211 - Shutdown token cannot be acquired on single-node Nutanix clusters KB 10217 - AHV hosts in cluster running AOS 5.18 or newer may become non-schedulable if bridge configuration across cluster nodes is not consistent KB 10218 - Imaging new nodes via Foundation may time out on nodes with many NICsNote: You may need to log in to the Support Portal to view some of these articles.

Nutanix platforms use a baseboard management controller (BMC) and basic input/output system (BIOS) to control the motherboard.The Nutanix BIOS contains optimized power management settings by default. Please do not change Power Management Configuration settings in the BIOS. Nutanix does not support custom power management configurations, and changing the power management settings in the BIOS can cause unpredictable behavior.Procedures updating the BMC and BIOS:1. Upgrade through LCM2. Manual UpgradeBMC: Nutanix BMC Manual Upgrade GuideBIOS: Nutanix BIOS Manual Upgrade GuideNote: Always upgrade BMC before BIOSRelease Notes: G6 And G7 Platforms

Looking on OS supported to migrate with Nutanix Move v3.6.0 I see CentOS 8.2 as supported but when I add a CentOS 8.2.2004 VM to be migrated from ESXi 6.7u2 to AHV 20170830.434 I get this warning:This VM is not on the AHV supported OS list. To proceed with migrating this VM, please be sure to bypass guest operations and take care of installing AHV device drivers separately. This VM has a guest OS which is not supported on ESXi. Please remove the vm from the migration plan if migrating to ESXi.Is this expected?

Hi,Unbale to show “VM clone” option in PC 2020.9.01 while creating the customer roles in PC but same option is vaibale on super admin & project admin roles.

Many users are unaware that network traffic can be segmented (or separated) within a Nutanix cluster for various functions or purposes. For example, backplane traffic can be separated from Management-Plane Traffic so as to allow for even greater available bandwidth for the backplane traffic. Further, as another example, DMZ related traffic could be isolated to specific host uplinks. The four primary means of network segmentation are the following:Isolating Backplane Traffic by using VLANs (Logical Segmentation) Isolating Backplane Traffic Physically (Physical Segmentation) Isolating Service-Specific Traffic Isolating Stargate-to-Stargate traffic over RDMATo note, certain means of segmentation are limited to certain hypervisor versions. For example, the segmentation of management and backplane traffic is supported across the AHV, ESX and Hyper-V (Hyper-V offering logical segmentation only) hypervisors, while service-specific segmentation is supported only by the AHV and ESX hypervisors.

Nutanix VirtIO includes device drivers specifically used by Windows VMs hosted in the Nutanix environment to enhance their stability and performance. This concept is very similar to VMware Tools for ESXi environments.The VirtIO bundles various drivers including:Balloon Driver Ethernet Adapter RNG Device SCSI pass-through controller Serial Driver SCSI ControllerThe VirtIO package is found on the Support Portal under AHV (please select “VirtIO” from the corresponding drop-down menu).To note, the device driver versions contained within the various available Nutanix VirtIO packages may be the same if there have been no updates for the drivers between the package releases. To correlate the driver versions associated with each VirtIO package release, please reference KB 5491 in the Support Portal.Further to note, beginning with VirtIO package release version 1.1.6 all driver versions match the VirtIO package version.

AHV hosts in cluster running AOS 5.18 or newer may become non-schedulable if bridge configuration across cluster nodes is not consistent. What is a non-schedulable node?A non-schedulable node is used to increase data storage on your Nutanix cluster and does not run any guest VMs on that node.To check if this situation exists on your cluster and to fix the issue, check KB-10217. 

Hi teams, can i create 3 node cluster with 2 different FC SFP+ switch 10gb because my port is limited? between switch i using FC SFP+ 10gb link. i think the first impact is latency between node, please give me suggestion using this topology  

Nutanix AHV uses Open vSwitch(OVS) to connect to the CVM, the hypervisor and the user VMs to each other and to the physical network on each node. The CVM manages the OVS inside the AHV host. Since the OVS is an open source software switch that behaves like a layer-2 learning switch, it maintains a MAC address table. Each AHV server maintains an OVS instance, managed as a single logical switch through Prism. Bonds:When multiple uplinks are used they are added to a bond acting as a single logical interface, to which the bridge is connected. Open vSwitch (OVS) does not support bonds with single uplink and as workaround we directly connect bridge to single uplink.WARNING:Avoid the use of a single uplink configuration and do not attempt to modify a single uplink configuration using manage_ovs if the version of AOS is 5.10.x prior to 5.10.4. Warning:Updating uplinks can cause short network disconnect. It is strongly recommended performing network changes on a single node at the time after ma

Hi there.  I’m trying to plan an upgrade on our nutanix clusters from VMWare 6.5 to either 6.7 or 7.0 and I’m having a bit of a struggle figuring out the compatibility of the different VMWare versions along with our Nutanix clusters. We have two Nutanix clusters, our main site is a 7-node cluster with 5 Gen5 nodes and 2 Gen7 nodes.  Our remote data center is a 6 node cluster with all Gen 6 hardware.Our main site is running AOS 5.10.5 LTS and our remote datacenter was just recently upgraded to 5.15.2 LTS in preparation for the vmware upgrade.  I plan on upgrading our main site to the same AOS version of 5.15.2 LTS.Where I have an issue is that when running the VMWare Assessment Tool (VSAT) I keep seeing notifications on each cluster that certain nodes may not be compatible with VMWare 6.7 or 7.0 because of various devices that “May not be supported” yet say things like “is certified but current driver (ixgbe) is not supported”.  In some cases the same exact nodes in the same cluster wit

Create3 new hard drive in PVS. Trying to boot via PVS and system boots directly to hard drive. Doesn’t use PVS even though the BDM iso points to PVS.  Anyone have any ideas.  Using Citrix LTSR 1912 ThanksDave 

Manual license selection allows the customer to select specific licenses available in the customer account and apply the selected licenses to the cluster. This feature can be used when: Mixing license types (e.g., Life-of-Device and Capacity Based Licensing) in a single cluster Selecting term licenses with specific expiration dates Selecting licenses tagged for specific use cases (e.g., owned by a particular organization) Manual license selection is available as an option to license products on Prism Element and Prism Central.  Where is the Manual License selection option?You see it on the portal’s ‘Manage licenses’ page displayed after .csf file from Prism (PC or PE appropriately) is uploaded. When ‘Select License’  is selected on each card, The pop-up has a ‘manually manage licenses’ option.How to access ‘manually manage licenses’ option on licensing workflow on portal:In the support portal navigate to Products--->Licenses--->manage licenses Manage licenses page: Here ‘Choo

Hello All,I have recently deployed Prism Central and I am trying to give team members access via their AD accounts. I have went through the roles and discovered I cannot add new members to the predefined roles; however, if I duplicate the roles I can add AD users and groups to the new roles. This works for me however when I duplicate a role such as the “Super Admin” role I am warned that not all permissions are going to apply to the new role and I would need to create the new role via CLI to get these permissions. Ok fine that makes some sense. But where is the documentation on how to do that? Can someone point me to the documentation to perform these role creation tasks via CLI?Thanks, Scott 

To troubleshoot LCM issues related to DELL we need to go through PTAgent logs. They are located in following directions depending on version dellaum.logDell specific log to track firmware. These logs are located on the host. AHV Host:/var/log/dell/dellaum.logESXi Host:/scratch/log/dell/dellaum.log PowerTools.logDell's specific log to track interaction with the Dell Update Manager. The logs are located on the host. AHV Host:/var/log/dell/PowerTools.logESXi Host:/scratch/log/dell.PowerTools.log PTAgent.config Dell PTAgent configuration. Logs locations differ between the hypervisors.AHV:PTA 1.7.x:/opt/dell/DellPTAgent/bin/PTAgent.configPTA 1.8:/opt/dell/DellPTAgent/cfg/PTAgent.configESX:Pre-PTA 1.7-4.x:/scratch/dell/DellPTAgent/bin/PTAgent.configPTA 1.7.4+:/scratch/dell/config/PTAgent.config For details please refer following article:DELL_logs_location

Hi all,Running AOS 5.10.5, i have changed my cluster from RF2 to RF3, including my main container and the “SelfServiceContainer”,however a week after the change I’m still seeing this error regarding extent groups,I believe that this is due to NutanixManagementShare still being RF2 (with no ability to change it, since its a systemmanaged container), or is there some other reason?

Hi ! Everyone,Does anyone know that Nutanix G7 Model has two built-in M.2 SSDs,is it possible to do Raid 1?How to do it? Thanks

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of October 18-24, 2020.KB 10119 - Alert ID - A130114 - WitnessNotConfigured KB 10120 - Alert ID - A1163 - Volume Group Action Error KB 10134 - File Analytics deployment fails with error: "Cannot connect to File Analytics VM from Prism. Please verify that network details for the VM are correct and the IP is reachable from Prism" KB 10158 - NGT installation fails with the following error message: The system cannot find the file specified. cmd.exe /c net start "Nutanix Self Service Restore Gateway" KB 10166 - Language setting cannot be changed in Prism if logged in as Domain Administrator KB 10179 - Create Image task failed uploading file from URL using FTP protocolNote: You may need to log in to the Support Portal to view some of these articles.

Nutanix provides a suite of utilities for cluster maintenance, including tools and scripts that help you use CVM and Prism resources more efficiently.Latest Version of Cluster Maintenance Utilities is CMU 2.0.3Procedural Notes:Update CMU with the Life Cycle Manager, starting with LCM version 2.3.4. Nutanix supports CMU with AOS 5.10 and later, and with both Prism Central and Prism Element.New Features:Beginning of update Support for CMU Scavenger tool for Cluster Cleanup (Scavenger is not a cluster-level service. It operates per VM)CMU 2.0.3 Release Notes

In VMware vCenter, when a new cluster created, the default  HA configuration is disabled: When opening the HA configuration for this cluster (Select cluster in inventory -> "Configure" tab -> vSphere Availability section -> "Edit" button for vSphere HA) we can see that HA is disabled and the response for "Datastore with PDL" and "Datastore with APD" is pre-defined as "Power off and restart VMs".  While this new cluster is still empty, if vShere HA is turned on from this configuration window, it unlocksconfiguration sections for PDL/APD response: If the response under "Datastore with APD" was not changed to "Disabled" before adding host(s) to the cluster then, later when freshly imaged ESXi host(s) (with Misc.APDhandlingEnable = 0 set by foundation process) are added to cluster, the APD response configuration section is locked and cannot be changed to "Disabled" according our recommendations for standalone clusters. As a result, attempting to enable HA on this cluster fails wit

Nutanix presents us with many management interfaces like HTML5(Prism), REST API, acli and ncli for managing and troubleshooting and maintaining work infrastructure.  We will look into how to access the Nutanix Command line Interface and what the capabilities and purpose of acli and ncli command-lets areaCLI: Acropolis Command Line Interface  Utility to create, modify and manage VMs in AHV. Provides extra abilities(commands) to manage AHV host networking, manual snapshot etc Cannot manage Nutanix Cluster and so we have ncli nCLI:  Nutanix Command Line Interface Utility to manage the entire Nutanix cluster operations. Ncli is more extensive and complex command set To access the CLI, You can install it on your local machine Check out how to install ncli on your local machine here. From any Controller VM SSH to any CVM as a nutanix user and type ncli and hit return to enter the ncli command shell and will be the same process for acli.Once inside the shell, you can view the list o