Deployment Success

There are 3 types of Nutanix nodes:    An HCI Node is the most common kind of node. It is heavily equipped with all three components: processing capacity (CPU), memory (RAM), and data storage capacity. An HCI node can run any kind of supported hypervisor. A Storage Node only runs the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. These nodes have a bare minimum of processing and memory capacity however, as the name suggests, have plenty of storage onboard. A Compute Node only runs the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. Logically, th

There are 3 types of Nutanix nodes:    An HCI Node is the most common kind of node. It is heavily equipped with all three components: processing capacity (CPU), memory (RAM), and data storage capacity. An HCI node can run any kind of supported hypervisor. A Storage Node only runs the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. These nodes have a bare minimum of processing and memory capacity however, as the name suggests, have plenty of storage onboard. A Compute Node only runs the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. Logically, th

All, I have a 6 Node 1065 system in 2 blocks.  Recently one of the CVMs (node 2, block A) crashed.  When rebooted it was just going in loops.  When diagnosed it seems the SSD (not the SATADOM) had failed and we replaced it.  When we try to boot the CVM, it still just loops. We were told to boot that node with Phoenix which the cluster provided me for download.  I do that and it doesn’t load Phoenix and gets errors instead.  I’m looking for a suggestion of how to get the node back to 100%.  At this point (and throughout) the ESXi on the SATADOM has booted fine and I guess if I didn’t care about the storage side I could just ignore this but I’d like the system to be fully healthy. Any suggestion about how to get the CVM working again would be appreciated. Thank you Johan

What is the difference between the Redundancy Factor and Replication Factor? Redundancy factor 3 is a configurable option that allows a Nutanix cluster to withstand the failure of two nodes or drives in different blocks. By default, Nutanix clusters have redundancy factor 2, which means they can tolerate the failure of a single node or drive. The larger the cluster, the more likely it is to experience multiple failures. Redundancy Factor 3 requirements: Min 5 nodes in the cluster. CVM with 32GB RAM configured.

VDi (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is one of the earliest applications that was used in hyper-convergent  systems. The closer the storage to the cpu and memory the better the performance. The plugin provides the means for getting more information on Citrix director from Citrix generated desktops running on a Nutanix cluster. Citrix also has its own plugin that can be used. This conversation is about nutanix provided plugin and how to install it. Nutanix AHV Plug-in for Citrix Director creates customized reports for the following VM-level performance statistics: VM IOPS VM I/O Bandwidth VM Average I/O Latency Nutanix AHV Plug-in for Citrix Director gets the data directly from the Nutanix AHV hosts to generate performance statistics of the virtual machines. The link:

The NCC health check idf_db_to_db_sync_heartbeat_status_check verifies the consistency of data replicated from the Source Cluster to the Replica Cluster. IDF is Insights Data Fabric. A DB that contains data about all the entities in the cluster. And it has to be synced between PE and PC. For the purposes of the check, the source cluster is where the check is run from and the replica cluster is the DB instance that is compared against. This check returns a FAIL status when the heartbeat sync time between database on the source cluster and database on the replica cluster crosses a predefined threshold value (10 minutes, by default). 

Currently, we have two types of releases: Short Term Support (STS) releases that have new features, but also imply regular upgrades. Long Term Support (LTS) releases that are maintained for a longer duration and provide primarily bug fixes for an extended period of time on a particular release family. Depending on your choice of the type of the release i.e. LTS or STS, you can identify the type that has been currently installed using one of the following methods:  By looking for is LTS fiel

If you've set up a new Nutanix cluster, you've seen the popup during the initial login that asks if you want to disable Pulse (not recommended). Yes, that one.   So you may be wondering, what will it send and why would I want to enable this?   The purpose and scope of Pulse data is cluster health monitoring. The data sent to Nutanix includes hardware, software, and firmware version information, storage usage and configuration details, resiliency status, CVM health status information, and some limited detail about VMs on the cluster. In the Pulse settings UI in Prism you have the option to enable or disable additional support information such as entity names, so you can keep those user-friendly names private if needed.   More complete detail on what gets included in Pulse data transmissions can be found in t

I’m running into an issue with my script to deploy and setup a new VM in AHV.  The part to check for and install Windows Patches can take a while and sometimes I come out of that routine and I’m no longer connected to Prism Element. I connect with Connect-NTNXCluster… I’ve seen where you can use $TestConnect = Get-NutanixCluster and then check the .IsConnected parameter. However in my testing, I last connected yesterday and when I run that this morning it still shows .IsConnected = True so it doesn’t seem like it gets updated. I’ve also changed the Prism Element GUI settings to a 2 hour timeout but still seems like after way less than that I am no longer connected.  Does that apply to script connections as well? What is a good/reliable way to test if I'm still connected (outside of trying a command and catching the “unauthorized” error)?   Thanks!  

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of April 19-25, 2020. KB 9225 - Flow | Traffic between Target Group VMs may be blocked whenever a VM Migrate or Power On event is triggered KB 9272 - How to open Urls within the Frame Session KB 9281 - Xi Frame on AHV Manual CCA Configuration Note: You may need to log in to the Support Portal to view some of these articles.    

We have many clusters in HCI . Now we want to locally segregate prod VM n NOn -prod VM in a cluster . how can we do ? Do we have concept of resource groups?

Let's say you just upgraded your AOS to the latest version and now  you are receiving this alert in your environment.   "Disk space usage for root on Controller VM has exceeded 80%"   The Nutanix CVM is what runs the Nutanix software and serves all of the I/O operations for the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host.   Not sure how to bring the root partition on the CVM below 80% and which document to consult to?   The following knowledgebase articles might help you in resolving the alert.   KB-7604

Let's say for example we have multiple VLANs in our environment to logically segment the traffic.    We need to configure the network interface accordingly as we might need a VM to be VLAN aware.    Before understanding the method to configure this, let us understand the difference between trunk and access modes.   An access port sends and receives untagged frames (i.e. all frames are in the same VLAN)   A trunk port supports tagged frames and thus it all

Hello, Which 10G Switches and SFP+ modules are supported with NX-3360-G7 nodes & C-XCVR-SR-SFP+ modules?

I have two upgrade options showing in my Nutanix clusters. One is for a 5.15 release and the other is for a 5.16 release. I'm currently on a 5.11.2.3 release and generally keep my clusters updated to the latest release possible. Normally I'd go to the 5.16 release and not ask this question, but I heard from someone that 5.16 might have some problems in it. Would I be safe upgrading to the 5.16 release, or would it introduce instability into my environment? 

Pulse is an essential tool for maintaining uptime on a Nutanix cluster. While alert emails can directly open a case for an issue which has already happened, the data gathered and sent by Pulse enables identification of potential known issues that haven’t impacted your cluster yet.   Enabling this feature within a Nutanix cluster is fairly simple, but depending on your network setup and security there may be some additional steps to make sure it’s working.   When you first set up your cluster, right around the time you accept the EULA and change the password for ‘admin’ you are given the option to disable Pulse. So long as you don’t select to disable it, Pulse will attempt to work with the default settings. For some environments it’s just that simple. The cluster will start sending data periodically to Nutanix and our Support Portal will highlight any conce

Where we can see and create webhooks to integrate with third party monitoring tools e.g. BigPanda.

The NCC health check duplicate_hypervisor_ip_check detects IP addresses that conflict with any of the PE/clusters hypervisor host IPs on the same network. It does so by enumerating all available IPs for the external hypervisor interfaces in the cluster, checks responses to these IPs on the local network, and calls out any duplicate IP's which may be detected.   This check results in a PASS status if none of the Hypervisor IPs have been duplicated in the network. If this check returns a FAIL status, that means that either the Hypervisor External IP or Hypervisor backplane network has a conflicting IP address assigned with another device on the sam

In a traditional Nutanix cluster at least 3 nodes are expected to form a cluster. There is an option however to form a single-node or a two-nodes cluster for ROBO (Remote Office/Branch Office) implementations or as a backup site.   The working of the two-node cluster is different from our usual 3 or more nodes cluster. Some examples are: We cannot expand a two-node cluster. Node removal is not supported. There is no cluster stop for 2 node cluster   So what is the graceful way to shut down and start a two-node cluster?  How to shut down a 2-node cluster:

While attempting to update a VM category via the prism central API, we are getting a 409 response saying: { 'api_version': '3.1', 'code': 409, 'message_list': [{ 'message': 'Edit conflict: please retry change. Entity CAS version mismatch.', 'reason': 'CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_NOT_ALLOWED' }], 'state': 'ERROR'} It seems to be occurring on only one VM as all others seem to update normally. I can clear it by updating the VM through the gui, however once I try and do it via API I get that error.   Any thoughts on what could be going on with this VM?

Are you looking for a way to support more than 12K VMs as part of your Prism Central installation? Then you should try to scale out Prism Central. Nutanix introduced Prism Central scale-out architecture in AOS 5.6. Prism Central scale-out architecture allows  customers to scale out its Prism Central deployments incrementally, depending on the needs. Single Prism Central instance can support up to 12k VMs, with Prism Central scale-out, the number of supported VMs increases up to 25k PoweredOn VMs.  Prism Central scales-out has 3 VMs and has been architected to tolerate one node failure (n+1 fault tolerance).

Flow is a software-defined networking product tightly integrated into Nutanix AHV and Prism. Flow provides rich visualization, automation, and security for VMs running on AHV.    There are instances in which flow is not configured in your environment but still, you will see the following alert    "Flow Control Plane Failed"    There could be multiple reasons for the alert to be recurring but if you're sure that you have not enabled flow in your infrastructure, you can use the following KB article to get a better idea about the alert, confirm if the flow is enabled or not and the possible workarounds    "Flow

Hi everyone, I’m looking for your advice please for ESXi-based Nutanix clusters with hybrid storage. Question is regarding the placement of ESXi persistent scratch. With traditional architecture, the advice normally was to configure /scratch to be on a shared datastore, not a local one. The argument was that in case of a host failure, the logs will still be available from other hosts. With Nutanix, I can see the options as 1) leave the default, on vfat partition on SATADOM/M2/BOSS; 2) in a folder on local VMFS datastore where CVM is (same storage device though); 3) on a shared datastore, i.e. on DSF. What is the Community (best) practice with ESXi /scratch in Nutanix environment? Please kindly share your advice and thoughts. Thank you.

Two weeks ago I’ve upgraded our two clusters to AOS 5.15 . After that, both clusters began to receive constant warnings for root partiton space usage high(exceeded 80%) on almost all CVMs. Below is the result of ‘df -h’ on one of the CVMs:  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on devtmpfs         18G     0   18G   0% /dev tmpfs           512M     0  512M   0% /dev/shm tmpfs            18G  1.2M   18G   1% /run tmpfs            18G     0   18G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/md1        9.8G  7.4G  1.9G  80% / /dev/loop0      240M  2.3M  221M   2% /tmp /dev/md2         40G   23G   17G  57% /home tmpfs           3.6G     0  3.6G   0% /run/user/1000 /dev/sdg1       5.5T  1.4T  4.0T  26% /home/nutanix/data/stargate-storage/disks/

I am trying to locate the memory slots “P2-DIMMD1” and “P2-DIMMD2”  in G4 but did not see any slot marked as P2-DIMMD1 or P2-DIMMD2. would you please let me know how to find these slots and replace memory. Thanks, Tairshah