Deployment Success

Hi,I have a customer with multiple clusters running hyper-V 2016. We are noticing dropped RX packets in the clusters. There was to an extent where there was a RX dropped packets alert generated in one of the clusters. So we proceeded to upgrade the Intel NIC firmware as recommended by support, after this, we notice the alert does not happen anymore. But we still see dropped packets.Is this normal or okay for a cluster/NIC to have rx dropped packets?

Below are the top knowledge base articles for the month of March 2020. KB 4116 - Alert - A1187, A1188 - ECCErrorsLast1Day, ECCErrorsLast10Days KB 7503 - G6, G7 platforms with BIOS 41.002 and higher - DIMM Error handling and replacement policy KB 4141 - Alert - A1046 - PowerSupplyDown KB 1540 - What to do when /home partition or /home/nutanix directory is full KB 1113 - HDD/SSD Troubleshooting

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of March 22-28, 2020. KB 8864 - LCM Pre-check test_hyperv_2019_support KB 8940 - LCM on HPE - SPP update compatibility matrix KB 8999 - NCC Health Check: copyupblockissue_check KB 9007 - LCM Darksite: Inventory success but fails to list the available KB versions. KB 9014 - How to Create a Mapped or Network Drive from your Sandbox to a Utility Server

What is Foundation? Foundation is a Nutanix provided tool leveraged for bootstrapping, imaging and deployment of Nutanix clusters. The imaging process will install the desired version of the AOS software as well as the hypervisor of choice.   By default Nutanix nodes ship with AHV pre-installed (depending on your country), to leverage a different hypervisor type you must use foundation to re-image the nodes with the desired hypervisor. NOTE: Some OEMs will ship directly from the factory with the desired hypervisor.   The figure shows a high level view of the Foundation architecture:     To use a different hypervisor (ESXi or Hyper-V) on factory nodes or to use any hypervisor on bare metal nodes, the nodes must be imaged in the field. Foundation service is includ

SAS is the leader in analytics and Nutanix is the leader in invisible infrastructure. Nutanix has thousands of customers and many of them already have SAS software running in their organization. They have experienced the benefits of invisible infrastructure and are moving more of their applications (including SAS) to Nutanix. It’s easy to deploy and manage SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya on Nutanix Today, SAS 9.4 helps discover insights, manage data and make analytics approachable. SAS 9.4 has been tested on Nutanix NX Models – both as a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), as well as using Nutanix as back-end storage only, for external hosts. Nutanix AHV clusters perform well in both scenarios.

For most maintenance tasks and upgrades we can keep the cluster up and VMs running, but in some cases the whole cluster will need to be shut down. If you just need to power off a single node, a cluster of three or more nodes won’t need to stop.  To stop a single-node cluster please see the section “Shutting Down a Single-node Cluster” in the NX and SX series hardware administration guide. To stop a single node in a larger cluster see the section “Shutting Down a Node in a Cluster (AHV)” 

Regardless of the reason to destroy the cluster whether it is to relocate and reuse an existing kit or switch to a different hypervisor, to build something new often means to destroy something that already exists and Nutanix has a process for it. Migrate all user VMs off the cluster. Reclaim licenses. Ensure there are no errors displayed.  Stop the cluster. Destroy the cluster. Not too bad, right?   Some things to keep in mind is that cluster

Hi, I’ve configured a Nutanix device running Prism 5.10 with SNMP - I’ve set a transport for UDP on port 161 and made sure there’s a tick in Enable for Nutanix objects.  But when I try to run an SNMPWalk or SNMPGet from a device on the same subnet to start building a custom service in Solarwinds NCentral I get no response from the device.  To confirm the issue isn’t on the server I’m running the query from I’ve done the same thing to another windows server and that works fine, so I’m fairly confident I’ve got the local firewall configured, I’m just not getting a response from the Nutanix device? I configured a trap on the Nutanix device and pointed that at the same server and that worked, it just doesn’t seem to be responding to incoming SNMP requests?  Any suggestions as to what I may have missed would be gratefully accepted!

Let say that you have updated your IPMI IP address or moved it to another subnet, after you finish the update you are not able to log back in to the IPMI. This happens as a result of not restarting the genesis service on the local node which people tend to forget, after you make the change you must restart the services on the same node’s CVM by running “genesis restart”. If the restart is successful, output similar to the following is displayed: Stopping Genesis pids [1933, 30217, 30218, 30219, 30241] Genesis started on pids [30378, 30379, 30380, 30381, 30403]   You can change the network configuration of your IPMI using one of the following methods:

Let’s say that you ran the health checks on your cluster and received a failure under the component “cvm_name_check”, what does it mean and how do you fix it?   The NCC health check cvm_name_check ensures that any renamed CVMs (Controller VMs) conform to the correct naming convention to avoid issues with certain operations that depend on identifying the CVM from UVMs on the same host.   The default Controller VM naming is NTNX-<block_serial>-<position-in-block>-CVM. The display name of the Controller VM must always: Start with "NTNX-"; and End with "-CVM" For more information check out: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/kbs/details?targetId=kA00e000000XfCMCA0   To see how to modify the hostname of the Controller VM chec

You may have noticed when adding disks to the node or replacing disks with larger capacity ones, utilisation distribution between the disks does not occur immediately. You check on the cluster sometime later and notice that newly added disks still show minimal usage, much lower than expected.   By default, the aim is to bring disks utilisation within +/-7.5% spread of the tier utilisation. There are some things to consider when expecting a certain outcome: Disk balancing is not triggered unless the tier usage is at least 35%.  Only 1 GB of data is moved during a Curator scan per node. 

There are a number of reasons you might want to migrate a VM manually in or out of a Nutanix AHV cluster. You could be working with a situation not supported by Move, such as stand-alone ESXi without vCenter or no network path from the old hypervisor to the Nutanix cluster. Possibly you want to save a VM's disks to portable storage media and physically transport them rather than push them across the WAN. If you're wanting to move VM data in or out of AHV, the methods have been provided in this article "Transferring Virtual Disks to an AHV Cluster". If you're just looking to migrate current, working VMs from an ESXi or Hyper-V cluster Nutanix highly recommends using 

Is there a way to execute a script (or PowerShell script/command) inside a newly created AHV VM which does not have an IP address yet?  The VM has Nutanix Guest Tools installed. I’m looking for automating the creation of a new VM. In VMware, I use the Invoke-VMScript command.  I didn’t know if Nutanix had something similar? Thanks! -TimG

Sometimes it is very boring to install the PrismCentral VM on AHV after your Cluster runs but it gets buggy. So here are some tips to solve problems there Deploy a Network in your new AHV Environment first Deploy the new VM via Prism Element Homepage Often you get an error with ssl and httpd could not start! Login via ssh to ip of your fresh deployed Prism Central Server Login via nutanix / nutanix/4u sudo -i service httpd status (mostly not started) service httpd start (ignore the ssl errors in the output) Now the new PrismCentral Website should arrive after a while under https://ip-of-prismcentral Login not possible with admin / admin or admin / nutanix/4u? Login again via ssh and nutanix / nutani

When a Nutanix / vSphere cluster is deployed by Foundation the recommended drivers are installed, but after some time you may want to check if there is a newer driver recommended.   From the Nutanix perspective, we have covered this with an NCC Health Check: esx_driver_compatibility_check so if you update NCC and run a health check, this check should tell you whether there is a later driver version qualified by Nutanix. To run the check from the CLI use “ncc health_checks hypervisor_checks esx_driver_compatibility_check” from any CVM in the cluster.  You may see a newer driver listed for your NIC hardware and ESXi version. A newer driver may not have been qualified yet by Nutanix and in some cases could cause issues for the cluster, so generally we recommend staying with the recommended drivers

Hi,   I’m new to nutanix and this is my first post :)  I’ve started to create a cluster in a lab environment and it seems to work fine. I created two bridges with 2x10G and 2x1G for user VM traffic.  For the next step I tried to use the network segmentation to separate management and backplane traffic. Therefore an eth2 interface is required for the CVMs. Problem is, that there’s no eth2 available, just eth0 and eth1:   When I start the segmentation process I got the particular error message:     Did I miss somethi

Q. Does Nutanix support inline encryption? Inline encryption is not currently supported on the Nutanix platform. However Data At Rest Encryption (DARE) of two kinds is supported: Using Self Encrypted Drives (SED) is supported Security Guide v5.16: Preparing for Data-at-Rest Encryption (SEDs) Security Guide v5.16: Configuring Data-at-Rest Encryption

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of March 15-21, 2020. KB 8885 - Alert - A15039 - IPMI SEL UECC Check KB 9009 - AHV | No Intel Turbo Boost frequencies shown in the output of "cpupower frequency-info" command KB 9070 - [CSI] PVC Volumes Stuck in Pending State | Error: Secret value is not encoded using '<prism-ip>:<prism-port>:<user>:<password>' format KB 9071 - Configuring hypervisor after satadom replacement fails with phoenix 4.5.2

In a Nutanix AHV cluster the image service is used to index and manage ISO and virtual disk images for cloning to new VM disks or mounting to the virtual CDROM. With the addition of Prism Central 5.5 or later, this adds a global image service to manage these files across multiple clusters. When managing images from Prism Central we sometimes will see an image show up on a cluster as "inactive". This means the metadata for the image exists but the file does not exist locally on that cluster.   The article "Prism Central: Adding Images to Prism Central" gives a few options to remediate this condition when an image is needed on a certain cluster but is inactive. These methods are useful with Prism Central 5.5 and 5.10 versions.   In Prism Central 5.11 w

Hello, does anybody have experiences with a container OS like RancherOS on AHV? In the Compatibility Matrix of Nutanix I can see that RancherOS v1.5.5 is compatible with my AOS 5.10, but I don’t know which image of RancherOS I should use. The are some images for a specific cloud provider and some for a specific hypervisor, but no one for Nutanix, AHV or KVM.   I tought then I simply have to use the rancheros.iso, but there a some contradictions that I don’t understand. The good news is that the VM is working as expected, but RancherOS everytime enables the hyperv-vm-tools on startup and the container os-hypervvmtools is restarted every few seconds. The logs of this container are also empty.

2 of 3 nodes are fine and working. The 3nd CVM is up and i could ping it. Restart the Cluster with “allssh genesis stop cluster_health; cluster start” does not start these Cluster Partner. After Login in Prism i saw a “Disk degraded” for these 3rd node and now these disk is missing.    How to fix node Nr. 3 in a 3 Node Cluster?    

What is Erasure Coding? Erasure coding increases the usable capacity on a cluster. Instead of replicating data, erasure coding uses a parity information to rebuild data in the event of a disk failure. The capacity savings of erasure coding is in addition to deduplication and compression savings.   If you have configured redundancy factor 2, two data copies are maintained. For example, consider a 6-node cluster with 4 data blocks (a b c d). In this example, we start with 4 data blocks (a b c d) configured with redundancy factor 2. In the following image, the white text represents the data blocks and the green text represents the copies.   Data copies before Erasure Coding 

I am looking for other customers who have used the witness feature. We have three buildings each about 1 mile from each other. 10g fiber between them. We have two Nutanix clusters, one in each of two of the buildings. We have the ultimate licensing and are already using Metro clustering. I have the fail over set to manual. Today I setup a witness server in the third building. As far as I can tell everything is working. The real question is should I use it? Is anyone using the witness. Does it cause more problems than it solves. At least with manual I have full control when a fail over happens. So far it has been easier to fix my issues than to fail over and almost all issues are network related not nutanix.

What is Metro Availability? Nutanix provides native “stretch clustering” capabilities which allow for a compute and storage cluster to span multiple physical sites.  In these deployments, the compute cluster spans two locations and has access to a shared pool of storage. The solution is currently available for ESXi only.    This expands the VM HA domain from a single site to between two sites providing a near 0 RTO and a RPO of 0. In this deployment, each site has its own Nutanix cluster, however the containers are “stretched” by synchronously replicating to the remote site before acknowledging writes. The following figure shows high-level architecture of a Nutanix Metro Availability deployment:   The following figure shows an example link fail

This alert is generated when an API comes in which is authenticated as "admin". Nutanix recommends any script or third party application sending APIs to the cluster should use a service account rather than using 'admin'. You can read more about this alert from the article "Alert - ExternalClientAccessCheck" If you are seeing this alert, it is informing you that some system is authenticating as admin. To aid in investigation the IP address is provided. The intent is that any 3rd party application or script should be using a service account and not ‘admin’ as this makes command auditing much more reasonable and helps keep the admin password secure. When a third party application such as Veeam is set up to authenticate to the cluster as ‘admin’ that should gene