Deployment Success

The Nutanix CVM is what runs the Nutanix software and serves all of the I/O operations to the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host hence it is of crucial importance to configure CMVs with the right amount of resources. The RAM and CPU allocation of the CVM both depend on the model of the nodes, the storage capacity of the cluster and the features used in the cluster. Each environment is unique in a way and each and every single one is dynamic by nature. Features are turned on and off, nodes upgrade, storage added. The following guide helps us to understand the memory requirement of the CVM for different models and features. The next time you are planning to add a feature or upgrade hardware in the cluster look at the minimum requirements to make sure that the cluster performance is not affected. After all there are very few things more satisfying than a smooth maintenance window. Acropolis Advance Administration Guide: CVM Memory Requirement Prism Web Console Guide v5.16: Increa

On 31st March 2020 we made available our latest Long Term Support (LTS) release of AOS, version 5.15. This LTS release builds upon a mature and proven AOS codebase which customers have already been running successfully in their production environments.   End of Support Life (EOSL) and Release Information: AOS 5.15 is a Long Term Support (LTS) Release: Information on AOS Long Term Support (LTS) and Short Term Support (STS) Releases, please see KB 5505 or the Support policies page Please refer to the AOS EOL Schedule for release details If you are on an EOSL release, please plan on moving to one of the following to avoid disruption in support: AOS 5.15 (LTS) or a supported LTS release AOS 5.16 (STS) or a supported STS release for rapid adoption of new features mentioned in the release notes   Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for Approved Platforms and EOL: Information on the Hardware Compatibility Guidelines and EOL can be found on the Support policies page Please refer to

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of March 29-April 4, 2020. KB 9119 - Alert A1159 "Flash Mode Usage Limit Exceeded" is not being raised KB 9123 - Alert - A160050 - FileServerConfigureNameServicesFailed KB 9130 - Clicking Source Entity = Container or Disk in an Alert/Event/Task will error out: "Storage Container or Disk with id '<UUID> ' was not found" KB 9131 - Prism Central (PC) 1-click deployment fails on Prism Element (PE) cluster version prior to 5.10.10, 5.11.2, 5.16 and 5.17 KB 9135 - Nutanix Move: "DuplicateName" for ESXi to ESXi Moves on the same vCenter KB 9147 - Migrating CentOS/RHEL 5.11 VM by Move KB 9160 - Nutanix Support Organization response to COVID-19 KB 9163 - Kubernetes pod fails to mount a volume that is internally-attached to a VM KB 9169 - Era Registration Fails due to multiple IP Addresses KB 9173 - LCM Failure: The following entities cannot be updated as they are disabled KB 9178 - ESXi 6.7U3 Upgrade on PRIMEFLEX Using 1-Click Wi

Hello, We build our vm images using packer and ansible and upload them to different endpoints. First time I uploaded the images to Prism Central using API v3 and batch processing. Prism Central deploys the image to all the cluster that are registrated. That works fine… BUT… HOW can i define the destination storage container on each cluster?? I can define placement policies etc but I cannot assign a category or policy to Storage Container. Prism Central always deploys the images to “SelfServiceContainer”. But we dont want that.

Hi everyone,I’m using the API to pull VM performance stats, however I’m having trouble interpreting what I’m seeing.For instance, I’m pulling “hypervisor.cpu_ready_time_ppm” for one of my VMs and getting the following output:{ "statsSpecificResponses": [ { "successful": true, "message": null, "startTimeInUsecs": 1576458000000000, "intervalInSecs": 30, "metric": "hypervisor.cpu_ready_time_ppm", "values": [ 108, 97, 144, 107, 89, 92, 78, 74, 47, 49, 90,.... Output truncated for brevityI get that the metric is a percentage but obviously you can’t have 144% of time, so how should I interpret these values?What I really need is a guide and/or reference that explains all of these metrics and how to interpret them.I found the following link but it doesn’t really tell me what I want to know:https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Prism-Central-Guide-Prism-v51:mul-alerts-user-created-metrics-r.html

When it comes to administering the Nutanix cluster, it's very important to control permissions and to restrict access to critical components such as CVMs, AHV hosts and the Prism UI. Any user that has write access to these components can make drastic changes to the Nutanix environment and thus to your organization’s production/testing environment. Here is how to reset the password for each of the components above: AHV | Root account password reset check out KB-7068 Reset Web Console or nCLI Password check out KB-1200 To recover CVM Password Through the Prism Web Console check out KB-2233

Nutanix recommends that you use a single container in an AHV cluster to simplify VM and image management. What if you still have to have more than one container and wish to split existing VMs between the containers?  For example, you created a container named Production and want to move all production VMs to that container.   Since currently there is no Storage vMotion equivalent available to move VMs between containers, what we do as a workaround is that we create images from the vdisk and then use these images to deploy new VMs and selecting the desired container.   A general overview of the process looks this: Find the VM disk files. Power off the VM. Create images from the files found in step 1 using acli. Create a new VM using acli or using Prism UI. Use the image created in Step 3 as a source for the disk. Power on the VM and check if everything is working fine. You can delete the old VM or the image if required.   To have a detailed look at the steps and the commands i

Hello All, i have a question want to explain  what’s the differents between IPMI port and SHARED IMPI? if there are any business or technical cases to choose between them ?    thank you,

Our hosts network ports are currently configured as Active-Backup bonds. I can determine which Ethernet port is currently active, which Ethernet port is on standby, and I can issue a command to failover the port. I would like to know if there is a command which can be run from the AHV which outputs the time and date-stamps of the last Host Ethernet port failover. 

There are various scenarios in which you may need to unregister a cluster from PC, and it is important to do it correctly.  Whether you are decommissioning a Prism Element (PE) cluster which was registered to Prism Central (PC), or you already have decommissioned a cluster but it is still linked to a PC, or you have a cluster that is registered with one PC instance but would like to re-register it with a different PC instance for the benefit of localized management or to configure availability groups using Leap. All    What does "correctly" look like? Done properly, unregistration of a cluster from PC involves a remove-from-multicluster step followed by clean-up of associated metadata. This metadata clean-up must be allowed to complete prior to attempting to re-register the cluster to a PC, otherwise, registration could be blocked.   How to do it? There is no GUI method to unregister a cluster from Prism Central, so the process requires SSH access to the PC VM as well as to a CVM of th

What is LCM? The Life Cycle Manager (LCM) tracks software and firmware versions of all entities in the cluster, integrated both on Prism Element and Prism Central. LCM Structure: LCM consists of a framework and a set of modules for inventory and update. LCM supports software updates for all platforms that use Nutanix software. LCM supports firmware updates for a specific platforms. From Prism Element you can use LCM to update AHV, NCC, Foundation, BIOS, BMC, DATA Drives, HBA Controllers, SATADOMs and M.2 Drives (G6 and later). From Prism Central, you can update Calm, Epsilon, Karbon, and Objects.   When you run a firmware upgrade on multiple nodes, the LCM updates one node at a time to prevent any down time in your cluster. Before the upgrade starts, all the VMs on that node are migrated to another host and the node enters maintenance mode. Always make sure that your cluster can tolerate a node failure by having the data resiliency status as “OK” in Prism Element.   For more informati

Dear all, I need to provide some reporting for my management. I'm using REST API & Python, to extract values. I managed to get hosts information (cpu, ram) and physical storage without any problem. Now I need to get the logical storage summary and I can't find the values via the REST Api. (same values as we get on the PRISM homepage on Storage Summary part) It's probably a calculation but I can't find the right one. May I ask you to provide me the values and calculations. Thank you for your help. Best regards Cedric

What is Nutanix Guest Tool (NGT)? Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) is a software based in-guest agent framework which enables advanced VM management functionality through the Nutanix Platform. The solution is composed of the NGT installer which is installed on the VMs and the Guest Tools Framework which is used for coordination between the agent and Nutanix platform. The NGT installer contains the following components: Guest Agent Service Self-service Restore (SSR) aka File-level Restore (FLR) CLI VM Mobility Drivers (VirtIO drivers for AHV) VSS Agent and Hardware Provider for Windows VMs App Consistent snapshot support for Linux VMs (via scripts to quiesce) This framework is composed of a few high-level components: Guest Tools Service Guest Agent The figure shows the high-level mapping of the components:    Important notes:  NGT uses TCP/IP network connectivity secured with SSL. The installation includes identifiers unique to the VM and the cluster, but you can pre-install NGT on a clone ba

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 KB 4158 - Alert - A1104 - PhysicalDiskBad KB 4188 - Alert - A1050, A1008 - IPMIError KB 2090 - AHV | Host and Guest Networking KB 4519 - NCC Health Check: check_ntp KB 4409 - LCM: (LifeCycle Manager) Troubleshooting Guide KB 8792 - NCC checks: same_hypervisor_version_check, duplicate_cvm_ip_check, same_timezone_check, esx_sioc_status_check, power_supply_check, orphan_vm_snapshot_check giving ERR KB 4541 - Alert - A101055 - MetadataDiskMountedCheck KB 2486 - NCC Health Check: cvm_mtu_check KB 2473 - NCC Health Check: cvm_memory_usage_check KB 3357 - NCC Health Check: ipmi_sel_cecc_check KB 4494 - N

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 KB 9122 - download for AOS Bundles or any large files from Prism and Portal fails for specific customers KB 9132 - Alert - A1305 - Node is in degraded state KB 9137 - Overview of Memory related enhancements introduced in BIOS: 42.300 and BMC: 7.07 for Nutanix NX-G6 and NX-G7 systems KB 9138 - LCM on INSPUR - BIOS-BMC Compatibility matrix Note: You may need to log in to the Support Portal to view some of these articles.

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 included on CVMs and can be accessed at port 8000 on a running CVM that is not in a cluster, or if the CVM IP address is not yet configured the Foundation Portable software can automatically discover the nodes. Check out the prism web

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. SAS software makes great demands of IT infrastructure, so you must get the design right to ensure a successful deployment. Evaluating the SAS I/O requirements accurately is pivotal. Nutanix encourages involvement of Nutanix engineers to determine the back-end service requirements as well as optimal imple

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)”  If there's going to be a site power outage, a full network outage, or physical relocation of the whole cluster you're going to want to gracefully shut down the whole cluster. The full procedure is covered in the article Shutting Down an AHV Cluster for Maintenance or Relocation.   In summary the procedure will be as follows: Update NCC and perform a health check, then address any items of concern. Shut down all the user VMs. Stop any Nutanix Files cluster, if applicable. At this point no VMs other than

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 destruction does not affect either: IPMI configuration. Which is convenient if you wish to re-use the settings in the new environment.  Installed hypervisor. Nodes would have to be re-imaged should a different hypervisor be required. Migrate all workloads off the cluser prior to executing the cluster destroy. Cluster destroy clears all metadata and data on the storage.   Useful links: KB-3716 Reclaiming Cluster License Acropolis Advanced Administration Guide: Destroying a Cluster Field Installation Guide

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: Configuring the Remote Console IP Address (IPMI Web Interface) Configuring the Remote Console IP Address (Command Line) Configuring the Remote Console IP Address (BIOS) For the full documentation check out this page.

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 check out: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/kbs/details?targetId=kA032000000TUjkCAG   You followed the naming convention and the check is still showing a failure? This might be a false-positive alert depending on your AOS, contact Nutanix support for verificatio

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.  Even if the tier usage is below 35% should any disk usage across the cluster reach 70%, disk balancing takes place.   Disk Balancing:  Disk balancing ensures data is evenly distributed across all disks in a cluster. In disk balancing, data is moved within the same tier to balance out the disk utilization. This is different from ILM (Information Lifecycle Management), where data is moved between dif

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 Nutanix Move to migrate VMs to AHV. The manual migration methods require attention to detail and generally involve a larger time investment and more downtime to complete the move. I won't go into full detail on the steps, that's already done in the article I linked, but I will highlight that for any VM you’ll need VirtIO