How It works

Era is a database as a service (DBaaS) that automates and simplifies database administration, brings one-click simplicity and invisible operations to database provisioning and life-cycle management. Era enables database administrators to provision, clone, and refresh the database clones to any point in time. Era allows administrators to define standards for their database provisioning needs with end-state driven functionality that includes High Availability (HA) database deployments. Era automates and simplifies the operations such as provisioning of databases and copy data management.Era enables you to easily provision database environments (either production or otherwise) on your Nutanix clusters. Also, you can only provision the database server VM that hosts a database, so that you can later create or clone databases on that database server. Era provis

Objective:Create a virtual/physical separation between different kinds of CVM traffic. Each type of traffic can be on different vLANs (virtual) or a completely different physical switch. Different type of CVM traffic are:Management: Prism, SSH, Rsyslog, SNMP, PE-PC etc. Any communication that requires the default gateway. Backplane: Mainly CVM  CVM communication that happens between cluster services. Host  Host and Host  CVM traffic also comes under this category. Service: This is a user defined traffic type where-in he can choose a particular AOS feature to be separated out of other traffic types. RDMA: This is a type of

Can VMs keep uuid when migrated through Xi Leap and back to original cluster?

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of September 20-26, 2020.KB 8911 - Alert - Flow Visualization Statistics Collector Service Restart Detected - ConntrackStatsCollectorServiceRestart KB 9622 - NCC Health Check: pc_fs_inconsistency_check KB 10023 - Push images from one PC cluster to another PC cluster KB 10036 - Windows Portable Foundation Application may fail to start without any error on Windows 10 1809 and above. KB 100

Nutanix infrastructure customers often suffer performance issues on their database, and call in to Nutanix Technical Support to help them resolve them.  One aspect I have observed with database customers, and which impacts their performance, is the placement of the VMDKs on SCSI Controllers.  Assuming that there are four VMDKs serving the database VM, they might have configured the four VMDKs as follows.  This is an extract from the ESXi Host which the VM is running on:[root@esxasrk63u35:/vmfs/volumes/9f254e88-e3c751d/pqrsd00][root@esxasrk63u35:/vmfs/volumes/9f254e88-e3c751d/pqrsd00] cat pqrsd00.vmx | grep vmdk -A3scsi0:0.fileName = "pqrsd00.vmdk"sched.scsi0:0.shares = "normal"sched.scsi0:0.throughputCap = "off"scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"--scsi0:1.fileName = "pqrsd00_1.vmdk"sched.scsi0:1.shares = "normal"sched.scsi0:1.throug

If there was a gflag applied in the past on cluster and now you dont have a track on the details, the same can be found out by running this NCC check ncc health_checks system_checks gflags_diff_checkThe output will show you the list of non-default gflag currently on the system, more details here -NCC Health Check: gflags_diff_check

Very frequently we receive an alert just before an upgrade that cluster doesn't have enough space to download the binary files (). If that is happening to you, there are ways to clean the partition below the threshold (75%). Some of them include below  Cleaning Old ISOs and Software Binaries ( For old AOS, NCC, Foundation versions) Checking Removing Old Logs (Log files shared for support cases if not cleared later, occupy space)  

Nutanix has worked closely to build integrations between ServiceNOW’s SaaS offering andNutanix infrastructure with the following areas of focus:ServiceNOW CMDB integration for Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure discovery and modeling Nutanix Alert Integration with ServiceNOW Events and Incidents and remediation via XPlay ServiceNOW Request Management and Fulfillment for Services Hosted on Nutanix via CALM plug-in For More Details: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-integration-with-servicenow

Ever wondered about the underlying mechanism used by AHV hosts to facilitate network communications for themselves and hosted VMs across a network? This underlying mechanism is an open-source software platform called Open vSwitch which operates as a software-defined switch on each host.This software-defined switch operates very similarly to a traditional layer-2 hardware switch in that it learns and maintains MAC addresses and makes frame-forwarding decisions based upon that information. However, it also can be considered much more scalable and extendable.With AHV, each host maintains its own Open vSwitch instance and parameters are passed to these instances using an open-standard protocol called OpenFlow.You can find more information regardi

When you on-ramp new team members they’re going to need access to all their tools. If those new teammates will be managing Nutanix systems they most likely need a login to the support portal for access to documentation, downloads, the knowledge base, and the ability to open a support case.   So how do we set up access for new users? There are a few simple steps covered in the article How to Gain User Access to Nutanix Support Portal .   You’ll need a block or software-only serial number and the user’s email address. The email address should be in the authorized domain for your customer account.   To find the block serial number log into Prism and navigate to Hardware > Diagram. The block serial number is d

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of September 13-19, 2020.KB 9982 - LCM: Operation failed. Reason: Multiple LAGs as uplinks in a VSwitch is not supported. KB 9987 - HPDX Platforms Cabling Guides KB 10004 - LCM inventory does not show available firmware updates for HPE nodes with iLO version 2019.03.01 KB 10008 - AHV | Uploading vhdx image may fail if the image is corrupted KB 10012 - Cloning an image and Updating di

Compression is one of the key features of the Nutanix Capacity Optimization Engine (COE) to perform data optimization. Data Storage Fabric provides both inline and offline flavors of compression to best suit the cluster’s needs and type of data. As of 5.1, offline compression is enabled by default.Inline compression will compress sequential streams of data or large I/O sizes (>64K) when written to the Extent Store (SSD + HDD). This includes data draining from OpLog as well as sequential data skipping it. There is no impact to random I/O, helps increase storage tier utilization and benefits large or sequential I/O performance by reducing data to replicate and read from disk.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. When inline compression is enabled but the I/Os are random in nature, the data will be written un-compressed in the OpLog

Representational state transfer ( REST ) Application Programming Interface (API) 3.0 is based on an intentful API philosophy. According to the intentful API philosophy the machine should handle the programming instead of the user enabling the datacenter administrator able to focus on the other task There are three publicly available Nutanix APIs. Note that while you may see API v0.8 listed in the REST API Explorer in Nutanix Prism, it is strongly recommended to use v3 APIs wherever possible.   v1 (Prism Element only) v2.0 (Prism Element only) v3 (Prism Central only)

Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) is cluster-resident software that can help diagnose cluster health and identify configurations qualified and recommended by Nutanix. Depending on the issue discovered, NCC raises an alert or automatically creates Nutanix Support cases. NCC can be run provided that the individual nodes are up, regardless of cluster state.NCC actions are grouped into plugins and modules:A Plugin is a purpose-specific or component-specific code block inside a module, commonly referred to as a check. A plugin can be a single check or one or more individual related checks. A Module is a logical group of common-purpose plugins. It can also be a logical group of common-purpose modulesNCC Output: Each NCC plugin is a test that completes independently of other plugins. Each test completes with one of these status types:PASS FAIL WARN INFO ERRNCC can be executed via:a) GUI

Nutanix recommends that you use the Prism Life Cycle Manager to perform firmware updates. However, firmware must be updated manually if:The component is located in a single-node cluster, OR The component is located in a multi-node cluster, but the hypervisor the cluster is running does not support LCM firmware updates.Manual Upgrades:Manually Updating SATA DOM Firmware Manually Updating M.2 RAID Hypervisor Boot Drive Firmware

When attempting to hit LCM via ‘Software Upgrade’ screen via a Cluster in Central, it links you to LCM on central, not on the cluster. Is this intended behavior or a bug? 

The Prism interface allows the investigation of the disk I/O latency. As a result, following questions are raised. Note: Nutanix recommends that maximum latency readings should not be used as a measure of cluster performance and health. Average latency is a useful measure of cluster performance and health. What should be the average latency on a production cluster? What should be the maximum latency? What point is the latency too high? How to investigate the high latency?

We may have a requirement to have a RPO as less as 1 minute.  The NearSync feature provides you with the ability to protect your data with an RPO of as low as 1 minute.To implement the NearSync feature, Nutanix has introduced a technology called Lightweight Snapshots (LWS) to take snapshots that continuously replicates incoming data generated by workloads running on the active cluster. The LWS snapshots are created at the metadata level only. These snapshots are stored in the LWS store, which is allocated on the SSD tier. LWS store is automatically allocated when you configure NearSync for a Protection Domain.Some of the advantages of NearSync are as follows.

NTP i.e. Network Time Protocol is a critical component of the Nutanix cluster and is crucial in keeping up hardware, processes, services and applications running with time synchronization across one another.  Inconsistencies in time synchronization could lead to undesirable consequences, not to mention the potential disastrous impact it could have on databases and real time applications through operational failures.  The downside of a poor NTP scenario could be data loss, hard to detect security breaches, even leading to legal liabilities, and loss of credibility.  NTP alerts are generated when you run the NCC Health checks, and are typically shown as below:Detailed information for check_ntp:Node 172.24.0.143:FAIL: The hypervisor is not synchronizing with any NTP server. This might occur if none of

Witness VM in Metro Availability Configuration:A "Witness" is a special VM that monitors the Metro Availability configuration health. The Witness resides in a separate failure domain to provide an outside view that can distinguish a site failure from a network interruption between the Metro Availability sites. It can only be configured on AHV and ESXi hypervisors.The main functions of a Witness include:· Making a failover decision in the event of a site or inter-site network failure.· Avoiding a split-brain condition where the same storage container is active on both sites due to (for example) a WAN failure.· Handling situations where a single storage or network domain fails.To learn about the different scenarios you might encounter and the requirements of a witness VM,

Getting this error when I try to use putty/plink for any ACLI-related command:bash: ACLI: command not foundDoesn't seem to matter what acli “command” i run, even just running “acli” by its self gives the same error. I am able to run commands like “hostname” etc using plink/putty on the CVM. Feel like im missing something very simple here.Example command:putty $cvmIP -l $username -pw $password “acli vm.disk_get $vmname disk_addr=scsi.0”

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of September 6-12, 2020.KB 9960 - AD user cannot manage PC and NCC upgrades after upgrading to PC 2020.8 version KB 9980 - Cluster outage may occur during an LCM upgrade when restoring block fault-tolerance KB 9981 - SSP | VM nic update task performed by SSP user may fail on Prism Central 5.17 and above versions KB 9985 - Intermittent Network Disconnects Due to MAC Learning Disabled When Using AHV Bond Mode Balance-SLB

Do you know Support Cases can be Scheduled on Support Portal?Support Portal users that are working with Nutanix Support can elect to schedule a follow-up for a case. The instructions within the case page are designed to be self-explanatory on how to schedule. However, you may want to understand how a case is handled when scheduled prior to using the feature. Portal Scheduling Overview The scheduling feature is only presented under the following conditions: Support contract allows for 24x7 coverage

While doing LifeCycle Manager (LCM) upgrades, Nutanix infrastructure customers could encounter failures on the SATADOM upgrade on a ESXi Host, with the message:"Operation failed. Reason: Lcm prechecks detected 2 issues that would cause upgrade failures.Check 'test_hypervisor_config' failed with 'Failure reason: APD/VMCP feature is enabled on cluster, Please disable, Please refer KB 6470'Check 'test_min_phoenix_version' failed with 'Failure reason: APD/VMCP feature is enabled on cluster, Please disable, Please refer KB 6470' You can try disabling the APD using the following command on the Host:

The CVMs that comprise a Nutanix cluster get their time by syncing to a single member which is known as the NTP Leader (aka Genesis Master). This node will be responsible for syncing with whatever NTP servers the customer added to Prism. When NTP is properly configured, the Leader CVM will set its own clock to the time provided by the server and then all other CVMs will sync with the Leader's time.  For AHV clusters, the same list of servers used by the NTP Leader will be configured on each host to sync with independently. All other hypervisors need to have NTP configured separately using their unique management tools. By default User VMs sync their time with the local hypervisor where they are running, but users can configure their machines to sync with local or internet-based NTP servers as well.