How It works

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.

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.    

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

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

Our vision at Nutanix has been and will always be: "one platform, any app, any location". This has been our goal from close to the beginning.  We have openly documented Nutanix architecture in the freely available Nutanix Bible, and we are committed to open-source software, actively using and contributing code within a variety of communities. For example, here is a simplified architecture of a Nutanix environment taken from the Nutanix bible:      In the documentation, you will find all the information you need regarding the Software, Hardware, performance, recommended practices, restrictions and more. 

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of April 12-18, 2020. KB 9109 - Cannot Login to Prism with AD account KB 9168 - Custom Virtual Machine Report Creation in Prism Central KB 9223 - Nutanix Files: FileServer preupgrade check failed with cause(s) Sub task poll timed out KB 9224 - Restore the SSR snapshots using CLI KB 9232 - LCM Failure: Could not find pnics attached to the CVM interface

The NCC health check check_vcenter_connection verifies if the vCenter Server is registered with Prism and if a connection can be established. Nutanix cluster communicates with vCenter Server to obtain virtual machine information necessary for certain Nutanix cluster operations like Data Protection, One-Click upgrades, etc. If the vCenter Server is not registered or is not accessible, those operations may fail.   The check returns a PASS if vCenter Server is registered with Prism Element and connection can be established. The check returns an INFO if vCenter is not registered with Prism

To perform core VM management operations directly from Prism without switching to vCenter Server, you need to register your cluster with the vCenter Server. Nutanix cluster communicates with vCenter Server to obtain virtual machine information necessary for certain Nutanix cluster operations like Data Protection, One-Click upgrades, etc. If the vCenter Server is not registered or is not accessible, those operations may fail.   The NCC health check check_vcenter_connection is also in place to verify if the vCenter Server is registered with Prism and if a connection can be established. Follow the steps to register your cluster with vCenter: Log into the Prism web console. Click the gear icon in the ma

Did you know that you can directly access the files in the Nutanix container from your local desktop? It is possible using WinSCP. This process helps in uploading or downloading files to and from Nutanix container. For example, you want to download a phoenix iso you generated on a CVM.   Here are the steps to access a container:   Open WinSCP. Connect to the CVM IP using SFTP protocol and port 2222. Login using the admin/prism element credentials. Ena

We all know that Virtual IP is used to access the Prism web console. It is also referred to as the external IP address of the cluster. Cluster virtual IP is mapped to the CVM which is the Prism service leader. Every time a new leader is elected the virtual IP is transferred to the new leader CVM, ensuring Prism Element availability. The NCC health check virtual_ip_check verifies if the cluster virtual IP is configured and reachable. It is scheduled to run every hour, by default and will generate an alert after 1 failure. To manually verify virtual IP settings in the Prism web console.

Did you know that in Acropolis (AHV) you can enable high availability for the cluster to ensure that VMs can be migrated and restarted to another node in case of a failure? Best effort VM availability is enabled by default in Acropolis. Virtual Machine High Availability (VM HA) VM HA is a feature designed to ensure that critical VMs are restarted on another Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) host within the cluster if a host fails.  

Let’s say you need to administer your user VMs from the command line interface.   The Controller VM resources are shown under the VM page In the Nutanix Prism, but you will not be able to change the resources configuration unless you connected to the Acropolis hypervisor (host) and modified the configurations using virsh.   “virsh: is a command line interface tool for managing guests and the hypervisor.” Centos.org. First you can review the settings of the CVM under the VM Page on Prism.

Let's say that you ran the health checks on your cluster and received data_replication_check failure, what does it mean and how do you fix it?  The NCC health check data_replication_check helps to ensure that the customers are not impacted by an extremely rare condition which can result in the inability to restore from snapshots. This issue is covered in Field Advisory 28.   Scenario 1 - Cluster is running an old version of AOS.Scenario 2 - Cluster was recently upgraded, but has snapshots created before the AOS upgrade. For a full explanation and the solution for both scenarios check out the health check documentation at: KB-2089. To make sure

Scalability is the backbone of any industry solution, hence with ever-increasing workloads, it is natural for us to add new nodes in our existing infrastructure to make it scalable and highly efficient. Nutanix provides a feature which  allows you to add new nodes to your existing cluster and increase the cluster overall capacity.    A question lingering in our mind right now  Do we have some guidelines regarding cluster expansion?    Cluster expansion depends on the AOS version, hypervisor type (AHV, ESXi, Hyper-V, or Citrix Hypervisor), data-at-rest encryption status, and certain hardware configuration factors.  

It may be helpful to determine what commands were run previously to troubleshoot a current issue. Let’s first understand what aCLIand nCLI command utilities are.   aCLI: utility to create, modify and manage VMs in AHV. nCLI: utility to manage cluster operations.   The history files are hidden and are persistent across reboots. Below article explains how to  retrieve commands history: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/kbs/details/?targetId=kA032000000TSsjCAG