How It works

Did you know that each node of the cluster keeps records of the upgrade history of its components? Quite convenient to look at when determining the timeline of events during troubleshooting.    Each of the components below has a dedicated history file: AOS Hypervisor NCC Files Hardware CVM memory In addition, there is a history of maintenance mode engagement on the cluster.   The article below lists the commands necessary to retrieve a specific component’s upgrade history. https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/kbs/details/?targetId=kA0600000008VYECA2   Want to know how upgrades work in Nutanix?   Take a look at the following Knowledge Base to understand how upgrades work in Nutanix architecture. https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/kbs/details/?targetId=kA00e000000LMgICAW    

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of April 5-11, 2020. KB 8842 - NCC Health Check: cassandra_ssd_size_check KB 9198 - [Prism Central] Prism Central 5.16.1.2 - Docker logs for docker based services are missing KB 9209 - Zoom Security Statement KB 9211 - How to remove Ghost NICs on Windows Note: You may need to log in to the Support Portal to view some of these articles.

I have read in the ECA course some recommandation from Nutanix regarding AHV Networking specialy for LACP. If this is a best practice please Nutanix do as usual and set it by default :  "ovs-vsctl set port br0-up other_config:lacp-fallback- ab=true” "ovs-vsctl set port br0-up other_config:lacp-time=fast"

You may have encountered an alert about PE-PC Connection Failure, or regarding IDF db to db sync. It’s possible that you had a visible issue with Prism Central’s management and monitoring of clusters, but also possible that you didn’t.   What are these alerts for? How do we know if there’s really a problem? What can we do to fix it? I would like to answer these questions for you.   Prism Element and Prism Central need two-way communication for a number of reasons. Manageability, forecasting, alert visibility, and reporting in Prism Central all depend on periodic syncing of data from PE to PC. Prism Central’s VM and infrastructure management, image creation, DR orchestration, and other enhanced features like Calm require API communication from PC to PE.   PE-PC Connection Failure alerts indicate communication failure. This could be a short-lived issue and even an expected one, like when PC is rebooted during an upgrade, or it could reflect a more prolonged connection loss.    Seeing the

NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) is a framework of scripts that can help diagnose cluster health. NCC can be run provided that the individual nodes are up, regardless of the cluster state. NCC checks could be run from the Prism web console for clusters where AOS 5.0 or above and NCC 3.0 or above are installed.   Procedure: 1. Logon to the Prism web console. 2. Browse to Health page, select Actions > Run Checks 3. Select the checks that you want to run. 4. Enable/disable the sending of the report email, then click Run. 5. Browse to Tasks Page, to review the summary by clicking on the task status ‘Succeeded”. 6. Download the summary by clicking on ‘Download output’.   Note: You cannot run NCC checks from the Prism web console for clusters where AOS 4.7.x or earlier and NCC 3.0 or earlier are installed.   Log Collector Logs can be collected for Controller VMs, file server, hardware, alerts, hypervisor, and for the system.   Procedure: 1. Logon to the Prism web console. 2. Browse to H

Logging into the cluster 5 times a day (we can’t imagine why but you’re the boss) and always re-attempt the login because you can never enter the password right? Concerned about the security of transmitting your password across the network? Looking for an extra security layer? All of these are valid reasons to enable key-based authentication for SSH sessions.   Generally speaking, there are two options: Go completely passwordless Use a combination of a public key and a password   How does it work? You generate a key pair (a public and a private keys) using RSA algorithm. You never share a private key with any other system or server. The public key, on the other hand, you add to the Prism.   With the first login public RSA key of a server (Prism in this instance) is shared with a client (session initiator) which together with the public key of the host recorded in the prism comprises a mutual public key exchange. Since the public key on its own, without its private part, is not enou

The new ESXi 7.0  has been released, does the latest version of nutanix 5.15 (LTS) support upgrades?

Let’s consider a scenario where you have two NX AHV clusters, A and B and there is an urgent need to move a VM from cluster A to cluster B.    What are the scenarios available?    Do you need to create a protection domain?  Do you need to import vdisks from cluster A to cluster B?  These are some questions which might be boggling your mind.    The following knowledge article helps to list the different scenarios available and steps required in each scenario.    AHV | How to move VM disks between two AHV Clusters     To understand the concepts of data protection and disaster recovery in the Nutanix environment, the following documents might be helpful   Data Protection and Disaster Recovery for AHV based VMs Data Protection and Disaster Recovery 

What is Prism Central? Prism Central is a Multi-cluster manager responsible for managing multiple Acropolis Clusters to provide a single, centralized management interface. Prism Central is an optional software appliance (VM) which can be deployed in addition to the Acropolis Cluster (can run on it). How to access Prism Central? Prism Central can be accessed using the IP address specified during configuration or corresponding DNS entry.   The figure shows an image illustrating the conceptual relationship between Prism Central and Prism Element:   Here is a brief explanations about each of the main pages in Prism Central UI: Home Page: Environment wide monitoring dashboard including detailed information on service status, capacity planning, performance, tasks, etc.  To get further information on any of them you can click on the item of interest. Virtual Infrastructure: Virtual entities (e.g. VMs, containers, Images, categories, etc.) Policies: Policy management and creation (e.g. securi

Would like to put together a report that would in detail break down the storage used by VM snapshots, as well as, storage used by Protection Domains.   Have been digging around and found a couple scripts that display some useful information however not quite what I’m looking for.  Anyone have an idea on how best to proceed?

I have an AHV VM that I would like to disconnect the NIC and connect the NIC in my script.  I need it disconnected while sysprep runs and sets a static IP address then I’m good to connect the NIC again.  (Otherwise it pulls a DHCP address and replaced the hostname with the DHCP address in DNS).   I can Get-NTNXVMNIC and see the current status of the NIC but I don’t see a way to change the status (i.e. I don’t find a Set-NTNXVMNIC command).   Thanks!   -TimG

NTP or Network Time Protocol is an integral component for any infrastructure as it allows for accurate timestamps of events across the environment. Whether it is relied on for monitoring, troubleshooting or services and applications operations – NTP source is one of the key components of modern IT infrastructure.it helps different systems to be in sync with each other.   Controller Virtual Machines (CVMs) are the backbone of Nutanix Hyper-converged Infrastructure. It is important for all the CVMs in the cluster to be in sync with each other. The CVMs use NTP to sync time between themselves within the cluster by after electing one of the CVMs as an NTP leader, even when an external NTP server is not configured, not available or not being used by design.    Is there a check which validates time sync between the CVMs?  The NCC health check cvm_time_drift_check verifies the time differences between CVMs (Controller VMs).    Why is it important for the CVMs to be in time- sync with each oth

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