How It works

What if one day you wake up and decided to give AHV a shot? But wait… you are running ESXi.  Hmm… If only there was a way to convert ESXi to AHV. Well… there is a feature called “In-place hypervisor conversion” to save the day.   But what about the VMs?  All the VMs that are running in the ESXi cluster are converted so that they can run on the AHV cluster.    Following are the enhancements to this feature are:- Decreased VM downtime. The state of the VM is preserved and the VM is brought back into the same state post-conversion. Preservation of the MAC addresses of the VM NICs after conversion The Prism console is responsive during the conversion process. However, the Prism goes into Read-Only state.   You can check out the requirements and limitations for In-place hypervisor conversion here.   Finally ready to give AHV a run after going through the requirements? To start the conversion, follow the document here   Have any questions? Drop a comment and let us start a discussion

Receiving emails about EOL, but no clue what it means? Once a product is EOL (end of life), then there will be no further upgrades/updates released for it and will no longer be supported by Nutanix.   This may include the AOS version, Prism central, Nutanix files or Supported hardware platforms.   To view the EOL information, navigate as follows:-   Login into Nutanix Support Portal. Menu > Documentation. EOL Information. Select the entity you want to see the information for.   Don’t want to follow the above steps and like shortcuts?… Click here then.   Have any questions? Drop a comment and let us start a discussion.

So you are planning to configure VM-VM anti-affinity policy in your AHV environment to ensure critical VMs run on different hosts. That’s thoughtful thinking right there and it makes sense.   Now if you create this policy when the VMs are off... when you power them on, you’ll see the policy kick in and the VMs will be running on different hosts.   But… what if the VMs were powered on when you applied the policy? Do you have to restart the VMs?   The answer is No.   After the policy is created, Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling  (ADS) will migrate the VMs running on the same hosts to different ones.  This will not happen immediately though. It takes a while for ADS to start migrating these VMs.   So sit relaxed, you created the policy… ADS will take care of it.   Want to know how to configure VM-VM anti-affinity policy or how to delete it. Check it out here   Have any questions? Drop a comment and let's start a discussion.

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of February 9-15, 2020. KB 5512 - REST API: Alerts data placeholders are not populated KB 8803 - How to change ESXi Host TLS version running on Nutanix cluster KB 8812 - Moving Nutanix nodes to chassis of different generation KB 8855 - How to change Virtual Machine video card memory in AHV KB 8897 - Nutanix Collector "We couldn't find this IP address or host name" KB 8916 - LCM operation may timeout when performing upgrades in ESXi environments KB 8924 - How to map Nutanix Volumes disk from Linux VM to vdisk KB 8942 - karbonctl commands with --pc-username and --pc-password flags fail with 'no consumer: "text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"' error KB 8951 - Alert - A160068 - AFSDuplicateIPDetected KB 8955 - RMA: Return Instructions (APAC) KB 8962 - Unable to browse containers using WinSCP when it contains files name with non-English characters KB 8963 - PRISM displays the wrong speed for the NICs faster than 10G Note: You may need to

Every modern architecture solution requires data saving and optimization techniques to manage their workload efficiently and optimally. Nutanix HCI provides various techniques for storage optimization based on your workloads. Let us take a look around regarding the techniques to understand the working and best practices.      1. Compression  There are two types of compression available   Post-process compression Inline compression Want to know how compression works and how to enable it in your cluster?  Compression Guide   2. Deduplication   Deduplication reduces space usage by consolidating duplicate data blocks on Nutanix storage.  Want to know more about different types of Deduplication and the best practices of using Deduplication? Deduplication    3. Erasure Coding Erasure coding increases the usable capacity on a cluster. Instead of replicating data, erasure coding uses parity information to rebuild data in the event of a disk failure. The capacity savings of erasure codin

Let's say that you upgraded your cluster and noticed that the timezone of your AHV has changed, why and what is the recommended practice?  When running a health check, you will see a warning stating that "The AHV host's time zone was changed/set to something other than UTC." Nutanix recommends against making any configuration changes on the AHV hosts which includes changing timezone, from AHV version 20170830.58, the default timezone on AHV hosts is set to UTC upon upgrade or installation, for more information check out KB-6834 In this case, no further action is required from your side. To edit the timezone of a user VM, check out KB-3134 To edit the timezone of a CVM, check out KB-1050

In our environment we are currently hosting 2 HP Gen9 ESXi servers. Our plan is to purchase a single HP Gen 10 and having a 3 node cluster made out of it. To start with I want to create a single node (Gen 10) and slowly start moving VM’s from the esx host to that Nutanix host without interrupting the 2 esx servers. So my question here is, How is it possible for me to start with a Single host and start adding hosts to make up a cluster of 3 nodes (1 → Gen10, 2-Gen9)?

Ever thought a lot about advantages of UEFI over legacy BIOS? No? Who does that anyway?   To start with, UEFI firmware is a successor to legacy BIOS firmware that supports larger hard drives, faster boot time and provides more security features. Creating and starting VMs with UEFI firmware provides the following advantages. Faster boot time Avoid legacy option ROM address constraints Include robust reliability and fault management Use UEFI drivers   AOS 5.11 onwards we have a functionality to see the Boot Configuration from Prism UI by following the steps below:-   Navigate to the VM page -> select your VM. Click on Update. Under boot configuration, you can see if its Legacy BIOS or UEFI.   Want to know more about UEFI Support for VM in Nutanix, click here   Have any questions? Drop a comment and let us start discussing.

Hi, NCC is reporting that I’m missing the cpupower command. Seems strange. I’m using a i7-2600k processor in each node. Should I install the package using yum repositories?  Where does it run, host or CVM?   Detailed information for host_cpu_frequency_check: Node 192.168.0.127: ERR : Error while getting host CPU frequency range. bash: cpupower: command not found   Node 192.168.0.121: ERR : Error while getting host CPU frequency range. bash: cpupower: command not found   Node 192.168.0.125: ERR : Error while getting host CPU frequency range. bash: cpupower: command not found   Node 192.168.0.123: ERR : Error while getting host CPU frequency range. bash: cpupower: command not found

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's say that you are monitoring your cluster's performance or you received alerts regarding high CPU on a CVM.  Why high CPU utilisation on a CVM is a critical alert?  The CVMs are one of the most important components in a Nutanix cluster. It is crucial that CVMs are healthy and perform their tasks properly as they run Nutanix software and serve all of the I/O operations to the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host. To understand the reason behind the high utilization, begin by identifying patterns of the performance:  Is the high CPU constant or periodic?  How long has the high CPU been occurring?  Is there a similar behaviour on other CVMs?  Certain patterns may point towards a cause. For example, a periodic spike may be attributed to antivirus, backup or a similar scheduled task being run in the background. To view the live CPU utilization run top on a CVM. For historical "top" info, review the top logs based on each CVM under/home/nutanix/data/logs/sysstats/top.INFO

Hi, I am dealing with an EOL cluster (3060). I am facing recently a case where the prism element does list a vm which does not exist on the AHV. It is a fake vm.  There is no active support to ask them. Any help?    

Can someone help me with a power shell script which can help us to build multiple VMs by using a Win10 template we have. The environment that I am trying to build the VDIs have Nutanix as the Hardware and ESX 6.5 as the Hypervisor. The script should able to build the machines with sequential number and put them under a specif folder in Hypervisor. I can get the different templates for different containers and with proper Vlan.

Let's say you had an issue in your cluster and you have worked with a Nutanix engineer.  If the issue needs deep investigation, we usually create a log bundle locally on the CVM and then we ask you to upload it to the portal, then we drop the remote session so the customer doesn’t have to wait online while we investigate. After generating the bundle, it will be saved locally on your CVM and it's not automatically removed.  You can delete the bundles if you don't need it anymore to free more space on the CVM, as the CVM is a very critical component in the Nutanix eco-system and it's very important to have enough space and memory for it to perform it's tasks.  Make sure that you do not remove a directory under "logbay" but simply a file or files inside a sub-directory.  Usually the two directories that gets populated the most are "/data/logbay/bundles" and "/data/logbay/taskdata", deleting the files inside these directory will free up some space.  Check out how to create a log bundle at 

There can be instances where one might forget the CVM password and is not able to access the command line.    Is there a way we can recover/reset the CVM password?   Well, there is a way to recover/reset your CVM nutanix password using the prism console. Of course for that, one needs to have the prism password in hand.   We can set up passwordless ssh by generating ssh keys from your pc/desktop and then adding your public key to the cluster through the prism. So when you try to login to the CVM from the same pc/desktop, it will not prompt you to enter the password and will directly log you in.   The article detailing the steps on how to do the above is KB-1895    Now once you’re in, you can change the password by simply following KB-2233   Have any questions? Drop a comment and let’s start a discussion.

3 Identical pc's P300 Lenovo running I-9900 Cpu's error back saying non intel CPU

Hello All, Sami here, the 3rd party developer responsible for the current official Nutanix Visio stencils. I’ve been playing with few ideas how to make them better and came up with Dynamic Nutanix Visio stencils.    Why DPTPB Dynamic Nutanix Visio shapes?   Let's be frank: Documenting can be boring, all the exciting and fun stuff has been done and now you have to document what you've done or plan to do. The harder the tools used for documenting are to use, the less likely you are to produce quality documentation. My aim with the Nutanix Dynamic Visio shapes is to have ability to produce more detailed and accurate drawings of Nutanix environments in less time. This is accomplished by using intent based workflow and to have built-in automation to populate the drawing with desired elements based on your intent.   What are DPTPB Dynamic Nutanix Front and Rear View Shapes?   DTPPB Nutanix Dynamic Front & Rear View Shapes are Nutanix NX appliance product images / shapes in Microsoft Visi

Let's say you want to shut down a CVM for maintenance, firmware upgrade or any other reason, and when you run "cvm_shutdown -P" you get this error: "StandardError: Cannot connect to genesis to check node configuration status" If you have an older version of AOS (5.5.x or 5.6.x) then the shutdown script on your CVM might need a small modification, you can contact Nutanix support and an engineer will edit the file on the spot, or you can upgrade the AOS to a newer version which has the fix. If you have a newer version and you want to shutdown a node in the cluster, make sure that you follow the correct shutdown process depending on your hypervisor, here are the instructions for each: AHV, ESXi, hyper-v or Citrix. You can also check out KB-3270 for the cvm_shutdown script.

Let's say that you performed a vulnerability scan on one of the CVMs and you see that some unused ports are open, what are these ports and why are they opened? For example, some of the ambiguous ports that are open are ports 445 and 2071, but you won't find documentation for this. Port 445 used by CVMs are used by stargate service, a critical service used by hypervisor/UVMs to access our storage Port 2071 is for the NGT regardless of your hypervisor type. Some use cases for NGT for non-AHV hypervisors are application consistent snapshot, file level restore, etc.  Closing the wrong port might affect your cluster performance, you should be careful when editing any port. If you are unsure of what a specific port is, contact Nutanix support for information and assist. Here are some commands to modify the ports on your nodes: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Nutanix-Security-Guide-v510:wc-cvm-firewall-block-unblock-ports-cli-t.html   Example of firewall ports that mus

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of February 2-8, 2020. KB 8259 - Prism Central Backup and Restore Using Metro Availability on ESXi KB 8728 - Nuclei or REST API does not sort entities in a human friendly way KB 8775 - False positive Alert A103088 : "CVM {} is unreachable" generated due to out of memory condition for cluster_health cgroup KB 8836 - Nutanix Files - Linux UID and GID not mapping correctly to Active Directory configurations KB 8862 - Only 500 Recovery Points are displayed in Prism Central KB 8894 - Genesis crashes with "TypeError: must be string without null bytes, not str" error after node expansion or cluster create KB 8898 - [Karbon] Deployments failure with error ETCD: rejected connection from " <PC>:<port> " (error "remote error: tls: bad certificate", ServerName "" KB 8899 - [ CSI ] Plugin fails to mount a volume on Ubuntu with error "while loading shared libraries: libisns-nocrypto.so.0" KB 8901 - Flow | Number of required Flow

In certain scenarios, after upgrading to LCM 2.2.9225 by performing inventory, the inventory objects, software/firmware updates are not displayed in the LCM page on PE (Prism Element) when logged in as an AD user.   This issue is generally observed if the AD Domain does not have a service account associated with it in Prism. Service account configuration in Prism was not mandatory in AOS versions older than 5.5. If authentication with the AD Domain was configured when the cluster was running the older versions, you are likely to hit this problem.   You can identify the issue either from the Prism UI or from the ncli, for the UI identification: log in to Prism > Settings (gear icon) > Authentication > Check if a service account is configured.   For the ncli identification and the solution check out: https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/7598   This is fixed in AOS 5.11, 5.10.6 or later.

Let’s say that you want to dive deeper into the performance of your AHV cluster to understand if the resource allocation has been done correctly and to check how many CPUs, Cores per CPU and Threads reside on each host. To see the CPU components, SSH to a CVM in your cluster and run ”hostssh lscpu”:   The result above is an output example of one node, for this host there are: Sockets = 2 Cores per socket = 6 (2x6 = 12 in total) Threads per core = 2 (2x12 = 24 in total) CPUs = 24 (threads in total) If you wish to see more information for each of the 24 CPUs on this host you can run "cat /proc/cpuinfo" on a host shell (not through the CVM). To jump from the CVM to it’s host, run “ssh root@192.168.5.1” and run the command above.

Can anyone let me know which steps are being involved when I expand Hyper-V cluster by using Prism? I have a Hyper-V cluster that being mixed by some AHV storage nodes and looks like I cannot use the Prism cluster expansion feature to add more nodes...

Can we have a document on Ncli

Regardless of the type of data you generate on your VMs, the data has to be backed up and safe. how do you make sure of that? a first step is to understand our basic approaches and how do we guarantee data resiliency.  The importance of data protection increases as the amount of data generated by your VMs continues to grow at unprecedented rates by expanding your storage pool, adding nodes to your cluster and deploying new Virtual Machines. To ensure that the data is safe, we have different approaches, here is a brief explanation for each:  Protection Domain (two types) Protection domain - Asynchronous DR: is a defined group of entities that consists of VMs and Volume groups that are backed up locally on the cluster and can also be replicated on a remote site.  Protection domain - Metro Availability: is a pre-specified and an active storage container in the local cluster linked to an inactive container with the same name on a remote site in which synchronous data replication occurs whe