How It works

Nutanix offers a monitoring & alerting utility, NCC - Nutanix Cluster check, which comes    pre-installed on every CVM.Nutanix Cluster Check is a powerful framework which includes several plugins to monitor & alert on different hardware and software components. It is installed on every CVM across a single cluster on all nodes.It comes with almost all Nutanix products, such as Prism Central, Files etc. NCC will include the relevant checks for these products, enabling Nutanix administrators to keep on top of any software, configuration issues. Following are some of the important Hardware (Physical Components) checks and alerting offered byNCC:a) Periodic Disk checksb) Periodic BIOS / BMC Firmware checks (Versions / Upgrades required)c) Boot Devices Monitoring (Sata DOM or M.2)d) SSD and HDD wear and tear checkse) BIOS, BMC checks to ensure all hardware components are current and stablef) Network Interface card checksg) IPMI / Out of band management interface checksh) Power Supply

Hi We currently use Files and I have created an SMB share. The share is setup to store disaster recovery information in the event a production failure. We use Data protection to replicate the share to another Nutanix cluster at another site.We want the ability to access this share in the event that our Active Directory isn’t available. I was looking for a location either in PE or PC where I could create local accounts and assign them as a user to this share but have been unable to find.Is this possible to do? Thanks 

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of October 20-26, 2019.KB 4639 - How to place CVM and Host in maintenance mode KB 8232 - Network Segmentation with isolated physical NIC KB 8285 - Alert - A130152 - Two Node Cluster changed state to stand-alone mode KB 8308 - Cluster expansion with Network Segmentation KB 8370 - Determining expected bandwidth for Pulse data KB 8376 - [Karbon] Node image upgrade stalls at 5% when an HTTP proxy is configured on Prism Element KB 8380 - Remote Site Connectivity Test - Test Connection Feature in PRISM KB 8386 - NCC check failure with "ERR : Failed to fetch NIC list on X.X.X.X for 00:0c:29:b2:a3:20" KB 8399 - SSR volume detach may issue the Windows event log "Error code: 0xc000009d" if FSRM quota is enabled KB 8400 - Interpreting advertised capacity configuration and logical usages of Storage Containers KB 8401 - Manage IPMI Configuration > Alerts through SMCIPMITOOL KB 8403 - Alert - A130108 - Cloud remote site failed to start K

Let’s say you’re running a Nutanix cluster with ESXi as a hypervisor and noticing a lot of files in your datastore and different service crashing.You’re running a VDI workload and number of files in the datastore is exceeding 30,000 and the vpxa service is crashing. This can be critical for your infrastructure as vpxa is responsible for communication between the ESXi host and the VirtualCenter Server. Does Nutanix give you a warning before the file limit is reached?Absolutely yes!The NCC health check nfs_file_count_check verifies if an NFS datastore has more than 20,000 files.Want to run the check individually?  Login from any CVM and try running the following command: nutanix@cvm$ ncc health_checks hypervisor_checks nfs_file_count_check Nutanix recommends that the number of files in any datastore should be less than 20,000 if vpxa instability issues occur.Want to manually check the number of files in any datastore?Try running the following command from an ESXi host shellfind /vmfs/vol

If you are running AOS 5.10 or later, you may notice some user VM in Prism show two IP addresses. This could happen if the VM releases its older IP address and acquire a new one. You will see both old and new IP addresses in Prism for this VM, even if VM uses a temporary IP address like APIPA addresses (APIPA addresses fall into 169.254.1.0 - 169.254.254.255 range and use 255.255.0.0 netmask)This is by design and should nto last more than 10 minutes as we scan the arp cache every 10 minutes as we scan the ARP cache every 10 minutes to detect duplicate entries, and remove all entries corresponding to an IP address except for the most recent one. Tis has been explained in your nutanix portal kb 7652.

Just curious if there is going to be an update to the Move API documentation to explain how we can create a migration plan from ESX to AHV. Currently the only example shown is for AWS to AHV and when we try to substitute that payload with values from ESX it fails. Create plan example is here:http://{{ move-ip-address }}:8082/#/v2api/plans/createplan We’ve tried using this same template to create a plan for ESX, but it seems to choke on the network identification section with a return code of {'ApiVersion': '2.0.0', 'Code': 20512, 'Message': "Invalid Network Mapping for VM 'NX-TEST'. Ensure sufficient user permissions on source environment to fetch network information.", 'State': 'Error'}(we have validate permissions) This appears to be the part of the payload that it doesn’t like:From the AWS example: "Networks": [            {                "SourceID": "vpc-8e1c3de7",                "TargetUUID": "343eaa8f-a251-4ec0-8ede-729c97f7cddc"            } We’ve substituted these AWS specific

 You might have noticed vCenter alarms regarding CVM memory usage being high,  and when you look at Prism console for the CVM, you will see it reports 100% but no prism alert will has posed up.This is a known visual artifact with passthrough VMs that could be bypassed by creating a customize alarm in vCetner for VM memory usage and apply it to all other VMs or to the folders containing the VMs. Disabling the builtin vCenter alarms in conjunction with enabling this customized alarm can by pass the alarm reported for VCM while continue reporting any VM high memory usage. For better understanding of this issue and its by pass please review the KB 4465 in your nutanix portal.  

What is the color of your Cluster Health Heart? We use the following stoplight style color code to report the quick view of the cluster health, in the form of a color coded heart.    Cluster Healthy     Cluster has at least one Warning Alert     Cluster has at least one Critical Alert  To view the specific alert(s), on the Health Dashboard click on any of the selections from the Home Dashboard, or click on the Heart directly to be taken to the Health Dashboard overview. Selection Options:Remote Sites Hosts Services Protection Domains …Once you have selected a specific Alert to review, you will have several options for the Alert.Run Check Turn Check Off Alert Policy ScheduleMake a note of the Alert name, and locate the Alert ID by searching for the Alert name in the Cluster Settings, Alert Policies view.  False Positive Alerts Occasionally there will be an alert that will inaccurately show a warning or failure. When this occurs there are a few options to correct

Hi guys, I'm somewhat new to Nutanix and I was curious if there was a powershell command that will allow you to set the project for a VM. Essentially I want to use scripts to deploy VM's and then when the VM is deployed move it into a project so we can track resources. The deployment part of this is easy enough, but nothing in powershell seems to indicate it can even do this. Is this something that can even be done? I really like the powershell integration, and I really like the SSP Prism Central and Projects. I'd really really like to be able to use both of these together. Thanks

If you already have a functioning “Syslog Server” and you would like to forward cluster logs to it, you can follow instructions in:“https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Advanced-Admin-AOS-v511:set-rsyslog-config-c.html”However, presently (as of fall of 2019) the activity entities like Alerts/Events/Audits in prism central cannot be redirected to remote syslog servers. This can be changed in future releases of PC and AOS will be reflected in Release notes.  

Let’s say you have Nutanix cluster with 24 CPU cores and 2 sockets and now you’re confused regarding the terminology.  vCPU and cores per CPU and how to provision CPU to a Virtual Machine confusing you? Let’s break the terminology down in simple terms!In the world of Hardware, we have sockets and cores. In a host, there would be 2 sockets(or CPU) and 12 cores in each socket, resulting in 24 cores.So what is a vCPU?vCPU corresponds to the number of sockets for the VM. Cores per vCPU correspond to cores in a socket, so in conclusion, if you have provisioned your VM with the following configuration:2  vCPU 4 core per vCPUIn this scenario, your VM would have 2 sockets and 8 cores in total.How can I provision my vCPU, is there a guide or documentation regarding it?Absolutely yes, please give the following article a readCPU Configuration So is there a way to overprovision my CPU?Absolutely yes, please give the following article a readCPU Oversubscription 

"cluster -f destroy" does not help. This is a new cluster, but during one click ESXi upgrade, tasks for stuck and now nothing can happen. I am fed up with tasks getting stuck and not completing, I would like to destroy the cluster and individually update ESXi on each node. We are runing XC740xd-12

When expecting to witness changes in storage utilisation performance, increase in free space in particular, please be aware that the change may not take effect immediately.There are two main types of Curator scans:Scheduled Scans Curator Full Scan — in 6 hrs after the last Full Scan Curator Partial Scan — in 1 hour after the last Partial Scan. Triggered Scans  — as a response to a situation in the cluster where Curator is urgently required.For more information:KB-2101, KB-2924.Posts here in NEXT community curator task type list or a search.Nutanix University video on Curator.Nutanix Bible on monitoring Curator tasks Application Mobility Fabric (AMF)

Suppose you have Erasure Coding (EC-X) enabled on all of your containers. Over time you find that workload structure and type has changed and is no longer suitable for EC-X. What do you do?Since migrating VMs between containers is a disruptive task alternative approach would be to disable EC-X on a container.In preparation for the task there are a couple of factors we recommend are taken into consideration:There will be increased I/O at the storage layer. Once EC-X is disabled on a container additional data will be written to the container and replicated. The influx of the data can be estimated by reversing EC-X gains. Expect temporary increase of storage utilisation in addition to calculations above. Parity data will not be removed immediately. Parity data size can be reverse calculated based on the same EC-X gains estimates.    There are no guardrails in terms of storage utilisation once EC-X is disabled. Please make sure there is sufficient space for the decoded data to be written —

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of October 13-19, 2019.KB 8018 - NCC Health Check: ns_proto_consistency_check KB 8094 - NCC Health Check: disk_status_check KB 8148 - NCC Health Check: cpu_avx_check KB 8315 - Files: chmod/chown on TLD fails on first mount with CentOS 6 KB 8356 - [Nutanix Objects] Objects 1.0.1 is missing from LCM Inventory KB 8358 - [Nutanix Objects] Unable to download access keys in browsers like Mozilla Firefox KB 8360 - LCM pre-check test_esx_ha_enabled failed but HA is actually enabled on vCenter KB 8362 - Alert - A130209 - IO failures to a data source in an external repository KB 8364 - Windows prompts for restart after migrating vms on a VDI cluster to a node with a different CPU generation KB 8366 - AHV | Guest VM running CentOS 7 may hang when CPU is hot added KB 8367 - AHV | VM may be restarted unexpectedly due to memory corruption KB 8371 - Nutanix Move - Upgrading using the offline bundle may show an unexpected error KB 8379 - AHV

Let's say that you have 25 Gbps SFP+ Network card in your host and have created a Windows Virtual Machine with a 1 Gbps Nic card and now confused regarding the bandwidth for the virtual machine and how the Virtual Nic of the VM is different than the Host Nic when it comes to bandwidth and functionality. vNic is the software NIC emulation in the VM and is just a driver and in latest VMs the NIC is para-virtualised, which means that the NIC and Operating System is aware of the Host Physical NIC capability and understands that the vNic is just a driver. So what basically is this driver supposed to do? The vNic driver is really an API between the guest and the hypervisor so the vNic bandwidth is totally disconnected from any physical hardware. So what is the Physical NIC card then? Physical Nic is the physical network adapter connected to your physical switch and is responsible for the transfer of packets in your environment. So how Para virtualised vNic is better, does it have any advanta

What can be encrypted? What configuration is supported? At which layer the data is encrypted? Which layer encryption is more secure?Nutanix offers three options of data encryption:Data-at-Rest Encryption - Self Encrypted Drives (SEDs) - cluster's native or external KMS for software-only encryption. If the Controller VM cannot get the correct keys from the key management server (KMS), it cannot access data on the drives. If a drive is re-seated, it becomes locked. If a drive is stolen, the data is inaccessible without the KEK (key-encrypting-key) (which cannot be obtained from the drive). If a node is stolen, the key management server can revoke the node certificates to ensure they cannot be used to access data on any of the drives. Data-at-Rest Encryption - Software Only For AHV, the data can be encrypted on a cluster level. This is applicable to an empty cluster or a cluster with existing data. For ESXi and Hyper-V, the data can be encrypted on a cluster or container level. The c

Looking to strengthen security of your HCL cluster? Consider keeping only necessary ports open. Following is the list of firewall ports that must be kept open to successfully access the Nutanix cluster. Prism web console: 9440, 80 SSH to both CVM and Hypervisor: 22 Cluster remote support: 80, 8443 vCenter remote console: 443, 902, 903 from both the user host and vCenter vCenter from Prism web console: 443, 80 Citrix MCS: virtual IP, Port 9440 (TCP) Xtract for VMs (Move): ESXi hosts (TCP 443, 902); AHV (TCP and UDP 2049, 111) Following is the list of ports that must be kept open for the 1-Click upgrade. *.compute-*.amazonaws.com:80,443 release-api.nutanix.com:80 ntnx-portal.s3.amazonaws.com and s3*.amazonaws.com Information above is extracted from KB-1478 which also explains what to do when configuring the entire range of IP address for AWS is not acceptable and using FQDN wildcards is not an option supported by the firewall the environment. KB-1202 Lists port number

Nutanix provides customer support services in several ways:The Pulse feature sends diagnostic data from customer clusters to Nutanix Support on a regular schedule. This enables Nutanix to deliver proactive, context-aware support to customers, monitor customer clusters and provide assistance when, or even before, a problem occurs. This data collection is anonymized, securely transmitted, has no effect on system performance and only basic system-level data needed to monitor the health and status of the cluster are collected. The Pulse framework also allows Nutanix Support Engineers to remotely collect logs from customer clusters on demand with customer approval but without needing assistance from the customer. This saves time in the data gathering stage of the troubleshooting process. Instead of asking the customer to run commands and send the output, which could go back and forth several times, the Support Engineers can just collect the logs themselves via the connection provided by Pul

We have below script which is changing VM's project from default to some other project but after we execute invoke-webrequest, we notice that it will change Vm's "spec_version" to different number than it's in out $body variable. That's the reason why invoke-webrequest is given below error. Just before we run invoke-webrequest, we checked that vm's configuration metadata "spec_version" is same than in $body that we are trying invoke. So it seems that invoke-webrequest is somehow first changing the vm's spec_version in vm's configuration data (in our case to 18) and after that trying to invoke spec_version = 16 on top of that. But because the version should be same, it's failing. Same error occured when you are trying the same in REST Explorer - "vms". SCRIPT: Import-Module d:\temp\PSNutanixPrismCentral.psm1 Invoke-NutanixPrismCentralLogin -Username "username@xxx.local" -Uri "https://prismcentral.xxxx.local:9440" # Get non default projects $Projects = Get-NutanixPrismCentralProje

If you have a 3 node cluster and your data resiliency is okay, you can handle a failure of 1 node, this is termed as FT-1 (Fault Tolerance), or alternatively RF-2. RF-2 is Redundancy Factor - 2, which states that all data in your NX environment has another copy distributed in your cluster, which makes it possible for the cluster to sustain a single component failure and is the default fault tolerance configuration for your cluster. What if you're handling a larger cluster and your workload is extremely critical? Redundancy factor 3 is a configurable option that allows a Nutanix cluster to withstand the simultaneous failure of two components by saving 2 copies of all your data in two different nodes in your NX environment. The requirements for RF-3 are as follows- Minimum number of Nodes in your environment should be 5 and the storage containers should be RF-3. Want to know more about how RF-3 works? Redundancy Factor 3 So what if you created a storage container with RF-2 and

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of October 6-12, 2019. KB 8046 - Set Up Frame Admin user with Domain Joined Instances KB 8076 - Sysprep fails on Windows 10 due to AppX packages not being installed for all users KB 8098 - Renewal of licenses/Buying new licenses KB 8101 - Licensing Steps to License Capacity Based Starter License KB 8149 - NCC Health Check: check_dvs_esxi_version_compatibilty KB 8151 - Saml authentication using ADFS unable to login KB 8229 - Alert Email Digest gets delayed within 30 minutes in AOS 5.10.5 or later KB 8237 - Kubernetes Dashboard deployment fails due to incompatible version with Kubernetes cluster. KB 8249 - LCM Pre-check : test_node_uuid_validity KB 8282 - Poor thread load balancing within RHEL/CentOS guests constraints guest IO performance KB 8304 - Era Server displays incorrect time after reboot KB 8312 - VMs not getting IP address from IPAM KB 8313 - AHV | Kernel debugging of Windows VM via network (KDNET) KB 83

Prior to AOS version 5.1.2 memory_reserved had not been populated at the time of VM creation. Once the VM was powered on the memory_reserved field was populated and the value remained persistent even when the VM was powered off. The issue was fixed in version 5.1.5 and 5.5 and above. It is important to remember that there is no over-provisioning of memory in AHV. The "total provisioned memory" amounts to all the memory configured on all VMs regardless of power state. The "total reserved memory" is memory configured to all Powered on VMs only.

Hi, We have several Hyper-V servers. We intend to implement Nutanix to replace those Hyper-V servers. We have been given Nutanix Collector win32 v2 to run collecting the information of the Hyper-V servers to estimate what Nutanix to buy. However, I don't know how to run it. Has any one run this before ? Is there any guide document ? Thank you very much for your help.

Once you complete firmware upgrade start prepping for another one. Eternal compatibility matrix checks, arguments with vendors on a version that is supported by both compute and hypervisor, forgetting to include plugins into upgrade and the list just goes on and on. Sounds familiar? There is a way out. Developed as the second generation of one-click upgrade LCM simplifies this problem for Nutanix environments. LCM provides a single process in Prism that identifies and qualifies upgrade paths against tested and validated versions, then uses a nondisruptive one-click process to complete the upgrade. LCM can perform firmware upgrades on the following server platforms: Nutanix NX appliances. Dell XC and XC Core appliances. Lenovo HX and HX Core appliances. When you upgrade firmware, we recommend that you use the latest versions of AOS, Foundation, and LCM. Quick snapshot of LCM workflow: Interested? Start with LCM glossary. Coffee read on LCM: Nutanix Upgrades: Life Cycle Manager