How It works

 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 fro

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?

"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

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 b

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

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 th

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

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-14

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

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 project

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 abou

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

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:

Occasionally you need to temporarily power off your cluster hardware for maintenance, relocation or any other necessary task. To do this you will need to stop your cluster and then start it back after the required task was done. But you will need to perform the following tasks before and after the cluster stop/start commands: 1- Disable any “Protection Domains” in the cluster and make sure there is no ongoing replication occurring. 2- Make sure no “Fail” message appears when performing the ncc health check on the cluster 3- Power off all the Vms running in the cluster 4- Stop “Files” (previously AFS) if you are using it in the cluster 5- Run "cluster stop" command 6- power off all CVM 7- Put all hypervisors in maintenance mode 8- Power off the hardware After the maintenance and powering on the hardware, you will need to undo the above steps. Put nodes out of maintenance mode and make s

Hello I'm new to Nutanix and setting up a small 3 node cluster with ESXi. Just wanted to know whether there is any automatic migration from Nutanix side in case of resource contention on 1 node. One such example: if there are too many VM hosted on a single node and causing storage contention, is there any option on Nutanix to automatically migrate some VM to other nodes (similar to what VMware DRS does - but this time, for storage) Thanks

I'm curious to find out how folks have been implementing departmental shared folders in nutanix files. We are currently running SMB files from a NetApp filer which has the ability to setup Qtrees/quotas for subfolders of the top level share. Is this possible in nutanix files as I'm not seeing anything in the documentation around it.

if you are trying to set “Enhanced vMotion capabilities” (EVC) on a running cluster, you may see a pop up Error Window saying: “… Powered-on or suspended Virtual machines on the host may be using cpu feature hidden by that mode” You can create a new cluster in vSphere and set the EVC on it first with no hypervisor, and then move the nodes and Vms from the old cluster to the new cluster. Please follow the link “Unable to Set Enhanced vMotion Capability (EVC) on a Newly-created Cluster” for detailed instructions.

Hello, What are the pros and cons of these two series? What workloads are better suited to which series? Why would you choose an 8k block over a 3k block and conversely? Thanks

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of September 29-October 5, 2019. KB 7668 - FAIL: Unable to get Kerberos Key Distribution Center IP'susing DNS resolution. Check Name Server configuration on this cluster. KB 8044 - How to enable Windows Search on Windows Server 2016 KB 8156 - Alert - A1195 - Cluster in Read-Only Mode KB 8182 - NCC INFO Message: Unable to fetch PSU type info of block for known reasons KB 8216 - Changing Data Services