While maintaining your Nutanix environment, there is a need to apply patches to keep everything running smoothly. Some of these patches require reboot of the CVM or Hosts to take effect.

For example, rebooting all hosts in a cluster means manually putting the host in maintenance mode, evacuating the VMs, turning off the CVM, rebooting the host, waiting for the CVM and host to boot up, and confirming the cluster data resiliency is OK before proceeding to the next host. As you can see, there is a lot of manual work involved.

However, there is a simpler solution: leveraging the rolling reboot script. The script utilizes our shutdown token feature to ensure that the node is up and running before proceeding to the next node. If you are using AHV, the script will be available in Prism. For ESXi hypervisors and for more robust options (even for AHV), there is a command line option found in KB 4723

More information about the prerequisites (please read this before using) and execution can be found in the following documentation:

Prism (AHV only) → Support Documentation

Command Line (More options) → KB 4723