Scaling out Prism Central | Nutanix Community
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Are you looking for a way to support more than 12K VMs as part of your Prism Central installation?

Then you should try to scale out Prism Central. Nutanix introduced Prism Central scale-out architecture in AOS 5.6. Prism Central scale-out architecture allows  customers to scale out its Prism Central deployments incrementally, depending on the needs. Single Prism Central instance can support up to 12k VMs, with Prism Central scale-out, the number of supported VMs increases up to 25k PoweredOn VMs. 

Prism Central scales-out has 3 VMs and has been architected to tolerate one node failure (n+1 fault tolerance).

The following requirements must be met before you can expand Prism Central or deploy a Prism Central VM:

  • The specified gateway must be reachable.

  • No duplicate IP addresses can be used.

  • The container used for deployment is mounted on the hypervisor hosts.

  • When installing on an ESXi cluster:

    • vCenter and the ESXi cluster must be configured properly. See the vSphere Administration Guide for Acropolis (using vSphere Web Client) for details.

    • vCenter must be registered in Prism.

    • DRS must be enabled in vCenter.

    • vCenter is up and reachable during the deployment.

If Prism Central is just a single VM currently, you can expand it to three VMs. This increases both the capacity and resiliency of Prism Central (at the cost of maintaining two additional VMs). 

There are two ways to deploy Prism Central in scale-out fashion. You can deploy 3 instances of Prism Central during initial PC installation or add two more nodes later as required.

Once completed there will be three Prism Central VMs visible in the list of VM entities.

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Notes:

  • Prism Central scale-out is supported on AHV and ESXi Hypervisors.

  • Once you scale out a Prism Central instance from a single VM to multiple VMs, you cannot revert back. Deleting any of the Prism Central VMs may result in data loss.

To expand this Prism Central instance across multiple VMs, follow this documentation:

Prism Central Guide: Expanding (Scale Out) Prism Central

Check out this video to see the step by step procedure to scale-out Prism Central

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