Have you always wanted to get a peek into the network traffic flowing in and out of your Nutanix infrastructure? Whether you got your first IT job for years or been a veteran for several years, you would have definitely at some point been keen to get a detailed look at your network traffic.
At Nutanix, the AHV hypervisor is based on the open-source KVM module and uses the CentOS Linux distribution. And yes, it comes with the popular packet capture utility tcpdump.
A few examples when you would want to use tcpdump in your Nutanix infrastructure would be:
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VM(s) lose network connectivity on a particular host
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A host has multiple network links and you wish to identify which is active
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VM(s) are not reachable from an external network
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In that particularly annoying issue, the switch vendor asks you to contact Nutanix support
The good news is that tcpdump is installed by default in AHV hosts and it can be run to inspect traffic on physical NIC’s as well as VM interfaces.
To learn more about this, see KB-9298
Note: tcpdump on the Nutanix CVM’s is not installed by default. You will have to reach out to Nutanix Support if you wish to do so indicating the reason.