3 drives needed for Nutanix installation? | Nutanix Community
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Hi,

 

I am considering Nutanix for our use-case. We have a HPe DL385 server with 2 L40S GPUs. I understand that Nutanix is supported by NVidia, which is an important plus.

 

However, I am trying to install Nutanix on our server, and now see it requires 3 *physical* drives to operate. One for the Hypervisor, one for CVM and at least one for Data. 

 

As we only have 2 (RAID 1) NVME, and 1 Data drive, we cannot proceed installation. I am not looking forward to sacrifice an entire Data drive (3TB) to a CVM / Hypervisor of only 200 GB. However, the installation does not seem to understand partitions in a drive. 

 

Can you confirm that the Nutanix installation requires 2x *physical* drives to work? Or is there still a workaround to have it understand partitions?

Thanks!

Yes, for the CE version of nutanix you need 3 drives. (1 for AHV, 1 for CVM and 1 for DATA). But you can use a USB drive for the AHV part. 

you need to remove the hardware raid setup. 

But you will not lose any available space when installing the CVM on the NVME drive. Just intstall it and look at you storage pool size when in prism element. 

 

Yes, for AHV you are right, that is a pure waste of space if installed on a 3TB disk. So I would suggest the following:

 

  1. USB drive for AHV.
  2. 1 NVME drive for CVM
  3. The other drives for DATA. 

That is amazing! I was worried that that would give issues. 

Do I understand that the USB stick would then have to stay in forever, or is that a temporary fix until we can create a new partition?

Thanks!

That is amazing! I was worried that that would give issues. 

Do I understand that the USB stick would then have to stay in forever, or is that a temporary fix until we can create a new partition?

Thanks!

It will never be a separate partition so yes it should always be inserted. But I got bad results with bad/cheap USB drives or USB drives used for a long time 😉 They will wear out. So for your test it is just fine but better is to add a separate boot disk for AHV. 

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