Question

Containers

  • 27 February 2019
  • 4 replies
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Would I be able to create storage containers in my cluster for the purpose of "pinning" VMs only to hosts that are assigned to the containers - restricting VMs to the hosts that belong to the container? The need is to control VM migration during Software Upgrades due to multicasting issues with the hosts.

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Thanks for your response. My preference is to allow these VMs to move when necessary, I just don't want them on the same host.
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Hi @rrdrez,

Actually Nutanix AHV supports VM-VM Anti-Affinity rules, but only if configured from command line, so maybe the Nutanix representative didn't understand the question and told you that this is not supported.

Anyway, in your case, since you want to pin VM to a specific host, the best option is the VM-Host Affinity policy that can even be configure on Prism web interface, just select the VM, click update and set affinity selecting the hosts that VM should be pinned. Please select at least two host for HA purposes.

More information about Affinity Policies for AHV can be found here: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v510:ahv-ahv-affinity-policies-c.html
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Thanks for your information. I was looking for was an anti-affinity rule, something our representative told us Nutanix did not support. I've since found documentation from Nutanix that gives cli commands that will create an anti-affinity rule: vm to vm anti-affinity rule(policy). I am in the process of testing that now.
https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v50:ahv-ahv-vm-anti-affinity-t.html
Otherwise the thought was to find a (temporary) workaround to avoid migration issues during a software upgrade.
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Hi @rrdrez,

You can create multiple containers in your Nutanix cluster but each container should be presented to all host as per best practices and for availability purposes. Regarding "pinning" a VM to specific hosts you can do that without deal with container, just create affinity rules.

Please, let me know which hypervisor you are using and I can provide the documentation for affinity rules.