Installation & Configuration

Regardless of the reason to destroy the cluster whether it is to relocate and reuse an existing kit or switch to a different hypervisor, to build something new often means to destroy something that already exists and Nutanix has a process for it. Migrate all user VMs off the cluster. Reclaim licenses. Ensure there are no errors displayed.  Stop the cluster. Destroy the cluster. Not too bad, right?   Some things to keep in mind is that cluster destruction does not affect either: IPMI configuration. Which is convenient if you wish to re-use the settings in the new environment.  Installed hypervisor. Nodes would have to be re-imaged should a different hypervisor be required. Migrate all workloads off the cluser prior to executing the cluster destroy. Cluster destroy clears all metadata and data on the storage.   Useful links: KB-3716 Reclaiming Cluster License Acropolis Advanced Administration Guide: Destroying a Cluster Field Installation Guide

Let say that you have updated your IPMI IP address or moved it to another subnet, after you finish the update you are not able to log back in to the IPMI. This happens as a result of not restarting the genesis service on the local node which people tend to forget, after you make the change you must restart the services on the same node’s CVM by running “genesis restart”. If the restart is successful, output similar to the following is displayed: Stopping Genesis pids [1933, 30217, 30218, 30219, 30241] Genesis started on pids [30378, 30379, 30380, 30381, 30403]   You can change the network configuration of your IPMI using one of the following methods: Configuring the Remote Console IP Address (IPMI Web Interface) Configuring the Remote Console IP Address (Command Line) Configuring the Remote Console IP Address (BIOS) For the full documentation check out this page.

Sometimes it is very boring to install the PrismCentral VM on AHV after your Cluster runs but it gets buggy. So here are some tips to solve problems there Deploy a Network in your new AHV Environment first Deploy the new VM via Prism Element Homepage Often you get an error with ssl and httpd could not start! Login via ssh to ip of your fresh deployed Prism Central Server Login via nutanix / nutanix/4u sudo -i service httpd status (mostly not started) service httpd start (ignore the ssl errors in the output) Now the new PrismCentral Website should arrive after a while under https://ip-of-prismcentral Login not possible with admin / admin or admin / nutanix/4u? Login again via ssh and nutanix / nutanix/4u to prismcentral sudo -i passwd admin set your admin password and repeat it reboot wait a while login to prismcental and admin / your password  Register your cluster in prism element 

Hi,   I’m new to nutanix and this is my first post :)  I’ve started to create a cluster in a lab environment and it seems to work fine. I created two bridges with 2x10G and 2x1G for user VM traffic.  For the next step I tried to use the network segmentation to separate management and backplane traffic. Therefore an eth2 interface is required for the CVMs. Problem is, that there’s no eth2 available, just eth0 and eth1:   When I start the segmentation process I got the particular error message:     Did I miss something?   Thanks Benjamin

I am looking for other customers who have used the witness feature. We have three buildings each about 1 mile from each other. 10g fiber between them. We have two Nutanix clusters, one in each of two of the buildings. We have the ultimate licensing and are already using Metro clustering. I have the fail over set to manual. Today I setup a witness server in the third building. As far as I can tell everything is working. The real question is should I use it? Is anyone using the witness. Does it cause more problems than it solves. At least with manual I have full control when a fail over happens. So far it has been easier to fix my issues than to fail over and almost all issues are network related not nutanix.

In some scenarios, you may need to move a disk from IDE to SCSI bus or vice versa. Sample scenarios include but are not limited to:   VM does not boot due to missing SCSI driver. In such cases, the disk can be converted to IDE to install the missing drivers and then moved back to SCSI. A wrong disk type was used during VM creation. Application requirements dictate the particular type of the disk. You have recently migrated VMs to AHV and noticed that some of the disks appear in IDE format.   After following the disks conversion process from IDE to SCSI (as described in step 2 of the uvm_ide_disk_check) the following doubts arise:   Question: Once the disk gets converted, does it immediately redirect all I/O to the SCSI drive and leave the IDE disk unused? Answer: Once the conversion is completed (which is actually a cloning process from the original IDE disk), the new SCSI disk needs to be attached to the SCSI bus and then the old IDE disk could be removed.    Question: What ar

What is cloud connect? Building upon the native DR / replication capabilities of DSF , the cloud connect feature enables you to back up and restore copies of virtual machines and files to and from an on-premise cluster and a Nutanix Controller VM located on the Amazon Web Service (AWS) or Microsoft Azure cloud.   The following figure shows a logical representation of a “remote site” used for Cloud Connect: Cost and management Amazon or Azure customers are charged only for capacity that is used (not charged for the full capacity). Once configured through the web console, the remote site cluster is managed and monitored through the Data Protection dashboard like any other remote site you have created and configured   About AWS & Azure Storage: Amazon S3 is used to store data (extents) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is used to store metadata. When the AWS Remote feature replicates a snapshot data to AWS, the Nutanix Controller VM on AWS creates a bucket on S3 storage. The buck

NVIDIA GRID boards allow GPU virtualization, enabling multiple users to share a single graphics card. GPU virtualization not only provides the benefit of higher user densities, but also delivers native-like performance while accessing a virtual desktop. In 2016, the Pascal-based P series was released—the P100, P4, P40, and P6. The P4 and P6 are best for blade server form factors and the P100 and the P40 are suitable for the other form factors, such as rack mount. Nutanix offers the P100 and P40 in our different hardware choices. In 2018, NVIDIA introduced the Turing Tensor Core–based T4 for cloud workloads, including high-performance computing, deep learning and inference, machine learning, data analytics, and graphics. One of the common causes of being unable to allocate vGPU to guests is caused by the GPU being set to Compute Mode which results in the errors below: The vGPU option may appear greyed out and unavailable When trying to install the NVIDIA-vGPU rpm package from the CVM

Hi team, i have questions about capacity calculator let say i have config for 3 node like the picture below,  so in prism will show me 17TB logical capacity correct?  and i have concern in extent store RF2 and N+1 (11TB) in sizer tool, what happen if i have data 15TB which is bigger than RF2 and N+1 size (11TB)?

We are running a nutanix cluster with Hyper-v. this was the worst thing we could do when we started with nutanix. We know that now. But my main question is, is there a way of getting this cluster converted to AHV?   It's a Dell XC cluster with 2 blocks and 5 nodes.   regards

New to Nutanix and have a question that may have already been answered, although I could not find it with a quick search.  We are needing to install an instance of Prism Central in our backup datacenter and need to know if there are any issues in running this application in multiple locations at the same time, or is there a specific installation method for HA?  If HA is not available are there any issues in actively using both instances via round robin DNS entries? Thanks in advance for your assistance. Joe

Hello, I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this, but I'm not sure where else to ask. I keep getting a message that there's an NGT Update Available on just one of our servers running Ubuntu. I ran an update and it went from 1.1.2 to 1.5.2. After resolving/acknowledging the issue it reported the same message again the next day. Is 1.5.2 not the latest?

What is Jumbo frames?  In computer networking, jumbo frames are Ethernet frames with more than 1500 bytes of payload, the limit set by the IEEE 802.3 standard. Jumbo frames can carry up to 9000 bytes of payload.   When should jumbo frames be used?  Use jumbo frames only when you have a dedicated network or VLAN, and you can configure an MTU of 9000 on all equipment to increase performance. A good general example of this approach is a separate SAN or storage network.   How to check your current MTU status? Run this command on one of your CVMs “NCC Health Check: cvm_mtu_check”. The command checks: On Hyper-V, validates if the MTU size is properly defined for eth0 and eth1 on the Controller VM On AHV, ESXi and Hyper-V, ensures the CVMs can communicate via eth0 with their configured MTU without upstream network fragmentation. For more information about this check, take a look at this article. How to Change AHV Host MTU for Jumbo Frames?  Check out this KB that explains the preparation and

Let's say that you have utilized the maximum recommended storage space in your cluster, you have an empty slot for another drive and you want to fill it to expand the storage capacity.   There are different types of drives out there, each of our platforms has it's own specifications and requirements.    To check which drives are compatible with your platform, choose your platform on this page and check out the data drives supported.    Your node will be in one of the following configurations:   1) Hybrid: A mix of SSDs and HDDs.  2) All Flash: can accept only SSDs and can contain only an even number of drives.  3) SSD with NVMe: only certain drives slots can contain NVMe, check the system specification via the link above for more information.   When adding more than one drive to a node, allow at least one minute between adding each of the drives. Check out my colleague Jon Kohler’s reply here where he provided some good caveats for adding drives. Specifically, increasing the hot tier c

Hello, I have a cluster up and running for almost a year now without any particular issues. I haven't logged into Prism for a long time and did so recent, and saw an alert on hat the cluster is not able to check NTP. I have them set for North American NTP servers. I think the real problem may be with Zeus, however, as when I SSH into one of the CVMs and almost any command (bur speciifally 'allssh root@192.168.5.1 date') I get: ================== error: ================= ================== Zeus ================= ================== configuration ================= ================== cache ================= ================== is ================= ================== not ================= ================== created; ================= ================== try ================= ================== again ================= ================== later ================= It is the same with any other command I try to run. Your insight is greatly appreciated.

How do we browse Nutanix containers from command line to check what is contained in it.

Hi I have confuse about the output of the AHV network command "mange_ovs show_interfaces", In the result, I can check the link status and speed of the NICs. But what is the meaning of mode ? I attached a snapshot as the following that give the output of a node in AHV which have 10Gb and 25Gb nic cards, but the mode all display 10000. What is the meaning of mode?

We just purchased Nutanix ( 2 Appliances , 3 nodes on each ) , we are planning to use VMware Enterprise plus on them. I've few questions, I would be more than happy if I get the answers: 1- if we used VMware, all Nutanix functions will be applied ? ( for example, if one HD failed, the data will be transfered to another Hard disk? ) 2- If I'm using 3 nodes, and I'm utlizing all the CPU and Memory and HD capabilities for all three, once one node goes down, how the VMs on this node will go to the other nodes while we are utlizing their full capacity? 3- if one node fail, the VMware VMs on this Node will be Automatically moved to another Node ? 4- In general, is there any difference if we used Acropolies or VMware ? will we get the same functions on Nutanix?

How can I reset a node to factory configuration after using the fundation process

Hi team,   i have question about prism central, if i enable feature like a flow ( as long i know, flow need prism central to enable and operate ), and i configure isolation or secure application for my vm,  what happen if my prism central down?

Greetings to all, After an update of the AOS from 5.8.2 to 5.10.5, the following alerts began to be received: IPMI sensor mismatch IPMI sensor data unavailable on host This is in a cluster with 3 Lenovo HX host, and all hosts have the same configuration when the cluster was created with the Foundations, I have already reviewed the access to the network to the BMC port and all the IPs respond and the users and passwords with correct. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/com.vmware.vsphere.resmgmt.doc/GUID-D247EC2C-92C5-4B9B-9305-39099F30D3B5.html This cluster uses the ESXi 6.5 hypervisor with vCenter 6.5, the information in the ESXi on the IPMI has already been added. The 3 CVM's respond to the ping between them and the BMC ports. Is there any parameter within the CVM that should be reviewed or from the PRISM console?

We are trying to setup SCOM Management Pack 2.4 with SCOM 2012 server. I have created LDAP (Windows Domain) account for Prism and IPMI access, i do able to validate with prism account but i could not IPMI. I am using AOS 10.5 with NX 1065 G6. I have tried to create IPMI local account and then tried to validate SCOM Management pack. It worked fine. I tried to validate with LDAP account but i am getting below error. for better administration i am trying to use LDAP. error validating ipmi account with "x.x.x.x" IP. Continue with next CVM Address? I have opened case with Nutanix. Just i want know whether Nutanix support to configure LDAP auth with SCOM. Any help will be much appreciated.

Hello is there a way to automatically install NGT guest tools without manually cdrom mounting process ? I want to use Packer to generate a centOS 7 golden image with preinstalled NGT guest tools thanks Gilles

Can existing cluster expand cluster new node with different subnet?     Thanks,   Hendra

Let's say you want to mix platforms, nodes or a sub-components in your cluster, what are the restrictions?  There are multiple components that you could mix, we took everything into consideration and explained it’s compatibility. In our portal, you can find the Hardware, OS, Storage, Encryption, DIMM, Hypervisor and vSphere restrictions. check out our Compatibility Matrix. For example, if you want to mix the hardware you can mix nodes that use different CPU families in the same cluster, but not in the same block.  e.g, a cluster can contain nodes from any NX generation, but a G6 block must contain only G6 nodes, a G7 block must contain only G7 nodes, and so on. For AOS, all the Controller VMs (CVMs) in a cluster must use the same version of AOS. Note: do not configure a cluster that violates any of the rules as it could lead to an unexpected behavior.  For the full documentation and rules check out this: https://support-portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Hardware-Admin-Ref