Installation & Configuration

Hi everyone, I’m looking for your advice please for ESXi-based Nutanix clusters with hybrid storage. Question is regarding the placement of ESXi persistent scratch. With traditional architecture, the advice normally was to configure /scratch to be on a shared datastore, not a local one. The argument was that in case of a host failure, the logs will still be available from other hosts. With Nutanix, I can see the options as 1) leave the default, on vfat partition on SATADOM/M2/BOSS; 2) in a folder on local VMFS datastore where CVM is (same storage device though); 3) on a shared datastore, i.e. on DSF. What is the Community (best) practice with ESXi /scratch in Nutanix environment? Please kindly share your advice and thoughts. Thank you.

Two weeks ago I’ve upgraded our two clusters to AOS 5.15 . After that, both clusters began to receive constant warnings for root partiton space usage high(exceeded 80%) on almost all CVMs. Below is the result of ‘df -h’ on one of the CVMs:  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on devtmpfs         18G     0   18G   0% /dev tmpfs           512M     0  512M   0% /dev/shm tmpfs            18G  1.2M   18G   1% /run tmpfs            18G     0   18G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/md1        9.8G  7.4G  1.9G  80% / /dev/loop0      240M  2.3M  221M   2% /tmp /dev/md2         40G   23G   17G  57% /home tmpfs           3.6G     0  3.6G   0% /run/user/1000 /dev/sdg1       5.5T  1.4T  4.0T  26% /home/nutanix/data/stargate-storage/disks/                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             17Q0A01WFB9D /dev/sdh1    

I am deploying nutanix at one of our customers site but unfortunately now he has 2 Switches with 1 GIG ports so is it doable to remove the 10 GIG from the bond and rely only on the 2*1G ports ?   Model used (NX-1365-G6) thanks in advance

I am using Nutanix on VSphere 6.5, and am affected by the 100% Memory usage alerts as described in KB article 000004465. I would like to create a folder in VSphere called Nutanix CVMs, which will not have the memory alerts enabled, and would like to move the CVM VMs in to this folder. Can anyone advise whether it’s safe to move a CVM VM in to another folder after is has been deployed? Part of me thinks this is a safe / normal procedure, as I’ve done it countless times with normal VMs. However, due to the complex nature of hyper-converged infrastructure and CVMs I understand I need to be very careful.   Thanks for your help   Jason  

Hi,  My CVM is reporting low on disk space and trying to cleanup. I tried to follow the KB1540 and noticed the logs directory needs to be clean up. Its consuming around 8.1G the rm cmd in article dont see to apply for logs folder. Any suggestion on how to free up space under logs safely? Can i winscp and delete the logs files?   Thanks CT

Hello, Are these any docs available which shows the setup between the Nutanix cluster and Prometheus/Grafana, similar to the one we have for Nagios https://next.nutanix.com/how-it-works-22/monitoring-nutanix-with-nagios-4500   Thanks.  

Hi, Does anyone know exactly how many nodes can I install by Foundation 4.5 at one time? As I am going to write some internal docs related to Foundation so I do want to know.   Thanks.

What is Foundation? Foundation is a Nutanix provided tool leveraged for bootstrapping, imaging and deployment of Nutanix clusters. The imaging process will install the desired version of the AOS software as well as the hypervisor of choice.   By default Nutanix nodes ship with AHV pre-installed (depending on your country), to leverage a different hypervisor type you must use foundation to re-image the nodes with the desired hypervisor. NOTE: Some OEMs will ship directly from the factory with the desired hypervisor.   The figure shows a high level view of the Foundation architecture:     To use a different hypervisor (ESXi or Hyper-V) on factory nodes or to use any hypervisor on bare metal nodes, the nodes must be imaged in the field. Foundation service is included on CVMs and can be accessed at port 8000 on a running CVM that is not in a cluster, or if the CVM IP address is not yet configured the Foundation Portable software can automatically discover the nodes. Check out the prism web

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?