Installation & Configuration

Nutanix Cluster is comprised of several critical software and hardware components. All communication happens on a IP network.  CVM - Controller Virtual Machine (AOS) Hypervisor - (AHV | ESXi | Hyper-V | XEN) IPMI - (Out of band management for the hosts) Each CVM communicates with its respective Hypervisor Host on a private IP network. Hosts and CVMs must be on the same subnet. Before proceeding with any network related changes, on the CVM or Hypervisor hosts, it is recommended to perform a cluster health check. Following Nutanix KB outlines the steps to ensure your Nutanix Cluster is in a healthy and consistent state: Checklist on verifying cluster health status  

Nutanix best practices dictate that regular disk drives are configured on the SCSI bus, and CD-ROM drives are configured on the IDE bus. While regular disk drives can be configured on the IDE bus, it is possible that performance degradation may be observed on the drive due to the low queue depth on IDE controller. To avoid performance impact conversion of IDE to SCSI can be performed. Prior to modifying the IDE disk, take a local snapshot of the Guest VM, in case a roll-back is needed. It is strongly recommended that the VMs are powered off before performing the conversion. Convert the disk by cloning the IDE disk and attaching it to the SCSI bus. It is recommended to remove the old IDE disk after the cloned SCSI disk is created and validated.

And so it is settled. You are migrating to Nutanix. Maybe even from Nutanix (we are sorry to see you leave). Nonetheless you might use some help with the process. Sounds like something you’d be interested? Source and destination platforms to choose from: VMware ESXi to Nutanix AHV VMware ESXi on legacy infrastructure to VMware ESXi on Nutanix Microsoft Hyper-V to Nutanix AHV AWS EC2 to Nutanix AHV Nutanix AHV to AWS EC2 Nutanix cluster to Nutanix cluster Guide 1. Move User Guide v3.4 - It would be unfair not to mention this product. Guide 2. KB1062 - VM Migration Scenarios and Solutions Guide 3.

Attempting to upgrade AOS from 5.1.3.2 to 5.5.9.5, but the preupgrade steps fails after 5% and the reason for failure isn’t displayed.  Is there somewhere I can go to get some details about why the preupgrade keeps failing at 5%?  This is what is displayed after the failure:   Thank you.

We added a couple of storage nodes to a modest 3-node cluster that was running out of disk space. The alerts about running out of storage, and not having enough for redundancy, are gone. A few months in, and every time I look in Prism, under Hardware, I see that the storage nodes' "Total Disk Usage" has not gone up very much. The compute nodes' disk usage is about 5-6 times as much as the storage nodes (and the compute nodes actually have more storage onboard than the storage nodes). I understand that Nutanix tries to keep a VM's storage on the same host that provides its compute resources (and the copy is sharded and spread out among other nodes). Is that why I am seeing so little utilisation of the new storage nodes in Prism?

Let's say we need to change the MAC Address of a VM we just created due to various reasons. licensing being one of themDoes Nutanix AHV provide you with a feature to set a static MAC Address or change the MAC address of a VM? Yes, we do have a feature to change the MAC address of the VM and assign another address.   As of writing this article, the feature can only be achieved through acli and have some limitations and guidelines. Please check out the Knowledgebase article regarding the steps with the latest updates.   KB-3670     Want to know more about AHV Networking? Try giving this KB a readKB-2090

Hello community, does anyone have advice on destroying cluster without CVM access? As you know, JAVA applet doesn’t allow you to reinitialize system because of existing cluster config. And, I don’t have access to CVM or Prism.   Thank you, Dragan

Let’s say you have connected a third-party storage device to a Nutanix Environment and now wondering whether it’s recommended or not.  Nutanix Architecture is designed specially keeping in mind local storage settings and configuring any third-party storage devices can cause some serious issues in your environment. There are two different situations that might occur Permanent Device Loss All Paths Down Want to know the issues in detail and how to identify them Check out the KB-8674 In brief, connecting third party storage devices to a Nutanix architecture is not recommended unless and until especially advised by a Nutanix Team for certain scenarios.

Let's say you have bought a new node(Yayy) and want to expand your cluster. Nutanix provides you with a GUI method to expand your cluster with ease and simplicity. Confused regarding the steps and the requirements before adding it to your cluster?    Let's break down the queries to help you understand cluster expansion and the requirements in detail. When can you add the node in your cluster? If the node is physically present in the cluster network subnet, you can go ahead with cluster expansion.   What should I check before cluster expansion? The cluster expansion process compares the AOS version on the existing and new nodes and performs any upgrades necessary for all nodes to have the same AOS version.   What are the guidelines before proceeding with cluster expansion? What are the specific considerations I should keep in mind in case the hype

Hi, We want to throttle replication bandwidth. In the Remote Site config in Data Protection, the option is to throttle B/W in MBps.  Is this Mbps (megabits per second) or MB/s (Megabytes per second)?  The unit implies megabytes per second (i.e. the "B" is capitalised), but that is normally a unit of throughput not bandwidth... Obviously there is an order of magnitude in difference so its important we interpret this correctly!

Hello, Lately I have been adding the Nutanix SCOM Management Pack version 2.4.0.0. From the start on it worked fine as I handed over the Cluster information via Nutanix Cluster Discovery. But now, a few weeks later, SCOM will not display any performance data of the clusters anymore. I am not able to find out where exactely caused this problem. I have different Clusters AHV and ESXI as well as multiple OSVersions running. Currently SCOM displays only one Cluster with it's information. From the other Clusters, there is no performance data shown. All other clusters were discovered correctely (and the same way) but won't show their data anymore. My situation looks like this - this dashboard is showing the clusters information. All other clusters (and their nodes) are not showing data - the dashboard stays empty.

I'm running Prism Central 5.7.1.1 and have recently upgraded 6 of our clusters to 5.5.7.1. Of those 6 clusters, 3 of them are still showing an Upgrade Status of 'Upgrading' in Prism Central. It's been a over a month for one cluster and I've restarted Prism Central appliance to no avail - has anyone else seen this?

I've seen servers that have active and inactive in replication . when I check the replication settings. there are inactive and active vm's in job. so i didnt understand that what is mean inactive vm's. can i delete it . if there is no replication in the other region, they take up storage space and if I delete them I can save space from storage space Also i have another question is on vcenter 6.5. i see free size is 4 tb but on nutanix mangement screen free size is 11 tb. why do i see it so different. If the virtual machine is deleted, there is a space recovered on the storage side.

Hey everyone, I am required to upgrade from ESX 6.7 U1 to U2 to resolve a bug that prevents me from going back more than 8-10mins to look at VM performance, however, Nutanix has only just now tested U3.  My question is: Has anyone migrated to U3 yet and if so how has it been so far? 

Need help to change the IP address , Subnet mask and gateway of CVM, IPMI, ESXi Hosts and vCenter AOS  5.0.4 ESXi  5.5.0 Build number - 1331820 ncc 3.1.2 vcenter 5.5.0 Build number - 2442329 total number of nodes : 5 1) what is the Order to change the IP address, subnet mask and gateway of 5 CVM, 5 ESXi Hosts, 5 - IPMI, 1 - vCenter 2) do i need to stop the cluster for CVM  - IP, subnet mask and gateway change? 3) do i need to stop the cluster for ESxi Hosts -  IP, subnet mask and gateway change? 4) is there any workaround to update the CVM - IP address, subnet mask and gateway without stopping the cluster 5) reason for stopping the cluster while changing the IP address, subnet mask, gateway 6) does this AOS version will support CVM and ESXi IP change 7) what has to be check before and after IP address, Subnet mask, gateway change of CVM, ESXi, IPMI and vCenter 8) What is the Procedure of changing the CVM

We are using a Prism Central Installation with several Clusters in different Sites. For the Administrators on Site, we want to configure a user on the site based prism elements instance, which is a viewing User, with the following additional permissions on the local cluster / Prism Elements: Viewing, Power on and off for all virtual Machines and also a one click shutdown of the whole cluster in case of power outages. We don't want to use the Prism Central User Configuration for following reasons: Prism Central is not accessible in case of line outages or power failures in our sites. And for security reasons and limited skills of the staff on site, I really appreciate not to give admin permission to the site staff. Any Idea, how to deal with this situation ? Thanks Oliver

Hi Team, We have multiple Nutanix clusters with Dell XC servers installed with ESXI servers. We found an user account "PTAdmin" present in Dell iDRAC servers. Is there anyway to disable the account from CVM or Hypervisor since we have 100+ nodes in the infra. Thanks.

Is there a minimum or recommended switch port buffer size? I plan on using eth0 and eth 1 to be connected to two different 10G switches but was wondering if there is a minimum buffer size or switch port requirement?

Hi all, A network security audit on a customer infrastructure reported a vulnerability on the cerebro http (port 2020) who is open on http in every CVM and without any security prompt.Some sensitives informations are visible : - AOS version : el7.3-release-euphrates-5.10.7-stable-... - VM Names  - Protection Domain names  - Witness ip address   - ...  Is there’s a way to secure this component ?

Hi, As per title i am wondering about encryption when we are using ESXi hosts and Nutanix together. We would like to encrypt the VM's and maybe Data-At-Rest encryption. We have currently 3 nodes in a block with 3 ESXi hosts and i wonder what the best practice is about encryption? Is it possible to encrypt the data both via Nutanix and vmwar software/KMS? Is it possible to encrypt only the VM's via VMware encpryption method and use the KMS directly via VMware or should i use the prism management? Does it matter in a Nutanix way if you choose to set up the KMS and encrypt the Data from the vSphere instead of doing it in the Prism mangement? Thank you in advance.

There is an ever-increasing chance that the next time you will need to add a node to the cluster or build a brand new cluster using new nodes – they will be bare metal nodes. What that means is that there is neither AHV nor CVM pre-installed on the node (unlike with factory imaged nodes). The process of imaging differs slightly from handling a factory imaged nodes hence this post. Bare metal nodes might come with a Discovery OS - small footprint software which allows for the node to be discovered by AOS 5.11 and later and thus imaged by an existing cluster CVM. When building a new cluster standalone (bare metal) imaging is performed from a workstation with access to the IPMI interfaces of the nodes in the cluster. Imaging a cluster in the field requires first installing certain tools on the workstation and then setting the environment to run those tools. This includes setting up Foundation VM and uploading Nutanix software images to the Foundation VM.

Hi   I want to monitor our Nutanix environment by Nagios XI. Is there a neat guide on how to do this?   Thanks Jeru

Hi there, i need some help with my Dell OptiPlex Micro Cluster. I wanted to build up a four node cluster but everytime i try to install the Nutanix CE, right at the finish line it says: “Waiting for the Nutanix Controller VM to start up………...…” followed by: “A Problem was encountered. Please review the contents of /home/install/firstboot.out for details, and refer to the documentation or the Nutanix NEXT community for next steps. Press <Enter> to return to the login prompt.” Now if i restart the installation and try to repair the CVM this error appears: “ FATAL: AN exception was raised: Traceback (most recent call last): File “./phoenix”, line 96, in <module> main() File “./phoenix”, line 74, in main params = gui.get_params(gui.CEBootDiskConfirm) File “./phoenix/gui.py”, line 1675, in get_params if guitype(args=args).skip_get_params:  File “./phoenix/gui.py”, line

Sorry if this topic has already been covered. I have been trying to use the new "Portable Foundation" app that runs on windows to image a cluster without using a VM. Every time I try (three so far) I get errors that the IPs I have provided are already used. I am using a flat switch and the 10G and 1G are unplugged from the customers switches. I have tried with my laptop in and out of airplane mode, with the firewall on and off and still receive the errors. The only difference is that each time I try, the listed IP conflicts are never the same. It will tell me in the first try that x, y, and z are in use, then the second time it may say that a, b, and y are in use. Any ideas? I really like the idea of this app working. Thanks, -David

Hello, If I have 3 Nutanix nodes and I cluster them together. How can I make a separate VPC for a test stack and a separate VPC for a Production stack? So that way I can build my VM's on the test stack and once they are good to go...I can do the same steps on my Production stack. I would like to have 2 isolated stacks for testing and production. Is this possible? Thanks