Installation & Configuration

I have a user who is requesting that we change our VMWare Host Power Management Policy from Balanced to High Performance. Questions 1: Do Nutanix hosts support VMWare Power Management features?Question 2: We are migrating to all AHV early next year. Does Nutanix have a corresponding setting for VMWare Host Power Management Policies?

As we have a strict policy in our company to be always at the latest patches for all services, we are required to upgrade to latest version of VMware "ESXi 6.7 U3" which was released last month, we are already running 6.7 U2 now. we have already upgraded our vCenter to 6.7 U3 which we do not think it has any issues with Nutanix. But to upgrade ESXi itself we do not know about its compatibility, i know about the case of patching ESXi to a higher patch level than the Nutanix certified ones "which we are regularly doing", but for ESXi 6.7 U3 we are afraid of breaking something or being incompatible, and we do not know either if ESXi U's are considered as patches or different versions according to Nutanix.. I searched over Internet and this forum about anything related to 6.7 U3 compatibility but found nothing, at least if we have a road-map from Nutanix about planned compatible version we can wait till its release. Thanks

Nutanix reserves space on the SSD-tier of each CVM for its infrastructure. These files and directories are located in the /home folder that you see when you log in to a CVM. The size of the /home folder is capped at 40 GB so that the majority of the space on SSD is available for user data.Due to the limited size of the /home partition, it is possible for it to run low on free space and trigger Prism Alerts, NCC Health Check failures or warnings, or Pre-Upgrade Check failures. These guardrails exist to prevent /home from becoming completely full, as this causes data processing services like Stargate to become unresponsive. Clusters with multiple CVMs having 100% full /home partition will often result in downtime for user VMs.The Scavenger service running on each CVM is responsible for the automated clean-up of old logs in /home and improvements to its scope were made in AOS 5.5.9, 5.10.1, and later releases. For customers running earlier AOS releases, or in special circumstances, it may

HI Trying to get a definative answere to what I think should be a simple question. Can I map a iSCSI drive to a Virtual Server by attaching a iSCSI Storage array ( Server has a Drive on the nutanix cluster and a second drive mapped to the exsternal array ( NTFS partitions on the MD iSCSI array ( NO VM's running on the array ) just mapping this as a drive Would love to get a formal response from Nutanix if this causes issues within a cluster or will there only be issues with the specific VM's the mappings are assigned to ?

High-Availability(HA) is a life-saver feature which minimises downtime and can save the production environment. What exactly is HA in AHV?  AHV VM High Availability (HA) is a feature built to ensure VM availability in the event of a host or block outage. In the event of a host failure, the VMs previously running on that host will be restarted on other healthy nodes throughout the cluster.  Want to know more about AHV HA? Give the following KB article a read!4636   So, do we ever want to disable HA for few VMs? Yes, there could be situations and architecture constraints which might make us disable HA for a few critical VMs.The reason, you ask? (*voice of Yoda*) One possible situation could be licencing constraints of few application workloads which are tied to host CPU.   So what happens when you disable AHV HA for a particular VM?  In case of a node failure, the VM will not be migrated and started on another Node.    How can we achieve this?    Read more about disabling HA and Agent-V

We all know that the data never shrinks, only expands. As of AOS 5.0, hot expand of VM disks is supported. All you have to do is expand the volume group via Prism UI or CLI (either aCLI or nCLI - chose your preferred method) and then extend the disk in the disk manager within guest OS itself.aCLI:nutanix@cvm$ acli vg.disk_update <Volume Group name> <disk index> new_size=<size of disk>nCLI:nutanix@cvm$ ncli volume-group update-disk uuid=<Volume Group UUID> index=<disk index> size-mib=<Size of disk in MiB>For detailed explanation and caveats please refer to:KB-3638 Expand volume group disk size on Windows OSKB-5832 AHV | How to expand a Windows VM disk 

After updating era on my dev system from 1.1 to 1.1.1.1 it is continually creating systems task for era_auto_snapshot  which are all stuck in waiting. I now have over 2000 tasks since the update 10 minutes ago

Have multiple Windows VMs running in your environment and want to install Nutanix Guest Tools silently in the Windows VM?You can absolutely do it with a little help from Nutanix and the power of automation scriptsSo how can you achieve this?There are two methods If you are a nerd techy, you can write a custom script using silent installer package.  If writing scripts giving you chills, we still have a procedure to install NGT silently with reduced clicks.Procedure Go to command prompt and browse to the drive where NGT is mounted Execute the following command  drive:\> setup.exe /quiet ACCEPTEULA=yes /norestart Use this command to ensure that VMs are not restarted after installing NGT. Note that if you use this command driver will not be updated. You need to manually restart the VMs to update the drivers.  drive:\> setup.exe /quiet ACCEPTEULA=yes If you use this command, VMs are restarted and drivers are automatically updated.Want to see the logs?In Event Viewer and in the %TEMP% 

Hello, I'm ssh'd into our CVMs and trying to change the default "nutanix" password using the passwd command. I'm getting the following error: passwd: Authentication token manipulation error Am I doing this incorrectly? Any suggestions? Thank you

Should you need to access container’s content directly, upload files to or download files from a container on AHV there is a simple guide with few things to remember: Do not delete any data from the container via WinSCP or any similar tool. Appropriate Prism or CVM command line workflows should be leveraged for doing the cleanup if needed. Deleting VM disk files directly from Nutanix container may affect Acropolis service, which can result in inability to manage user VMs.How to upload VM disk files from your workstation to Nutanix containerUsing WinSCP, connect to a CVM using SFTP protocol and port 2222 using Prism element credentials. Enable the option to show hidden files by going to Options > Preferences > Panels and then selecting the “Show hidden files”  option under the common settings. Select desired Nutanix container and upload file. How to download VM disk files from Nutanix container to your workstationPower off user VM, which disks will be exported, to avoid data corru

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) enables administrators to monitor network-attached devices for conditions that warrant administrative attention. In the Nutanix SNMP implementation, information about entities in the cluster is collected and made available through the Nutanix MIB (NUTANIX-MIB.txt). The Nutanix enterprise tree is located at 1.3.6.1.4.1.41263.The Nutanix MIB is divided into the following sections:Cluster information. Status information about the cluster as a whole. Software version information. Version information about the software packages that comprise the Controller VM. Service status information. Information about the status of essential services on each Controller VM. Hypervisor information. Information about each hypervisor instance. Virtual machine information. Information about hosted virtual machines. Disk information. Status information about the disks in the cluster. Controller VM resource information. Indicate how much CPU and memory capacity is

While migrating nutanix VM to AWS it is giving me error while launching it which is Could not find /.nutanix_active_svm_partition Aside to this while converting into the AWS image it is giving me this error : "ClientError: Multiple different grub/menu.lst files found Can you help is sorting this out? how it support to be deployed on AWS.

In modern IT Infrastructure, data is critical and having a copy of your data from where you can recover from has become an important pre-requisite for system design. To achieve this we use a technology known as Snapshot.So is it possible to even save your system running state while taking a snapshot in Nutanix environment?Absolutely YesIn Nutanix, we provide a technology known as application-consistent snapshot which can be selected when configuring Data Protection Domain.Want to know more about Data Protection with Prism elementGive the following article a readData Protection Guide So Nutanix have some guidelines with regards to Application consistent Snapshot?Absolutely yesNutanix recommends installing NGT on the VMs. Microsoft VSS service should be enabled. The workload running must be able to support to quiesce I/O operations. You must configure one consistency group for each VM. For the protection of VAAI clones with application consistency, each VAAI clone should be in its own pr

Reliable and Accurate Time Sync is mandatory for distributed services to work in a reliable / efficient manner.Network Time Protocol (NTP) is used across different devices and services on a network to maintain reliability and integrity of services, data and other critical functions.Nutanix - AOS, built on web-scale engineering principles, distributes roles and responsibilities to all nodes within the system to form a large cluster of services working together. Accurate time sync becomes a vital requirement for all the different components to work reliably and help keep up system integrity.Accurate time sync, not just offers integrity and smooth operations but offers a lot of value even when things don’t work as they should. During troubleshooting of any service, timestamps are used to understand and co-relate root-cause, impact of the problem.In order for a distributed system such as Nutanix AOS to work smoothly - NTP is of critical importance. CVMs (Controller Virtual Machine) that co

NCC check giving you warning that /home space usage is above the threshold(75%) and now you’re worried how will it affect your production and what all files and directories can you safely delete. Let us guide you through the steps to safely reduce the space usage of /home directory in the CVM. Before let us understand why you’re receiving this warning.Nutanix reserves space in the SSD under /home for its infrastructure and is capped at 40GB, and sometimes it is possible to run low on the space usage and triggering an alert.IMPORTANT NOTE → DO NOT treat the Nutanix CVM (Controller VM) as a normal Linux machine. DO NOT perform "rm -rf /home" on any of the CVMs. It could lead to data loss scenarios. Contact Nutanix Support in case you have any doubts.Now that we got that warning noted on a serious note, let us answer the question :  How can we reduce space usage? First, you need to get an idea of space usage.You can run the following script to parse the usage of /home partition and give u

We have shared a post on upgrade preparations and considerations. What now? When mapping upgrades it is only sensible to account for Nutanix Files as part of the process. What really happens once you click that button?First, the pre-upgrade checks will run to make sure that the cluster is able to be upgraded. If any of the pre-upgrade checks fail, you will see information about this in Prism and the actual File Server upgrade will not start. Users will have to click "Back to Versions" and start the upgrade again after the issue reported by the pre-checks is resolved. Once the File Server upgrade beings, each File Server VM is upgraded one-at-a-time onto the new Nutanix Files version. While an FSVM is down for the upgrade, users connected to shares hosted by this node may experience a loss of connectivity for a duration of roughly 20-30 seconds. After this short period, another FSVM will pick-up on hosting those shares, and users will regain access to their files. After each FSVM comple

While much is shared and posted about LACP configuration in AOS* the questions “How?” remains open. Let’s take a look at the workflow:Connect to CVM via SSH. Make sure you are connected to correct CVM by checking its name and IP. Follow steps from KB 2852 to verify cluster health. Do not proceed if cluster cannot tolerate failure of at least 1 node. Put the node and CVM in the maintenance mode. Connect to host via IPMI, as LACP configuration process might cause network disconnect. Perform required configuration steps (enable/disable LACP). Once configuration is completed, make sure both host and CVM are accessible via network. Please also make sure that all NICs in bond are operational, by shutting down links one by one and verifying connectivity. If all tests are successfully completed remove CVM and node from maintenance mode.For detailed instructions as well as commands examples please refer to KB-3263.For complete command reference Acropolis Command-Line Interface (aCLI).* For more

Is there a KB or documentation providing the JSON format and any additional things that may be coded in? For example, in going through the install.nutanix.com portal to generate the JSON file it doesn't ask for NTP server of the hypervisor. In looking at the file, though, there's this line: "hypervisor_nameserver": "8.8.8.8", I'd like to have our Nutanix deployments in code as much as possible (right now we're looking to various scripts for vSphere configurations). Being able to configure as much as possible up front and possibly make this a template for future deployments.

I'm running 3 node cluster, based on 5.10 version (2019-02-11) There are some alerts for each node: Detected Incompatible AHV Version Detected older AHV Version I've checked the Settings-Upgrade menu - there it nothing available to upgrade for AHV and AOS.

You have a Nutanix cluster with ESXi as a hypervisor, configured with Virtual Distributed Switch and you have a need to configure restriction on bandwidth for different network types, like vMotion, Management, iSCSI etc in the event of contention. VMware provides a feature known as Network I/O Control(NIOC).Want to know more about NIOC and how it works in our environment? NIOC Guide in Nutanix So how many versions of NIOC are there and which is compatible with Nutanix?There are two versions of NIOCVersion 2 Version 3 NIOC version 2 was introduced after vSphere 5.5.VMware vSphere version 6.x introduced.NIOC v3, which provided additional features like artificial features limits and reservation on system traffic. In vSphere 6.0x, we recommend using NIOC v2 with vDS, instead of NIOC v3  due to CPU overhead and some abnormal behaviour during our internal testing and evaluation.  In vSphere 6.5 Update 1, Nutanix fully supports vDS in combination with NIOC v3.Want to know in-depth about our c

Should there be a need to change IP address settings of an existing vCenter Server registered with Prism Element or Prism Central, the goal can be achieved in three steps:Unregister the vCenter Server from the cluster before changing the IP address of the vCenter Server. After you change the IP address of the vCenter Sever, you should register the vCenter Server again with the new IP address with the cluster. Instructions for Prism Element Instructions for Prism Central Change vCenter Server IP address settings. Register your cluster with the new vCenter Server following instructions below: Managing vCenter Server Registration Changes in Prism Element Managing vCenter Server Registration Changes in Prism Central Optional steps:run NCC Health Check: check_vcenter_connection troubleshoot if necessary following KB-4492

Migrating a Nutanix cluster between vCenter servers is one of those tasks that are not executed that often but when they are it is vital that everything goes as smooth as possible. Ensure the cluster is in excellent health by executing NCC health check. Presence of a distributed vSwitch must be addressed in advance.From there it is relatively straightforward:Create a new vSphere cluster in the new vCenter Server. Set the vSphere cluster settings on the new vCenter Server to the Nutanix recommended configuration (Configuring HA, DRS, and EVC). Unregister the Nutanix cluster from the old vCenter Server. Move the hosts from the old vCenter Server to the new vCenter Server. Register the Nutanix cluster to the new vCenter Server.For more details please see KB-4876.

Let’s say you are running AOS version 5.10.7, and want to upgrade to a different Nutanix Files version or confused regarding which Prism Central version you should install or upgrade to?Nutanix gives you a feature, Software Product Interoperability, to easily identify the compatible versions between software like Prism Central and Nutanix files with the AOS.All we need to do is first select the Software Type(AOS, Nutanix Files or Prism Central) and then the target software type and then we can find the AOS version compatible.Points to be taken into consideration Prism Central does not follow the Long Term Support Release (LTS) and Short Term Support Release (STS) tracks. Nutanix Files (formerly known as AFS) does not follow the Long Term Support Release (LTS) and Short Term Support Release (STS) tracks. Refer to the following link to know more about LTS and STS tracksLTS/STS InformationInterested to know more?How upgrades happen in Nutanix environment  Let’s learn about upgrades Prism

Let say for example you're running ESXi 6.5 U1 and want to upgrade to the latest ESXi version but confused whether the current hardware and AOS will support the latest ESXi version.Nutanix gives you a feature to identify the compatability of different Hypervisors with NX environment easily using the Compatibility Matrix. You just need to visit the compatibility matrix page, filter by using your hardware and AOS and you will see the hypervisors which are supported.Still confused before the hypervisor upgrade?Refer the following document regarding general guidelines before the hypervisor upgrade.Hypervisor-upgrade-guidelines

Not every environment opts for VMware DRS license. While LCM upgrades rely on resource scheduler it is still possible to achieve success in hypervisor upgrades without DRS feature.Things to consider as part of preparation for the upgrade:Compatibility matrix. Redundancy factor (must be at least RF-2 for a non-disruptive upgrade). Third party applications dependencies. For example, where Zerto Z-VRAs are present, additional tasks may be necessary to avoid disruption to live replication.Refer to vSphere Administration Guide for Acropolis (using vSphere FLEX Client): ESXi Host Upgrade Process  for detailed process guide.