Intelligent Operations

When considering providing certain permissions to a user or a group the following may come handy. Nutanix user accounts can be created or updated as needed using the Prism web console. The accounts can be local or pulled from Active Directory or LDAP servers.  On top of that Prism Central provides a third authentication method – SAML authentication. Users can authenticate through a qualified identity provider when SAML support is enabled for Prism Central. The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between two parties, ADFS as the identity provider (IDP) and Prism Central as the service provider. Once the account has been created it must be assigned a role. There are three options in Prism Element: User Administrator – allows the user to view information, perform any administrative task, and create or modify user accounts.  Cluster Administrator – allows the user to view information and perform any administr

Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) is a framework of scripts that can help diagnose cluster health. Nutanix Cluster Check assists in identifying configurations qualified and recommended by Nutanix.   Let’s say you encounter a scenario where after running NCC health check, you notice few checks fail with the following ERR message    ERR - Identified as CPU intensive   This message means that the specified health check, which is part of a particular NCC plugin, was identified as taking an abnormally long time to complete in previous attempts and has been disabled to prevent wasted resources trying to run it again.   The following document provides more information about the check and the solution for the same.    NCC - ERR: Identified as CPU intensive     Want to know more about NCC and its features?   Give the following guide a coffee read!   NCC Guide  

Let’s say you have been deleting some VMs/files in order to regain storage space but you don’t see any progress on the Home/Storage Summary window.   What could be the reason? The reason is that the space utilized by deleted VMs may not be available immediately. After removing or deleting many large files or VMs, free space on the Nutanix cluster appears to not increase or takes a few hours before the free space is seen/reclaimed.   This behavior of free space being slowly presented back to the cluster is expected behavior for Nutanix because of the service responsible for cleaning up space, Curator. The curator takes time to perform scans on the cluster to reclaim space.   The curator takes time to perform scans on the cluster and spreads the storage across the disks and carefully removes the correct files while maintaining redundancy for any data you want to keep.   To know more in detail about this and curator scan schedule, please take a look at KB-2924  Have any questions? Drop a

Let’s say you are new to Nutanix and are working on learning the skills required to manage the Nutanix cluster. The most basic task would be to learn how to create and deploy a VM as it is the backbone of any production environment. Creating a VM through prism is just a cakewalk and you can do it by following a few steps. To take a look at the steps, understand what is happening at each step and to get to know about the different options available, take a look at:- https://support-portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=SSP-User-Guide-v5_16:ssp-vm-create-t.html   To know more about VM management, take a look at https://support-portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=SSP-User-Guide-v5_16:ssp-vm-management-by-ssp-users-c.html   Have any questions? Drop a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Hi, All I would like to register for cc health_checks run_all in crontab. My goal is to check my health automatically in a day.

Nutanix Move (Move) is a cross-hypervisor mobility solution to move VMs with minimal downtime.    Let’s say we need to move our infrastructure from a VMware environment to AHV, but uncertain regarding vCenter user permissions.       You must need specific permissions at datastore, global, folder, sessions, virtual machine, guest operations, interaction, provisioning, snapshot management levels.    So confused about permissions and the process to configure the same?    Give the following knowledge article a read to understand vCenter permissions for Move.    Move | Required Permissions on vCenter User for VM Migration by using Nutanix Move   Want to know more about Nutanix Move and it's usage? Give the following article a coffee read!   Move Guide  .NEXT Move Series | Common guidelines

Let’s say you have a Nutanix environment which consists of both, SSDs and HDDs.  You have few critical high latency-sensitive workloads which require that the data should stay in the hot tier and should not migrate down to the cold tier, giving better performance.    Do we have an option through which we can configure a VM or VG storage tier preference to SSD?    The flash mode for VM and VG allows you to set the storage tier preference to SSD for a virtual machine or volume group. By default, you can use up to 25% of the cluster-wide SSD tier as flash mode space for VMs or VGs.      Want to know more about Flash mode and the guidelines for the feature?   Try going through the following guides!    Flash mode for virtual machines and volume groups  Best Practices: Flash Mode

Managing a large infrastructure is a tough and complex job. If you have 10+ clusters in your environment with thousands of virtual machines, managing the architecture becomes a whole lot easier with Prism Central.    Let’s consider a scenario where you decide to go ahead with a Prism Central deployment but to achieve the best performance, Prism Central VM must be sized to fit the environment.   Currently, confused regarding the optimal memory, CPU and storage configuration of PCVM?  What should be the configuration in a single or scale-out deployment?    The following document lists the details related to Prism central scalability.     The configuration of PC VM depends upon the number of UVMs in your environment.     Prism Central Scalability Document     Have questions or doubts regarding Prism central? Drop a comment and let us start a conversation.

Contact me about NTP. By default, Prism Health checks NTP every 12 hours. I excluded two prism health check items. - CVM NTP Time Synchronized - Hypervisor time synchronized If NTP communication is lost, try connecting again?

Hi Folks, I am trying to figure out if there is an option to specify the IP address details when the VM gets failover to DR site. At the primary site the VM has an IP address 192.168.11.x/24 and when the VM is failover to DR site in case of a disaster, the VM is supposed to an IP address 192.168.12.x/24. The IP address is statically configured at the primary site. Will we have to change the IP address manually once the VM is failover and powered on at the DR site or is there a way we can do it so that the VM automatically gets the IP address that needs to be set while performing the failover?

I have been deleting some VMs in order to regain storage space but I don’t see any progress on the Home/Storage Summary window. How can I refresh this information?

SIOC or Storage I/O Control is a feature in ESXi which when enabled, it helps the ESXi to monitor datastore latency and throttles the I/O load if the datastore average latency exceeds a particular threshold.    So what is esx_sioc_status_check ?    The NCC health check esx_sioc_status_check verifies if the vSphere feature "Storage I/O Control" (SIOC) settings for both "SIOC" and "SIOC in Stats Mode" are disabled on Nutanix containers.   Why do we want SIOC setting to be disabled in the cluster?   SIOC is an excellent feature for traditional server infrastructure, but it is neither required nor compatible with the Nutanix converged storage architecture. Starting from ESXi 6.0, SIOC in Stats Mode is enabled by default. Nutanix requires that both features be disabled.   It can cause a range of problems in a Nutanix environment and it's highly recommended that we disable it   Want to know more about the issues caused by enabling SIOC and a step-by-step guide as to how to disable it.    Giv

Just a reminder today that Nutanix does not support USB passthrough on all platforms/hypervisors. There are no plans to support USB passthrough on Nutanix platforms due to security concerns and due to the fact that it affects features such as live migration, HA, 1-Click upgrades and more. Alternative If you need a guest VM to access USB devices, using AnywhereUSB is a valid solution. This solution uses a USB hub accessible over TCP/IP. A driver is installed on the VM and it emulates a USB device connected to the hub as if it was directly attached to the VM. This method is well-known to work and does not affect the features mentioned above. Please see the Digi site for further details: www.digi.com/products/usb-and-serial-connectivity/usb-over-ip-hubs/anywhereusb   KB-3320 USB passthrough support on Nutanix platforms

Ever been in a situation where you forgot the password to your laptop, email account or your smartphone.  Imagine the same when you’re an administrator and managing large scale environments.     What will happen if you forgot the password to Prism Web Login?   You can’t even run the ncli commands!   Do we have a mechanism through which we can recover the password of the prism web console? What can we do if we have forgotten the password and want to reset it to default? Do we have a guide for that?      Of course.    Just follow the steps mentioned in the document below to reset the prism web console password!     Reset nCLI or Prism Web Console Password 

HI,  Is it advisable to disable Nutanix Prism Admin account after creating local user accounts with “User Admin” rights.  The purpose of this question is to increase the security level of access. Please advise. Thanks in Advance. Best, Shan

We have already covered the reasons for the Pulse configuration. Hopefully, you have configured it and are looking to verify the outcome. Here is a quick summary of how and where to do so.   Within the Nutanix Support Portal, customers can check if their assets are Pulse-enabled via two coloured dots beside each asset in the Products > Installed Base page. Please allow for at least a day for the data to be populated to the Nutanix portal.   An overview of data collected and configuring Pulse on the cluster can be found in the Configuring Pulse section of the Prism Web Console Guide.   For explanation of collection statuses with further troubleshooting please refer to KB-5784 Troubleshooting the Legacy Pulse Email or PulseHD status columns on Installed Base page in Nutanix Support Portal. Why everyone need Pulse .NEXT Pulse - what's in it for you? Much more than a simple call home. Prism Web Console Guide 5.16: Pulse Health Monitoring

In a VMware environment, we get three types of VMDK provisioning     Thick Eager Zeroed provisioned.  Thick provisioned. Thin provisioned.   Everyone who has worked with traditional solutions knows the performance benefits of a thick eager zeroed disk with faster I/O operations.    BUT BUT BUT !!!   In a nutanix environment, there’s no performance difference between thick and thin disk provisioning. So even when a thick disk is provisioned, no disk space is allocated to write zeroes. So there is no requirement for provisioning a thick disk.   Nutanix recommends thin disk over any other type of disk service.     Want to know more about disk provisioning in a nutanix environment?    Try going through the document    KB-1591  

Hi everybody, I see a “flapping” warning message for one SSD on my 3-Node Hybrid-Cluster (2x 1,92TB SSD per Node). Disk space usage for one or more disks on Controller VM ###.###.###.### is 88% which exceeds the threshold of 85%. I checked curator runs which were successfull.  From the I/O Metrics of a VM (Prism → VM → I/O Metrics) I only see the performance distribution (block size/read source usw.) for a point in time. I know Nutanix DSF handles tiering but is there a command/way to figure out which vm/vdisk claims most SSD capacity? Thanks for support, Marc

Feel intimidated by the amount of information that is anticipated in preparation for an upgrade? Start with this FAQ that covers questions like Is downtime required? Is there performance impact? What happens if the upgrade becomes stuck? How do I know if a version is compatible? What should I do in-advance? AOS,  Hypervisor, LCM, Foundation, NCC, Nutanix Files: What happens when I click "Upgrade Now"? How long does it take?   Find all of the answers in KB-6945 How Upgrades Work at Nutanix. Feel more inclined to read more now? Try these .NEXT posts we have put together:.NEXT All things considered — upgrade sequence and preparation guidelines.NEXT Upgrade paths - how to verify.NEXT LCM Series | List of pre-checks before the upgrade

Decisions, decisions. Should you go with that STS version? What is the downside? How soon will it be deprecated? Will you be able to switch over to the LTS later? How are they even different?    There are two separate Nutanix AOS tracks, Long Term Support Releases (LTS) and Short Term Support Releases (STS). LTS Each LTS release is maintained for 3 months after the release date of the later LTS release. The next LTS release is an upgrade followed by an additional 6 months of troubleshooting support. STS Each STS release is maintained until the next release. The next LTS or STS release is an upgrade followed by an additional 3 months of troubleshooting support. Why would you upgrade to STS:  in the interest of adopting new major features while being able to perform upgrades multiple times a year.   Maintained: Nutanix provides updates with workarounds and bug fixes for errors but will not provide upgrades. Update: Either a Maintenance Release or a Patch Release. Upgrade: Eith

Bringing down a cluster is a scary thing, isn’t it? What if it does not come back? What if this is not the right sequence? What if you make a typo? What if... Unfortunately, no matter how much one frets the task there is always a point when a cluster must be powered off. We thought we would hold your hand along the way at least figuratively speaking and provide you with a guide on the process so that the next time you consider that pesky network maintenance or emulation of DR or prepare for a site power outage or a re-location you would be all prepared for the task. In this post we will cover the process for the vSphere based clusters: Upgrade to the most recent version of NCC before proceeding with the following steps. For Metro Availability (Data Protection) Disable Metro Availability and Verify no Async DR replications are in progress. Shutting down guest VMs (Do not shut down the Nutanix Controller VMs.) Shutting down vCenter VM (if applicable). Shutting down Nutanix Files (file se

Finally, decided to replace self-signed certificates with CA-signed ones? Or ready to renew nearly expired ones but are unable to remember the process? Don’t you worry, we’ve got your back. To replace the SSL certificate 3 files are required: Private Key - key generated using RSA 2048 key type and signed using SHA256 hash. We also support EC DSA 256bit and EC DSA 384 bit. However, RSA 2048 is the most commonly used key type Public Certificate - Issued by a certificate authority (CA). We support x509 certificates in 64base encoded PEM format CA Certificate/Chain - The certificate of the CA that issued a public certificate above. In case the issuing CA is intermediate CA we will also need the root CA certificate. If there are multiple intermediate CAs we need the certs for all the intermediate CAs along with the root CA   Table 1. Recommended Key Configurations Key Type Size/Curve Signature Algorithm RSA 2048 SHA256-with-RSAEncryption EC DSA 256 prime256v1 ecdsa-wi

Did you know there is a native Nutanix tool available to verify the upgrade path for AOS, Nutanix Files and Prism Central? Support Portal > Documentation > Upgrade Paths See the Compatibility Matrix for AOS version - Hypervisor support. AOS follows the Long Term Support Release (LTS) and Short Term Support Release (STS) tracks. Please refer to KB#5505 for more details on LTS/STS model. To view AOS EOL versions, please visit here. To view upgrade paths for old AOS releases, please visit here. To view software compatibility, please visit here. If Prism Central is registered to the cluster then Prism Central needs to be upgraded before you upgrade AOS Link to the Upgrade Paths We have also described what to expect during the upgrade and how to map out the sequence of upgrade components in the .NEXT community posts: .NEXT: All things considered — upgrade sequence and preparation guidelines .NEXT: Upgrades. Yay, not again! How to upgrade Nutanix Files.

Returning from vacations and see that you cannot access your Prism Console? Perhaps you will see this kind of message: The Prism Central is reported as Disconnect - “Prism services have not started yet. Please try again later.” Most of the time you only have to restart the Prism Console Services, all you need to do is: Identify who is the Prism Leader in your environment and SSH to it. Run the commands to restart Prism Service Please follow the details on KB 1014. Note: In the case where the Nutanix Console requires a frequent or continuous restart, consider engaging Nutanix Support at http://portal.nutanix.com.

Hello, I´ve seen a alert on Prism about external authentication. Here you are the complete message: Possible Cause An external client is configured to authenticate to the REST API with the admin user. RECOMMENDATION Authenticate to the REST API with a different user that has administrative privileges. I don´t think I have anything configured to use APIs. CE 2018.01.31