Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

Whether your environment has grown enough to be ready to have a DR site or the scale of operations can no longer tolerate the loss of the site or maybe even a single application, the first question is “What are the options?”. And that is what we will talk about in this post.   Starting with AOS 5.10 Metro Availability is supported on Hyper-V.  Metro Availability is the solution if you are looking for minimal RPO and are preparing for a full scope DR scenario. Prism Web Console Guide v5.16: Data Protection   The next in line would be Async DR which is a scheduled based snapshots replications essentially. Both MA and Async DR require a physical cluster. Since single-node clusters are not supported at this point with Hyper-V it would have to be at least a 3 nodes block. Prism Web Console Guide v5.16: Configuring a Remote Site (Physical Cluster)   What if you are not ready to invest in hardware and be bothered with its maintenance? There are more options such as leveraging the mighty priva

When is the next LTS version of the AOS due to release?

Hi, I have a customer who is having a cluster of 11 Hyper-V 2016 compute nodes and 2 AHV storage nodes. During a NCC health check, there is an error mentioning that the 2 AHV nodes are not syncing with any NTP server. The current NTP time sync setup is something like this.   Nutanix cluster (Hyper-V and AHV) → DC → NTP source   First question, how should we begin troubleshooting the issue? There is no remote access for our support to perform a webex session troubleshooting due to security.   Second question, customer is changing the NTP source. This new NTP source is 1-2 mins behind. Any impact if customer proceeds to update on the DC? Does the cluster auto sync up    Third question, at what time intervals does the nutanix cluster probe or sync up with NTP time?   Regards, Leonard Thng

Hello. I'm trying to understand the sizer. How to calculate Applied Weight? CPU Type : 2 x Intel Xeon Processor 6252 (2.1 GHz, 24 cores) (48 Cores) Actual Core Capacity : 336.00 Applied Weight : 74.39 Adjustment Due To Memory Issues : 0.00 Adjustment Due To NUMA Considerations : 0.00 Effective RAW Capacity : 410.39 (Actual Core Capacity + Applied Weight) https://sizer.nutanix.com/#/help/articles/155 => Page does not open

Hi all I´m attempting to create one disk image from http server (I know that NFS is preferred) but i got errors from PE, acli and REST API. AHV, CVM, PE, PC and the web server are one the same network (then I can exclude routing issues)  and on the web server (Centos 7.7, apache httpd-2.4.6-90) firewall and selinux are disabled and the url is called using IP to avoid dns issues. The content is available via wget but the image creation command ends with error 503 (Service Unavailable) while on the web server with log at debug level nothing is written on error and access log.   I have tested also to stop httpd and use python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80 but doesn´t work (I got one excepction that I cannot fully read and I don´t know where is logged)   What´s wrong? I´m missing something? Someone have a suggestion?   Here some operation samples:   Download test using wget to check http service ~~~ nutanix@cmv:~/tmp$ wget http://192.168.158.40/images/gm-back-test-001-scsi1.qcow2 --2020-03-17 16:

If you need to clear up space on your Nutanix cluster you may be considering removing local snapshots, but what if the reclaimable space is displayed as “Processing”? What can we do about it, and how can we know if a snapshot is worth removing? The reclaimable space is subject to change and has to be totaled up before it can be known. This work is done during the same periodic filesystem scans which drive disk clean-up, post-process deduplication and compression, and information lifecycle management. Generally speaking we just need to wait for the next periodic scan to finish and then we should have the reclaimable space figure shown in Prism. If you need to estimate reclaimable space in the meantime, I can offer a few hints to help narrow that estimate. It helps to have a little understanding of how snapshots work, and how the reclaimable space number is identified. Think of it this way. Each current filesystem block has one or more owners, and any block cannot be deleted until no mor

Nutanix Mine is the product name for joint solutions between Nutanix and selected data protection software vendors.Mine is a fully integrated data protection appliance that combines the Nutanix AOS software with the Veeam Backup & Replication solution. Mine can provide data protection for any applications running in a Nutanix cluster.   Nutanix Mine with Veeam extends the core strengths of Nutanix software to backups. It integrates data protection software from Veeam with the software running in a hyperconverged manner on a Nutanix cluster. It is an entirely self-sufficient turnkey solution that provides compute, memory, storage, and now, backups too.   Nutanix Mine with Veeam is also tightly integrated with the Nutanix Prism management console, which means that IT administrators can use management interface for both primary storage (as part of the HCI infrastructure) and backups.   The Mine on Veeam can back up VMs and application data from Nutanix and non-Nutanix environments, wh

Hi Team,   We are running few file servers (windows 2016 machines) which are running on Nutanix + VMware 6.5. For e.g. i have a 5TB VMDK attached to the VM which is holding up a lot of files (being a file server). Now when we check the size of this disk in VMware, we this as around 4TB consumed (similar figures in Prism as well). However within Windows, the actual space consumed is only 1 TB.  The question is - how do we reclaim this space to match up the numbers seen by OS with what VMware believes the used space is. (i have seen some posts where users have mentioned using sdelete etc. but it isn’t really a scalable solution)  Thoughts ?  Thanks. Ravi  

Hi, my name is Rossana, I am new to the community and I have a question, I would like to know if someone can help me to know what kind of requirements NUTANIX must have to install SAP Business One, with 25 users and a HANA Database engine of 64GB with an average of 20,000 monthly transactions. Thank you very much

If you’re managing backups with Veeam, Hycu, Commvault, Rubrik, or another third party application then you may have encountered the alert message “Aged third-party backup snapshots present” even though nothing seems to be wrong. If so, you probably want to know why you’re seeing this alert and what to do about it. This alert doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem. It’s just seeing snapshot age. In most cases you just need to change the alert threshold which defaults to 7 days. See this article for more details about the alert. The phrase “third party snapshot” used in this alert refers to a specific type of snapshot requested by third party backup software using an API option specifically for this purpose. The backup application essentially has ownership of this snapshot. If your backup policy is set up to keep only five snapshots for this job, or to remove any snapshots over 14 days old, the decision of when to delete is made within the third party backup software. On the Nutanix end

Q1:  Is it ok to create protection domains on two different clusters with the same name with remote sites enabled on both clusters but PD is only setup with local snapshots only?   Answer: It is possible to have a protection domain with the same name as the remote site protection domain as long as they are not configured to sync with each other and it is only a local protection domain. It is also possible to configure "active" schedules for that protection domain and retain the snapshots in the local cluster.   Q2: Can a Protection Domain be renamed once configured and has entities and snapshots associated with it?   Answer: There is a workaround available which is to create a new Protection Domain with this procedure:   Create a new Protection Domain with the desired name and schedule. Remove all protected VMs from the old Protection Domain. Make a note of existing consistency groups. Add the VMs to the newly created Protection Domain, reconfigure consistency groups as they were in th

We love our VM level snapshots on VMware ESXi. It is a quick and easy way to roll back recent changes as if nothing has ever happened. It gives peace of mind and boosts confidence. It is not an answer to all prayers as, just like anything, it has its limitations.    What are the limitations of VM level snapshot in a Nutanix cluster?   First, let’s take a look at what are some of the interesting events that occur during the snapshot operation and its presence: If a virtual machine is running off of a snapshot, it is making changes to a child or sparse disk also called delta disk. The delta disk metadata in-memory of vSphere host includes the delta disk header. Updates to the header of the delta disks happen in memory as required and the changes are written to disk only upon certain events such as snapshot consolidation or when the delta disk is closed. Storage snapshot operations and storage replications are transparent to ESXi hosts. If the storage snapshot used to restore a VM wa

Are you going to have a planned power outage or relocation procedure that needs to shut down your Hyper-V cluster safely?   Maybe you have experienced this situation: We have a scheduled power outage at this location for Dec 31th. We are going to need to power everything down prior to the outage. What is the best way to safely power down the Hyper-V cluster? With Hyper-V Clusters it is important to consider the following procedure before shut down all the user VMs in the failover cluster : Make sure that you have at least one domain controller running outside of the Nutanix cluster. Otherwise, you will not be able to start VMs after powering on the cluster. Make sure that the Hyper-V hosts are configured to use this external DC/DNS server. Disable all Metro Availability-enabled Protection Domains, and make sure no on-going replication is happening. Consult the article Disabling Metro Availability for more details. To check the complete procedure and the details follow through to th

I'm trying to upgrade ESXi 6.0 to 6.7U2 but when try to do it from Prism im getting errors on DRS not enabled. Now we don't have DRS license, our cluster is ESXi 6.0 Standard License, is there any way to do the upgrade without the needs of DRS ?I read few documents that even if i try to use vCenter Update manager update will fail becasue DRS is not enabled. Any workaround solution ?

We've just gotten started with Nutanix, and I have a question about snapshots. Do I need to create a Protection Domain before I can create a snapshot? I'm not looking to take snapshots of a bunch of machines or have scheduled snapshots. I just want to make one snapshot of a single Windows server before I upgrade some software on it. We are running AHV as our hypervisor. Thank you

In the last few weeks we have been experiencing complete host CPU usage at 100% on all of our host(6 of them). We were never this high. When the system is at this level no one can do much on the ystem for a few minutes. The biggest change we did was add Bitdefender Gravity Zone to our system. We have about 650 VMs on the system. Memory usage hovers between 50-60% on all the hosts. We are running ESXI hypervisor with VMware Horizon to run our VDI system. Anyone have an insight into this situation? Is there any tweaking I need to do? What could be causing this?

Hi all, I´m attempting to download one image from a cluster on port 2222 as described on many documents (i.e. AHV | How to access VM disk files on Nutanix container or Copy files to/from a containter ) and I have a strange issue: using Filezilla or Winscp it works fine, using Centos 7.7 Linux scp doesn´t work. A syntax as “scp -P 2222 admin@VCM-IP:/default-container-171248/.acropolis/vmdisk/image-or-disk-uuid” accept the password and then terminate with error “exec request failed on channel 0” On the linux side firewall & selinux have been disabled a scp to other systems works fine. Any suggestion?    

Is there an ACLI or NCLI command to keep a VM from using flash tier completely?

The alert text “Connectivity to remote site is not normal” may show up for a number of different reasons, so it may not be immediately clear what to do about it. If you have recently added a remote site configuration in Prism it could be some problem of configuration, but if you had Async DR replication working for several days before the error popped up the issue is more likely to be related to network issues or the status of the remote site. Since the cause might only be temporary, the first thing to do is to re-run the check. To see the full detail I recommend running this one from the CLI: nutanix@cvm$ ncc health_checks data_protection_checks remote_site_checks remote_site_connectivity_check If you see a PASS result now and no corrective action was taken, the issue was temporary. If that’s the case you may want to check the alert timestamp and look into whether the network or remote site was undergoing maintenance or upgrade, or exhibiting some issue at the time of the alert. Since

Create VM, Add windows server 2016 CD-Rom, 16 GB memory, 80 GB HDD Power on Launch console Console displays SeaBIOS (version 1.10.2-3.e17_4.1) Machine UUID And thats it no activity, no messages, nada

What are you using for backup Nutanix?

If anyone is using HYCU to back up their AHV environment, please let me know your feedback. 1- Is the product good and acceptable solutions to back VM on AHV? 2- How was your restore experience, when you had to recover a VM or file or app data? 3- How is the support? 4- Is their documentation clear and easy to follow on any KB or DIY. Thanks a Bunch

Let us consider a scenario where you are running specific workloads that require extensive video rendering and needs GPU-enhanced acceleration.   Nutanix provides a solution in which the hardware is configured with GPU cards that allow video rendering to be passed through to the User Virtual Machine.    Want to read about NVIDIA Grid vGPU on Nutanix?    The following guide will help in understanding the architecture and requirements of handling it.    Nvidia grid vGPU Guide    So which hypervisors support this implementation?     The following hypervisors support the implementation :     AHV  VMware vSphere   Microsoft Hyper-V    The following document lists the hypervisor implementation in-depth for a vGPU solution.    vGPU on Nutanix: Hypervisor Implementation.      Have a GPU in your NX environment but wondering regarding the configuration, drivers requirement and basic troubleshooting?   Go through the following articles to understand some basic troubleshooting steps, command

The best way to know if your DR solution will work when you need it is to actually test the DR workflows, right? Of course a DR test can be disruptive so you’ll want to understand the procedures and best practices before your testing window actually starts.The Async-DR solution built into your Nutanix cluster can handle both planned and unplanned failover scenarios. Testing these capabilities is not much different from simply using them when needed.The two most relevant documents for these procedures will be the Prism Web Console Guide and the Data Protection and Disaster Recovery best practice guide. The Prism Web Console Guide provides the execution steps for setup and failover, while the best practice guide provides additional detail on available solutions, requirements, and related considerations around space, bandwidth, and seeding, and a best practices checklist. After reviewing the requirements and scheduling a test window, you can follow the planned failover workflow in the Pri

WE are planning to migrate 40 physical servers using Sureline. please if some one having some previous experiences .please comment.