Nutanix Cloud Manager

Did you know you can determine when a VM was created? All you need is a Prism Central instance.In PC UI go to Virtual Infrastructure –> VMs –> List –> in Focus dropdown choose +Add Custom  and search  for “Created Timestamp”.You can also find the time stamp from PC CLI using nuclei.For details refer to KB-9045 How to find a VM creation date and time in Prism Central.  Always remember to configure adblocking plugin (if you are using one) in the Web browser to exclude Prism from checks. KB-8762 Prism home page shows "loading" when Web browse

Performance issues usually begin with the scene of an administrator looking at statistics, scratching the back of the head and saying ‘Wait, what?’ The issue can manifest itself in so many ways and the main struggle is to find the entities of the environment that experience issues at the same time and look at the environment layer by layer. Whether the bottleneck lies on the network, compute or storage layer, troubleshooting performance issue is always a tedious and time-consuming task. That is why Nutanix published an article (or two) to help you with the process. Where to look, what to look for and how to interpret the numbers. KB-2345 [Performance] Troubleshooting high CPU in Nutanix environments

HI, recently someone upgraded a VM in our Nutanix cluster without documenting it. I know when it happened from the Tasks view in Prism. I need to konw if there is a log of who has logged into Prism to correlate but can’t seem to find this. Any ideas? Thanks!

Prism Pro is a set of additional features that are unlocked when Prism Central is licensed. These features include capacity planning, custom dashboards, and advanced search capabilities. The one-click planning feature that lets you forecast future workload growth so you can expand accordingly to meet the demands.Capacity PlanningThis feature ensures that environment never runs out of capacity. You can forecast shortages of CPU, memory, and storage, defining how much time until a given resource is exhausted. Information is based on machine-learned consumption behavior based on current and past utilization. This also provides a recommendation of scale out opt

I”m trying to find out if Nutanix has a scheduled patching regimen similar to Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday. How are admins informed when there is an emergency patch? Do these include patches to Prism, to AOS and firmware patches? Thank you.

Hi,I have 1 cluster 4 nodes nutanix. Any baseline to create a Preventive Maintenance Checklists Document?I just want to create a documentation saying that my nutanix cluster is just fine aside from NCC results. Maybe checklists for physical condition, firmware and etc? Thank you.

In this ever-changing digital world, there is a need to secure and protect digital data. Nutanix provides continuous fixes and updates to address security threats and vulnerabilities (CVEs).To find information about available security fixes and updates, navigate to the “Security Advisories” section within the Support Portal.Nutanix is also committed to providing security patches/releases in a timely manner on any new CVEs that are discovered. The following KB outlines the Nutanix CVE Patching Schedule/Policy: KB 4110

Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a protocol for clock synchronisation between computers. The hosts and CVMs in a Nutanix cluster must be configured to synchronise their system clocks with a list of stable NTP servers. Generally, at least 1 (one), but preferably 3 (three) or more reliable off-cluster NTP servers are configured on the cluster. To avoid split brain scenarios, it is always recommended to configure an odd-number of NTP servers.   Some of the primary things when it comes to NTP configuration and troubleshooting can be covered using these quick links. Please note that most of the links here are for the latest LTS version - AOS 5.15(as of July 28th, 2020). To configure NTP servers on the CVMs and AHV, see 

Hi everyone Is it possible for future versions of AHV to see the operating system fields of virtual machines?

We are trying to pull VM Creation Date on one of our AHV Cluster, we also have PC in our environment. Kindly advise if any way to fetch the VM Creation date.

Hi Guys I have a multiple of VMs protected, I would like to restore them to a smb. Severe are in different protection domains.  Is there a script I can use to restore multiple vms in different PDs at once?

Each of the services in Nutanix Cluster has a definitive purpose. Nutanix ClusterHealth service, for example, is practically an in-build monitoring system of the cluster. Nutanix Cluster Checks (NCC) and pre-upgrade checks rely on ClusterHealth. As with troubleshooting of any service status, the first thing to do is to attempt to start the service manually from the CMV. If that does not help and you are not running Hyper-V on the host check the logs located at /home/nutanix/data/logs/ for any FATAL files and inspect records in there. Note: Foundation process does not run when the Node is a part of a Nutanix cluster.   For logs location, handy commands and more tips be sure to check KB-1518 NCC Health Check: cluster_services_down_check. While the article is on an NCC check the troubles

As your environment grows, keeping track of various entities (VMs, Clusters, services, etc.) can become cumbersome. In order to keep tabs on it, you can utilize a feature called “Entity Exploring” found in Prism Central. With this feature, you can look at data across many clusters which are registered to Prism Central.   For example, under the VM->Entities  menu, you can create a custom view that lists additional columns (vCPUs, NICs, etc.) to your liking, and then save this view for future use. You can even export this view to a CSV file to save locally. Once you have created this granular view, you can then apply filters to drill-down even further if desired.   More examples of the customization of the “Entities”  menu can be found in the

Did you know you can restore a deleted VM from a leftover snapshot? If a virtual machine (VM) was accidentally deleted or migrated to a remote site provided the snapshot remains the VM can be recovered. When deleting a VM using Prism an option ‘Delete all snapshots’ is available. When the option is not selected the snapshots remain in the container and become orphaned. Similarly, when a VM is migrated to a remote site an is disassociated with the protection domain the snapshot remains. The recovery operation relies on a clone operation in aCLI. Clone a VM from a snapshot is essentially what happens when recovering the VM.   Follow KB-6194 Cloning from AHV Orphaned Snapshots for a simple set of instructions on the process. Prism Web Guide contains more information on

I set the security policy named LAMP as shown in the figure, and set it to monitor mode. LAMP-DB CentOS 7 MySQL is running on port 3306. LAMP-WEB database request is accepted. There is no control by fiwewalld. Can VMs in this tier talk to each other ? - No LAMP-WEB CentOS 7 Wordpress and apache are running. Web services are launched on http port. There is no database, no control by fiwewalld. Can VMs in this tier talk to each other ? - No   Then I did the following: View LAMP-WEB in browser from 192.168.0.0/23 segment. Ping to LAM

As a starting point of all or nearly all troubleshooting Nutanix recommends running Nutanix Cluster Checks (NCC). NCC identifies any risks or misses in the cluster configuration, hardware state, software components, networking and more. Checking for presence of orphan VM snapshots is part of NCC which, I think is quite convenient as chasing orphaned snapshots can be a hassle. Should you already know that there is a snapshot that is orphaned it can be removed with a single aCLI command. To be on the safe side always validate that the VM no longer exist. Otherwise, solution section of KB-3752 NCC Health Check: orphan_vm_snapshot_check lists all the steps necessary.   More on the subject:

Who can say they have never experienced a VM boot issue? We have all been there. Something quick and easy like creating a VM from scratch or powering up one after migration. Annoying but can be solved. On AHV the root cause may be hidden in one of the below: Incorrect boot device selected. Incorrect boot mode is selected: BIOS or UEFI. If the virtual machine was initially created in UEFI boot mode and then boot mode was changed to BIOS or vice versa, then VM will fail to boot. VirtIO drivers are not installed in the guest OS - results in PSOD also known as blue screen of death. VirtIO drivers used to be installed but are removed after a sysprep. You may find verification steps and resolution in the articles below:KB-9400 AHV | Troubleshooting Virtual Machine boot failures

Hi everyone! i created a blueprint of a centOS machine that installs docker, things were fine and it worked. now i published the blueprint in the marketplace and used it to create an application, it doesn't work anymore and it gives me the following error: Nutanix calm script execution has failed with error authentication by password failed. please refer kb-6098 for possible failure reasons. Notes : _ the blueprint sets the parameter PasswordAuthentication to yes in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config  file using cloud init, this works fine. My question is : why i get this error and why the blueprint doesn't work as before after publishing it in the marketplace. Thank you in advance.

Is there a way to make a UEFI based vm via comandlets or the API?  This posting seems to leave those two out.  https://next.nutanix.com/prism-infrastructure-management-26/uefi-on-vms-faq-37339

Hi Folks, We have been getting alerts on memory usage from the Prism Central VM. It seems to be a known issue. So to suppress the alerts from repeatedly generating cases in our internal ticketing system I am working on setting up an automated restart when memory usage gets to 90%. I’ve written the code to do this (a mix of the Nutanix cmdlets and Rest API calls in PowerShell). It works fine when run under my own account. My account has the ‘User Admin’ role. I should also mention we map roles to AD groups. However I wish to move the scheduled job to run under the context of a  service account. The service account has been assigned a Custom Role with a single assignment ‘Update VM Power State’      

I am looking at a way to programmaticly add a Directory User to a Project, as part of a blueprint.  Blueprint has a macro for the user identity in question.  I just need to be able to set that user as a Project User, and ultimately VM Owner.  I have the VM Owner, but they need to be a prior Project User, and adding domain users, to project users, sounds like a bad idea.

  Microsoft has enabled LDAP channel binding and LDAP signing in March this year in Active Directory Windows Servers architecture. Nutanix recommends changing Prism Authentication from LDAP on port 389 to LDAPS on ports 636 or an SSL encrypted port 3269. Two things to note with the process are: changing just the port number is not enough because the LDAP protocol also needs to change to LDAPS Prism self-signed certificates work with the LDAPS so no extra hassle The process is straightforward and only requires a change of a URL syntax in Prism settings.   For instructions and verification steps see:KB-9029 Changing LDAP port 389 authentication to Secure LDAP (LDAPS) ports 636 or 3269.   More on LDAP:

  At Nutanix we obsess over customer experience. Form the purchase through transition to support - all things, but also your experience as an administrator is part of our obsession. We believe that you have other things to do than to spend countless hours on achieving something that can be achieved with less effort. 1-Click upgrade is a feature that is designed to streamline the upgrade process and save your time. Sadly nothing is perfect and things go out of order. If the 1-click upgrade fails with the error below some troubleshooting is due. release-api.nutanix.com could not be reached during 1-Click Upgrade Reaching a Web page is like reaching an IP address but with an extra layer of FQDN resolution by DNS hence the troubleshooting logic looks like this: Verify that the FQDN resolution is successful Inspect proxy settings Verify correct settings are applied if using Transparent

After connecting my Cluster to Prism Central I see some VMs in Prism Central that are not existing anymore in the Cluster and I cannot find a way to remove them. Here is an example: These VMs are already deleted in the clusterIn Prism these VMs are not visibleIs there a way to delete these VMs from PC? I already tried to remove the cluster from PC, run the cleanup scripts and connect to PC again (even to a new installed one), but it did not help.

We're new to using Calm for automation/orchestration and I'm looking to get additional information/guidance on how we can leverage the Nutanix REST APIs during our virtual workload PreCreate/PostDelete tasks. I under how to work with the HTTP Task itself, but I'm not quite sure how to chain them together in such a way that it would work. They function as I would want individually, via the Test functionality for each HTTP Task.The first three cases we're trying to get to work to get our feet wet include: During Package Install, leverage Prism Central REST APIv3 vms to GET the complete spec of the newly created VM; modify that Response to update the Description; and set (PUT) the updated Spec with the modified Description as desired. During Package Install, graceful shutdown of the new virtual workload and removal of the second CD-ROM drive that is added (ide.3) to hold the 'unattend.xml' file.