Nutanix Cloud Manager

Should you ever have a need to extract affinity rules settings via command line there are aCLI commands to achieve the task.   Additionally, in AOS releases older than 5.10.8, 5.11.2 when VM affinity is removed via Prism task may complete successfully, but affinity can still remain set.   This may happen when the following conditions are met: AOS release older than 5.10.8, 5.11.2. Action is initiated from Prism. VM affinity is removed from all nodes.

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 b

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.  

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.   Th

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-U

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 fo

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 o

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?   

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?

Overview Integrating Nutanix Calm and Ansible is straightforward. This series walk you through the different steps to get your integration ready. Part 3 focuses on deploying a Multi-Machine Application, how you deploy Consul on a three virtual servers. Code The blueprint and code used in this part can be found here. Requirement Ansible Tower or Ansible AWX Blog series Part 1: Inventory Management Part 2: Launching a Job Template Enjoy the video and let us know if you have an

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  

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 pas

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.

Overview Integrating Nutanix Calm and Ansible is straightforward. This series walk you through the different steps to get your integration ready. Part 2 focuses on Launching a Job Template (a.k.a. Ansible playbook), how your new servers and applications get the software installed. Code The blueprint and code used in this part can be found here. Requirement Ansible Tower or Ansible AWX Blog series Part 1: Inventory Management Enjoy the video and let us know if you have any question!  

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 !!!

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:

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

Overview Integrating Nutanix Calm and Ansible is straightforward. This series walk you through the different steps to get your integration ready. Part 1 focuses on Inventory Management, how your new servers and applications get registered in Ansible for day 1 provisioning and day 2 operations management. Code The blueprint and code used in this part can be found here. Requirement Ansible Tower or Ansible AWX Enjoy the video and let us know if you have any question!  

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: