Nutanix Cloud Manager

Out of the box, Prism Element (PE) and Prism Central (PC) deploy with one local user configured, called ‘admin’. For initial setup this is useful but for the sake of security and auditing, it is strongly recommended to configure and use other accounts. For reference, User Management is covered in the Nutanix Security Guide. One option is to create individual local accounts in Prism. This is done from Settings – Local User Management. Whether on PE or PC (up to the current latest major release AOS 5.16), the role options for local users are: User Admin - allows the user to view information, perform any administrative task, and create or modify user accounts. Cluster Admin - allows the user to view information and perform any administrative task, but does not allow control of user accounts. Viewer – allows the user to view information only. The UI shows checkbox options for cluster admin and user admin. If user admin is checked, cluster admin is automatically checked also. If neither is

What is Calm? Calm (Cloud Application LifeCycle Management) is a DevOps Automation Platform that models applications and integrates your teams, governance, and life cycle operations to manage your applications, calm includes: Single pane of glass for all of your applications, making infrastructure invisible Visual Infrastructure, Operations, and Governance as code Works with public + private cloud, and containers nuCalm = nutanix Calm, our new platform in PC Calm has some prerequisites such as a minimum AOS version supported and ports that must be open for the feature to work. See the full prerequisite here. Note: Nutanix Calm is not supported on Hyper-V clusters. Nutanix Calm does not support vSphere essential edition. If you try to enable Calm with vSphere essential edition license, you get a failure notification because hot-pluggable virtual hardware is not supported by vSphere Essentials. Check out this getting started page for the full documentation or go to a specific page: Enab

Managing infrastructure is a tough and complex task, especially when dealing with cluster-wide upgrades. Nutanix provides features such as Life Cycle Manager that can turn firmware and hypervisor upgrades into a 1-click process, making them slightly less complex.  Life Cycle Manager pulls the latest upgrade packages from the official pre-configured URL while performing inventory and then proceeds with the upgrade.    What if the cluster is isolated from the Web?   There is an option to set up a local webserver with the LCM offline bundle packages and use the server to perform inventory and complete the upgrade.      For detailed information on how to use LCM without web access, refer to the Life Cycle Manager Guide.   For some examples of setting up a Web server, you can consult the following document as a reference guide  KB-5901 Using Life Cycle Manager (LCM) Without Web Access   To know more about upgrades, try below: Nutanix upgrades FAQ: AOS, LCM, NCC, Hypervisors, Files .NEXT BMC

Is there any way to test API with basic authentication on the Test Drive? As I can't download the Prism Central Bits, so testing APIs just using instance ID that has been provided in demo is not enough. Please tell if there is some way to download Prism bits and test. or any other way.

The backbone of a hyper-converged infrastructure is good network connectivity in the solution. Troubleshooting networking issues can be daunting. To help you with the process we put together an article describing the most common failure scenarios together with remediation steps as well as general troubleshooting techniques and sequence. The article also answers some of the most common questions: What are the possible causes of NIC errors? How do I determine if a Nutanix node is experiencing NIC errors? Should I be concerned that my NIC port shows any NIC errors? How does the packet error handling between cut-through and traditional store-and-forward switches differ? Where to look for errors? How does an error manifest itself? Normally if there is a fault with a cable, an SFP module, a switch port or the NIC hardware we notice some errors in the packets received or transmitted can be observed in the interface stats.   KB-1381 NCC Health Check: host_nic_error_check Want to know more abou

Nutanix gives you a feature to send alert emails periodically to ease administrator work and keep you always updated about your cluster health. Alert emails are used to warn users of errors in their Nutanix system.   Q. How to configure alert emails?    The following Prism Web Console guide lists the steps to configure alert emails  Prism Web Console Guide 5.16   Q. What will happen if the alert emails are not set up correctly?    It may lead to users being unaware of critical errors that should be addressed. In addition, Nutanix Autosupport (ASUP) relies on alert emails from customer systems to pro-actively warn of errors and depending on the alert will generate a support case so we can quickly bring attention and resolution to critical issues.   Is there a way to send a new mail to test my configuration?  How to monitor logs relevant to the alert email  How can I check my firewall and port configuration?  What are the basic troubleshooting steps to perform in scenarios of

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. For the steps and commands please refer to KB-7198 AHV | VM Host affinity is not removed when task initiated from Prism   More on affinity policies:Prism Central Guide: Affinity Policies for AHV Nutanix University: Tech TopX: VAAI on Nutanix

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

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 any question!  

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

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!