Nutanix Cloud Manager

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:

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 cer

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 Compatibilit

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.

Importing an existing Calm blueprint is simple from the UI. But what if you need to automate it? In this video, Laura Jordana shows how to leverage the Calm API to import a blueprint programmatically using Postman.  

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 

Hi,   I was successful on setting up prism central on the community edition all working good. Further i extended the cluster capability by enabling Calm. I am able to access the calm UI and see all the functions available. As a next step i tried to deploy hycu blueprint from market place also tried to deploy one VM from my on disk image. Both get failed with below error. Please help.   HTTPConnectionPool(host='172.16.xx.xx', port=4120): Max retries exceeded with url: /api/1/entities/get_by_name?name=Application-hycu--74b677a5-5cd9-4c49-9cb4-196e2d5e3be4 (Caused by ProtocolError('Connection aborted.', BadStatusLine("''",)))    Regards, Aravind

Hi, How can I install Prism Central on Nutanix CE? I tried to install it with manual method. When i run creation command, It fails.

Nutanix recommends that you have a single container for simple VM management, but due to certain reasons if you have configured multiple storage containers and VMs are running on them respectively. Let's say now you need to move a VM from one storage container to another in an AHV cluster.   Is there a method to accomplish the same?Of course Please go through the Knowledgebase article to know the steps requires to move VMs between containers within an AHV cluster.KB-2663     Want to know about different migration Scenarios in an NX environment? Go through the following KB 1062

​Just like with many other services NTP is something you do not think about until it breaks. Then all these strange things start creeping into your environment.   Symptoms: Users are not able to log in to the Prism web console using LDAP or other directory integrated services. Cluster services do not start. Cluster does not function correctly due to major time-skew post outage or maintenance. Log collection is inaccurate. Health checks that rely on accurate time frames and event correlation return inaccurate results. Incorrect and skewed graphs in Prism. User VMs start on hypervisor hosts with inaccurate RTC (real-time clocks) causing guest OS time skew. Third-party software products like Veeam or CommVault have trouble interacting with the cluster. Snapshots expire too early or too late when the time between a cluster and a remote site is out of sync. To resolve an

Hi Guys, I have a nutanix block with four nodes. I mean four node cluster.  Supermicro NX30-60 I have a query about fault tolerance. Currently it is set as RF-2 Each node  has 6 disks. 4 hdd and 2 SSD 4*800 gb hdd 2* 200 gb sad OS is AHV.  1) Assume, if one host completely fails, then the vm will be restarted on other host and it will continue to run without any issues.  2) If one disk fails(either HDD or SSD or both at the same time)from first AHV, then there will be no impact.  3) If two disk fails from two hosts(1st  AHV and 2nd AHV) at the same time(assume one HDD fails on both the nodes), then what will be the impact for all the running vms in the cluster?  4) If two disk fails from two hosts(1st  AHV and 2nd AHV) in different time I. E 30 mins gap(assume one HDD failed in 6AM in first node and another HDD failed at 6.30 AM in second node), then what will be the impact for all the running vms in the cl

Whenever you find LCM inventory operation on your cluster displaying only SATADOM firmware ugrades available while you now for a fact that newer firmware versions for other components are available it is not a bug that you have encountered! Firmware upgrades for 3IE3 satadoms are being prioritized in LCM. To reduce the likelihood that customers are impacted by issues with S160130N and S560301N firmware on 3IE3 model SATADOMs, Nutanix has updated Lifecycle Manager (LCM) in such a way that it will only show Satadom (Host Boot Device) upgrades available. Customers are being advised to use LCM to upgrade satadom disk on module firmware in their cluster to the version S670330N during their next available maintenance window. Once all satadoms are upgraded, later Inventory operations with LCM will once again show available updates for any other types of firmware (BMC, BIOS, SATA, etc.) on the cluster that are not already on the latest versions. Since there are no AC po

Uploaded the image but can’t see it? Why? Prism Central 5.5 and above includes a global image service that allows you to add (upload) images through Prism Central by using the v3 API. However, the Prism Central administrator (admin) interface still uses the v2 API. As a result, after you upload an image when you are logged in as admin, you might not see the image in the list of available images when you are creating a VM. This issue occurs if the global image service has not yet copied the image to the cluster on which the admin is trying to create the VM.   What to do? Add the image using the URL option instead of Image File. The source can be a standard HTTP(S) URL, or for NFS, use <hostname or FQDN>://folder/subfolder/filename. When uploading images with the URL option, each cluster will immediately attempt to fetch the image from the source. When the Create Image task displays as

We have multiple Clusters registered in our Prism Central, how can we fetch a report having clusters basic details through PC or command line?

Hello Community, I'm involved in a PreSales action. The customer asks for information regarding deletion of user data from Audit Logs. Is it possible to delete user information from audit logs? Or does the audit log automatically delete entries older than XX months? How long are events stored in audit log? Maybe this is based on a parameter? Thanks for any feedback! Jan-Oliver Ohloff

So I had to replace my prism central with a new one, unfortunately it had already taken ownership of the images. With my new prism central at I can not delete any of the old images and I get this error. Operation kImageDelete not allowed, catalog item is owned by cluster 4452164c-24b6-479d-b16b-a8635fbe2741, which I believe is my old prism central UUID. I can't delete them from from the clusters locally because they are hooked to prims central. This is pretty frustrating as I am trying to use PC as my main entry point for managing and deploying vm.

Continuing on NGT series this post is about troubleshooting. Nutanix strongly believes power of the community and joint effort. You are not alone. We’re here to help. Nutanix engineers put together troubleshooting steps for some of the potentiall or more common scenarios out there for you: KB-3741 Nutanix Guest Tools Troubleshooting Guide: SSR login is successful but you receive "Error executing command: System identifier mismatch" after login. Guest Agent Service is not reachable. NGT is failing installation on a user VM/server where a Python environment already exists. NGT is failing in-place upgrade or uninstall on a user VM/server with "notify_cvm_of_uninstallation". NGT installation on Windows server 2008 R2 SP1 VM gives a warning "Hot-fix 2921916 is not installed on your system".

You can create a VM template from a VM’s disk. While the process is somewhat tricky the goal is achievable. Acropolis Image create, update, delete (CUD) behavior has changed in AOS / Prism Central 5.5. Image API CUD behavior depends on whether a cluster (also known as Prism Element) is registered to Prism Central. If the Prism Element (PE) cluster is newly created and has never been registered with a Prism Central instance (that is, never managed by Prism Central), all image CUD operations will be allowed on the PE cluster. If the PE cluster is registered with a Prism Central instance (that is, managed by Prism Central), CUD operations will be blocked on the PE cluster. Ownership of images is migrated from PE to Prism Central. CUD operations must be performed through Prism Central. When CUD operations are blocked on Prism Element, they cannot be performed through the version 0.8 API, version 2.0 API, Prism Element web console, or acli. These

Lets start small! In this topic I will share how you can know your ESXi version on the cluster.  I understand that you want a quick way to verify ESX version on Prism, in Prism, although we do show the Hypervisor the cluster is running on, but currently the Prism UI does not show the hypervisor version. Perhaps a command may fit better your purpose. For this you can issue the following command from any CVM. nutanix@cvm $ hostssh "esxcli system version get" The above, will query each node to find out the version of ESXi it is running. Alternatively you could also use commands like- nutanix@cvm $ hostssh vmware -v (command specific to ESXi hypervisor) nutanix@cvm $ hostssh uname -a (hypervisor agnostic command)  

Hi All, Assume one cluster, all the same model. Can anyone confirm whether downloading the updates from the software upgrades option in prism for a cluster downloads the updates individually for each node? Or does it download it once and distributes the updates among the nodes. Our networking guy reckons he’s seeing the updates get downloaded 4x times for our 4 node cluster. I couldn’t find any documentation to confirm so I thought I’d ask the community. Cheers guys…

Nutanix guest tools (NGT) is a software bundle that you can install in a guest virtual machine (Microsoft Windows or Linux) to enable the advanced functionality provided by Nutanix. Nutanix Guest Tools enables the VM to CVM communication and sometimes we might encounter the NGT Services to be falling with the signature guiding towards SSL error.   So how do I identify if I’m facing a similar issue and resolve it? You can refer to the KB-3868 for guidance regarding which log file to check and which error trace is matching the issue. After confirming that you’re encountering the same issue, you can proceed with the solution mentioned in the knowledge base article. Want to know more about NGT and it’s configuration? Give the following document a coffee read

Security is the backbone of every infrastructure and Nutanix Prism gives you an option to upload an SSL certificate to establish secure communication with the cluster. Every AOS includes a self-signed SSL certificate by default to enable secure communication with a cluster.How  I create my own-self signed certificates? The following Knowledge Base article will guide you with the process of generating your own self-signed certificates.KB- 1537 How can I upload or replace custom or self-signed certificates to establish secure communication? The following documentation will guide you with the process to upload the certificates using Prism GUI

Handling a large infrastructure is tough and Prism Central is a tool to manage a large number of clusters with ease. Let’s say you’re handling 10 clusters and want to have an image in all 10 clusters to be readily available.Do we need to manually add images to each and every cluster? Prism Central 5.5 and above includes a global image service that allows you to add (upload) images through Prism Central by using the v3 API.   Need info on how to browse and add images to Prism Central?  Give the following documentation guide a read. Prism Central Images I uploaded an image using Prism Central but can’t view it? There might be a situation in which you have creat

We normally keep a handful of template VM’s with different type of OS that are updated and “ready to go” and use these for global automation when deploying new machines. I would like a way to deploy these templates as qcow2 images globally using the Prism Central image management. After a template VM are updated, I would like to automate them beeing converted to qcow2 images (already got this working with “qemu-img convert” command) and then import the qcow2 image to the Image repository in Prism Central to be distributed to all sites. The last step I have not managed to figure out how to do. Obviously I need some kind of API or CLI to automate this but all I find is how to do this using the GUI in PC. Did I miss something? 

Registered your Prism Element to a Prism Central, but now want to unregister the PE from the Prism Central and confused regarding the steps! Why would anyone like to unregister a cluster?The following are the reasons when you might want to unregister a cluster from prism central and perform a clean-up. Prism Central functionality is being evaluated but you do not plan to use the functionality. You manage your cluster or clusters using a different Prism Central instance. The Prism Central that your cluster was previously registered to has been destroyed or decommissioned.Unregistering a cluster through Prism GUI is no longer available and now you’ll be wondering the “WHY SO??”Well we all make mistakes and accidentally unregistering a cluster can be a big risk, so we need to mitigate the riskSo what’s the pr