NKP on NC2 (Prism Central) — Control plane VM created but cluster stuck at WaitingForKubeadmInit, workers pending (WaitingForControlPlaneAvailable)

Environment

• Platform: Nutanix NC2

• Prism Central: deployed and reachable

• NKP: v2.16.0

• Deployment methods tried:

  1. NKP from Marketplace

  2. NKP CLI (nkp create cluster nutanix ...)

Problem description

After deploying NC2 and Prism Central, I tried to deploy an NKP management cluster.

• Only the first control plane VM is created successfully.

• The cluster never initializes, and all worker machines remain stuck/pending.

• The status stays at: “Waiting for Cluster control plane to be initialized” / WaitingForKubeadmInit.

Symptoms / Output

./nkp describe cluster --cluster-name=managment

Cluster/managment False Info WaitingForKubeadmInit
├─ControlPlane - KubeadmControlPlane/... False Info WaitingForKubeadmInit
│ └─Machine/... True
└─Workers
  └─MachineDeployment/... False Warning WaitingForAvailableMachines (3 replicas, 0 available)
    ├─KubeadmConfig/... WaitingForControlPlaneAvailable
    └─NutanixMachine/... WaitingForInfrastructure

Expected behavior

The control plane should bootstrap successfully, the API endpoint should become reachable, and then the worker VMs should be provisioned and join the cluster.

Actual behavior

Control plane never becomes initialized (WaitingForKubeadmInit), and worker nodes remain pending because they are waiting for the control plane.

Questions / Help needed

• What are the common causes on NC2 + Prism Central for WaitingForKubeadmInit when the first control plane VM is created but the control plane never initializes?