5 Essential Tips for Maximizing Your Experience at Nutanix .NEXT for Bloggers
Network visualization Is one of those underrated but extremely useful features. Network visualization is a consolidated graphical representation of the network formed by the VMs and hosts in a Nutanix cluster and first-hop switches. Nutanix network visualization allows you to group VMs by power state or by parent hosts, group hosts by parent clusters or select a particular node from the cluster. Choose your layout based on the current needs. In Nutanix network visualization, every entity is interactive. For example, when you click on a VM you can see detailed information about its vNICs such as MAC address, IP address, VLAN ID, live statistics. Similarly, switch port will show information about MAC address, MTU size, live statistics. To enable Network visualization a set of requirements must be met: Configure SNMP v3 or SNMP v2c on TOR switches Enable LLDP or CDP on the first-hop switches. Network connectivity over SNMP port between CVMs and switch management IP addres
Let’s say you want to know what are the uses and differences between Prism Element, Prism Central and Prism Pro Nutanix Prism is the centralized management solution for Nutanix environments, however, Prism comes in different flavors depending on the functionality needed. Prism Element: It is a service already built into the platform for every Nutanix cluster deployed. It provides the ability to fully configure, manage, and monitor Nutanix clusters running any hypervisors, however, It only manages the cluster it is part of. Prism Central: It is an application that can be deployed in a VM or in a scale/out cluster of VMs (Prism Central Instance) that allows you to manage different clusters across separate physical locations on one screen and offers an organizational view into a distributed environment. Each Prism Central VM can manage 5,000 to 12,500 VMs, where Prism Central Instance (a three Prism Central VMs cluster) can manage up to 25,000 VMs. Prism Pro: It is a feature set
This series of two posts provides a walk-through of Xi Beam Cloud Governance capabilities to give you a better understanding of what a CCO (Cloud Cost Optimization) can do for you. What is Xi Beam Cloud GovernanceXi Beam Cloud Governance is a feature rich tool that provides visibility, optimization, and automated control over multi-cloud deployments including both public and private clouds.As a multi-cloud governance tool, Beam organizes all the infrastructure information along three key pillars of cloud governance: Visibility: Xi Beam provides deep visibility into multi-cloud consumption patterns at aggregate as well as granular levels to easily identify cost drivers. Optimization: Xi Beam uses machine intelligence to continuously provide right-sizing recommendations and deliver more than 50 percent in cloud cost savings. Control: Xi Beam helps you create automated policies that continuously take actions to reduce cloud costs. Beam also provides budget alerts so that you can take
Here is a tip on how to reset the password for Nutanix Prism local user. The guide applies to Nutanix Prism Central as well. There are two ways. 1. Using Prism interface Log in to Prism Element with domain user and go to User Management Prism user management From the user's window choose user and click update. On the bottom of the applet there is a Reset password button. 2. Command line Log in to CVM over SSH and get into ncli command line. Follow the step by step instructions by reading Reset Web Console or nCLI Password Also if you want to know how to modify the Prism user password expire days for security reasons, you can follow this article: Modify Prism admin and console user password expire days.
What is the difference between the Redundancy Factor and Replication Factor? Redundancy factor 3 is a configurable option that allows a Nutanix cluster to withstand the failure of two nodes or drives in different blocks. By default, Nutanix clusters have redundancy factor 2, which means they can tolerate the failure of a single node or drive. The larger the cluster, the more likely it is to experience multiple failures. Redundancy Factor 3 requirements: Min 5 nodes in the cluster. CVM with 32GB RAM configured. For guest VM to tolerate a simultaneous failure of 2 nodes or 2 disks in different blocks, VM data must be stored on a container with replication factor 3. NOTE: Nutanix cluster with FT2 enabled, can host storage containers with RF=2 and RF=3. Redundancy Factor 2 requirements: Min 3 nodes in the cluster. CVM with 24GB RAM configured. Some background to understand Redundancy Factor. Cassandra Key Role: Distributed metadata store Description: Cassandra stores and manag
Are you looking for a way to support more than 12K VMs as part of your Prism Central installation? Then you should try to scale out Prism Central. Nutanix introduced Prism Central scale-out architecture in AOS 5.6. Prism Central scale-out architecture allows customers to scale out its Prism Central deployments incrementally, depending on the needs. Single Prism Central instance can support up to 12k VMs, with Prism Central scale-out, the number of supported VMs increases up to 25k PoweredOn VMs. Prism Central scales-out has 3 VMs and has been architected to tolerate one node failure (n+1 fault tolerance). The following requirements must be met before you can expand Prism Central or deploy a Prism Central VM: The specified gateway must be reachable. No duplicate IP addresses can be used. The container used for deployment is mounted on the hypervisor hosts. When installing on an ESXi cluster: vCenter and the ESXi cluster must be configured properly. See the vSphere Administra
Did you know that in Acropolis (AHV) you can enable high availability for the cluster to ensure that VMs can be migrated and restarted to another node in case of a failure? Best effort VM availability is enabled by default in Acropolis. Virtual Machine High Availability (VM HA) VM HA is a feature designed to ensure that critical VMs are restarted on another Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) host within the cluster if a host fails. There are two VM high availability modes: Default - This does not require any configuration and is included by default when an Acropolis Hypervisor-based Nutanix cluster is installed. When an AHV host becomes unavailable, VMs that were running on the failed AHV host are restarted on the remaining hosts, based on the available resources. Not all of the failed VMs will restart if the remaining hosts do not have sufficient resources. Guarantee - This non-default configuration reserves space to guarantee that all failed VMs will restart on other hosts of the clu
Let’s say you need to administer your user VMs from the command line interface. The Controller VM resources are shown under the VM page In the Nutanix Prism, but you will not be able to change the resources configuration unless you connected to the Acropolis hypervisor (host) and modified the configurations using virsh. “virsh: is a command line interface tool for managing guests and the hypervisor.” Centos.org. First you can review the settings of the CVM under the VM Page on Prism. Connect to the Acropolis hypervisor (host) using the root account with password “nutanix/4u” Lists all the VMs on a host > virsh list –all Displays information about a VM > virsh dominfo VM_Name Displays information about the vCPU > virsh vcpuinfo VM_Name Sets the number of virtual processors > virsh setvcpus VM_name count Note: The count value cannot exceed the number of processors specified for the guest. You can increase the number of processors by editing the virs
How does one navigate in the ocean of solutions that are available on the market? What is supported? What is compatible with which hypervisor? Allow us to help! Here is part three of supported backup solutions together with an overview of each. ARCSERVE Top significant functionalities: Agent-based backup and restore of VMs for AHV, VMware and Hyper-V on Nutanix. Granular restore: File / DB / App / AD Restore / BMR to VM or V2P. Disaster recovery: Zero RPO and near-zero RTO with RHA to AWS EC2 environment. Built-in replication & high availability. Migration of disk images to tape, with granular restore from disk or tape. Supported hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V Nutanix platform OS: Arcserve UDP 6.5 Update 4 is validated on ESXi (6.5) & Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.5.5) Arcserve UDP 7.0 is validated on on ESXi (6.5) & Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.10.3.1) Arcserve UDP 7.0 is validated on Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.11) Arcserve UDP 7.0 is validated and has API i
NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) is a framework of scripts that can help diagnose cluster health. NCC can be run provided that the individual nodes are up, regardless of the cluster state. NCC checks could be run from the Prism web console for clusters where AOS 5.0 or above and NCC 3.0 or above are installed. Procedure: 1. Logon to the Prism web console. 2. Browse to Health page, select Actions > Run Checks 3. Select the checks that you want to run. 4. Enable/disable the sending of the report email, then click Run. 5. Browse to Tasks Page, to review the summary by clicking on the task status ‘Succeeded”. 6. Download the summary by clicking on ‘Download output’. Note: You cannot run NCC checks from the Prism web console for clusters where AOS 4.7.x or earlier and NCC 3.0 or earlier are installed. Log Collector Logs can be collected for Controller VMs, file server, hardware, alerts, hypervisor, and for the system. Procedure: 1. Logon to the Prism web console. 2. Browse to H
How does one navigate in the ocean of solutions that are available on the market? What is supported? What is compatible with which hypervisor? Allow us to help! Here part three of supported backup solutions together with an overview of each. UNITRENDS Top significant functionalities: Native protection for Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor via APIs. Backup storage can be Nutanix storage connected directly or an external NAS. Extend long-term retention or full site disaster recovery to a second Nutanix deployment, or even the Unitrends Cloud. Recovery Assurance for vSphere, Hyper-V and physical Windows through instant recovery, automated backup verification, failover plans, DR testing and compliance reporting. Can use Nutanix snapshots for short-term retention and local VM recovery Supported hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, VMware vSphere, XenServer and Hyper-V Nutanix platform OS: Unitrends 10.1.1-3 is validated on Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.5.0.6) Resources and getting started: Datasheet
How does one navigate in the ocean of solutions that are available on the market? What is supported? What is compatible with which hypervisor? Allow us to help! Here is part two of supported backup solutions together with an overview of each. RUBRIK Top significant functionalities: Instant Recovery: deliver near-zero RTOs for Hyper-V or vSphere VMs by mounting directly onto Rubrik. No rehydration required. Global Real-Time Search: search for VMs and files with suggested search results. API-first Architecture: automate custom lifecycle management workflows that play well with third-party services (i.e. Chef, Puppet, ServiceNow, VMware vRealize Automation). Customized Analytics: deliver platform analytics across the hybrid cloud on data management, compliance, and capacity utilization with Rubrik Envision. Create and share data visualizations. Policy-Based Management: use an SLA policy engine to create and automate policies. Protects NoSQL Databases on Nutanix Enterprise Cl
How does one navigate in the ocean of solutions that are available on the market? What is supported? What is compatible with which hypervisor? Allow us to help! Here is the list of supported backup solutions together with an overview of each. HYCU Top significant functionalities: Automated application discovery, application-aware backup and application-aware recovery. Prism like look & feel and a hypervisor-agnostic architecture to protect Nutanix and non-Nutanix virtualized environments. Fast file share (Nutanix Files) backup that is impact-free and agentless. WAN-free backup for Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO). Application-aware storage level snapshots. Full deployment of HYCU right from Nutanix CALM Marketplace Supported hypervisors: Flexibility and choice for hypervisors, either AHV or ESX. Nutanix platform OS: Nutanix AOS v5.1 or later Resources and getting started: Datasheet: Simple to use, Ready-to-roll intelligent application data protection for Nuta
SAS is the leader in analytics and Nutanix is the leader in invisible infrastructure. Nutanix has thousands of customers and many of them already have SAS software running in their organization. They have experienced the benefits of invisible infrastructure and are moving more of their applications (including SAS) to Nutanix. It’s easy to deploy and manage SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya on Nutanix Today, SAS 9.4 helps discover insights, manage data and make analytics approachable. SAS 9.4 has been tested on Nutanix NX Models – both as a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), as well as using Nutanix as back-end storage only, for external hosts. Nutanix AHV clusters perform well in both scenarios. SAS software makes great demands of IT infrastructure, so you must get the design right to ensure a successful deployment. Evaluating the SAS I/O requirements accurately is pivotal. Nutanix encourages involvement of Nutanix engineers to determine the back-end service requirements as well as optimal imple
You may have noticed when adding disks to the node or replacing disks with larger capacity ones, utilisation distribution between the disks does not occur immediately. You check on the cluster sometime later and notice that newly added disks still show minimal usage, much lower than expected. By default, the aim is to bring disks utilisation within +/-7.5% spread of the tier utilisation. There are some things to consider when expecting a certain outcome: Disk balancing is not triggered unless the tier usage is at least 35%. Only 1 GB of data is moved during a Curator scan per node. Even if the tier usage is below 35% should any disk usage across the cluster reach 70%, disk balancing takes place. Disk Balancing: Disk balancing ensures data is evenly distributed across all disks in a cluster. In disk balancing, data is moved within the same tier to balance out the disk utilization. This is different from ILM (Information Lifecycle Management), where data is moved between dif
In some scenarios, you may need to move a disk from IDE to SCSI bus or vice versa. Sample scenarios include but are not limited to: VM does not boot due to missing SCSI driver. In such cases, the disk can be converted to IDE to install the missing drivers and then moved back to SCSI. A wrong disk type was used during VM creation. Application requirements dictate the particular type of the disk. You have recently migrated VMs to AHV and noticed that some of the disks appear in IDE format. After following the disks conversion process from IDE to SCSI (as described in step 2 of the uvm_ide_disk_check) the following doubts arise: Question: Once the disk gets converted, does it immediately redirect all I/O to the SCSI drive and leave the IDE disk unused? Answer: Once the conversion is completed (which is actually a cloning process from the original IDE disk), the new SCSI disk needs to be attached to the SCSI bus and then the old IDE disk could be removed. Question: What ar
NVIDIA GRID boards allow GPU virtualization, enabling multiple users to share a single graphics card. GPU virtualization not only provides the benefit of higher user densities, but also delivers native-like performance while accessing a virtual desktop. In 2016, the Pascal-based P series was released—the P100, P4, P40, and P6. The P4 and P6 are best for blade server form factors and the P100 and the P40 are suitable for the other form factors, such as rack mount. Nutanix offers the P100 and P40 in our different hardware choices. In 2018, NVIDIA introduced the Turing Tensor Core–based T4 for cloud workloads, including high-performance computing, deep learning and inference, machine learning, data analytics, and graphics. One of the common causes of being unable to allocate vGPU to guests is caused by the GPU being set to Compute Mode which results in the errors below: The vGPU option may appear greyed out and unavailable When trying to install the NVIDIA-vGPU rpm package from the CVM
Nutanix Mine is the product name for joint solutions between Nutanix and selected data protection software vendors.Mine is a fully integrated data protection appliance that combines the Nutanix AOS software with the Veeam Backup & Replication solution. Mine can provide data protection for any applications running in a Nutanix cluster. Nutanix Mine with Veeam extends the core strengths of Nutanix software to backups. It integrates data protection software from Veeam with the software running in a hyperconverged manner on a Nutanix cluster. It is an entirely self-sufficient turnkey solution that provides compute, memory, storage, and now, backups too. Nutanix Mine with Veeam is also tightly integrated with the Nutanix Prism management console, which means that IT administrators can use management interface for both primary storage (as part of the HCI infrastructure) and backups. The Mine on Veeam can back up VMs and application data from Nutanix and non-Nutanix environments, wh
Let’s say you want high availability at the NIC level and failover capacity to the CVM and user VMs. We recommend using balance-slb to take advantage of all adapters. Balance-tcp is a load balancing method that increases host and VM bandwidth utilization beyond a single 10 Gb adapter by balancing each VM NIC TCP session on a different adapter. Also used when network switches require LACP negotiation." Advantages of Bond Mode for balance-slb Balance-slb bond mode in OVS (Open vSwitch) takes advantage of all the links. Rebalance VM traffic from the interface that is used extensively to less used interfaces. When the configurable bond-rebalance interval expires, OVS uses the measured load for each interface and the load for each source MAC hash to spread traffic evenly among links in the bond. Traffic from some source MAC hashes may move to a less active link to more evenly balanced bond member utilization. Here is an article that describes the impact of the change and the s
Q1: Is it ok to create protection domains on two different clusters with the same name with remote sites enabled on both clusters but PD is only setup with local snapshots only? Answer: It is possible to have a protection domain with the same name as the remote site protection domain as long as they are not configured to sync with each other and it is only a local protection domain. It is also possible to configure "active" schedules for that protection domain and retain the snapshots in the local cluster. Q2: Can a Protection Domain be renamed once configured and has entities and snapshots associated with it? Answer: There is a workaround available which is to create a new Protection Domain with this procedure: Create a new Protection Domain with the desired name and schedule. Remove all protected VMs from the old Protection Domain. Make a note of existing consistency groups. Add the VMs to the newly created Protection Domain, reconfigure consistency groups as they were in th
Are you going to have a planned power outage or relocation procedure that needs to shut down your Hyper-V cluster safely? Maybe you have experienced this situation: We have a scheduled power outage at this location for Dec 31th. We are going to need to power everything down prior to the outage. What is the best way to safely power down the Hyper-V cluster? With Hyper-V Clusters it is important to consider the following procedure before shut down all the user VMs in the failover cluster : Make sure that you have at least one domain controller running outside of the Nutanix cluster. Otherwise, you will not be able to start VMs after powering on the cluster. Make sure that the Hyper-V hosts are configured to use this external DC/DNS server. Disable all Metro Availability-enabled Protection Domains, and make sure no on-going replication is happening. Consult the article Disabling Metro Availability for more details. To check the complete procedure and the details follow through to th
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI replaces the legacy Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interface originally present in all IBM PC-compatible personal computers,with most UEFI firmware implementations providing support for legacy BIOS services. UEFI can support remote diagnostics and repair of computers, even with no operating system installed.Advantages :The interface defined by the EFI specification includes data tables that contain platform information, and boot and runtime services that are available to the OS loader and OS. UEFI firmware provides several technical advantages over a traditional BIOS system: Ability to use large disks partitions (over 2 TB) with a GUID Partition Table (GPT) CPU-independent architecture CPU-independent drivers Flexible pre-OS environment, including network capability Modular design Backward and forward compatib
Let’s say you want to add a new node with a newer processor class than the existing nodes in the cluster. In this case you must enable EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) feature. What is EVC? EVC stands for Enhanced vMotion Compatibility which is a vCenter Server cluster-centric feature allowing virtual machines to vMotion or migrate across ESXi hosts equipped with dissimilar processors in the same cluster. VMware EVC Mode works by masking unsupported processor features thus presenting a homogeneous processor front to all the virtual machines in a cluster. This means that a VM can vMotion to any ESXi host in a cluster irrespective of the host’s micro-architecture examples of which include Intel’s Sandy Bridge and Haswell. One caveat to remember is that all the processor(s) must be from a single vendor i.e. either Intel or AMD. You simply cannot mix and match. What are the benefits? The main benefit is that you can add servers with the latest processors to your existing cluste
Are you wondering which alerts generate a support case with Nutanix Support and whom Nutanix contacts when a case is generated? There is a particular subset of alerts that have been identified as being important, so action can be taken on them. These alerts are called Alert cases. When the cluster is under a current support contract, alert cases are generated. Alert cases are handled by Nutanix Support, who reach out to the primary Support Contact (also referred to as the break/fix contact) associated with the node or cluster in question. For customers with a third-party providing front-line support, it is normal to have a representative from that company listed as the primary Support Contact. Most of the alert cases are created with a P4 priority level, which has a target response time of 24 hours. NodeDegraded and NodeAvgLoadAboveThreshold are created with a P2 priority level, which has a target response time of two hours. To know which alerts generate cases, and how to change the co
Let’s say you recently acquired a brand new Nutanix Cluster that will allow your business-critical applications like Oracle to take full advantage of low-latency storage performance and linear scalability, high availability, and simplified management. By shifting their workloads to Nutanix, DBAs and system administrators can achieve a lower TCO and eliminate the complexity of constantly managing and optimizing their underlying compute and storage in a multitier architecture. With the RMAN TO PLATFORM feature, you can migrate your Oracle database across platforms, making it easier than ever to get started on Nutanix. I hope that this note empowers you to begin moving Oracle user tablespaces from Solaris to Linux on Nutanix. See the specific details on Step by Step Migration Instructions document to get the steps for converting user tablespaces from Solaris to Linux. Also you can consult : The complete Oracle Database Migration from Solaris to Linux technical note. The Oracle o
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