5 Essential Tips for Maximizing Your Experience at Nutanix .NEXT for Bloggers
Nutanix, like any other system is composed of several components including hardware, software and firmware. If a component has to communicate with another at any given moment, the connection has to be pre-integrated and supported. How do you keep-up and understand what is compatible with what? Easy! with our compatibility matrix. For example, you have a Nutanix block model NX-8035-G5 and you want to know the supported AOS and Hypervisor for the chosen Model. The matrix shows the AOS, AHV, and hypervisor compatibility for Nutanix NX and SX Series platforms and SW-Only Models qualified by Nutanix (such as Cisco UCS, Dell PowerEdge, HPE ProLiant and others listed here). For other platforms not listed here, such as Dell XC, Lenovo HX, and others, please see your vendor documentation for compatibility. The matrix is presenting the fields in a cascading style, to show a clear components dependencies. Also in the compatibility matrix, you can see the Nutanix Ready Solution where we show the
Nutanix is continuously developing and improving it's features with new releases of different components, how could you know if the current software of component A is compatible with software B? For example if you are interested in upgrading your Prism Central or the Nutanix Files, there would be a specific set of Prism Central and Nutanix Files versions that can be installed with a limit of an older version depending on your AOS version. This goes both ways, if you are interested in upgrading your Operating System (AOS), you need to check your current Prism Central and Nutanix Files to understand which AOS version you can use on your current cluster's versions. We have a public page for our customers that can do the checks for you, on our Software Product Interoperability page you choose your software and the target software type, you choose your current version and the compatible version will be presented in green. The information there is dynamic and it could change with every relea
Let’s say that a VM migration is required for data protection or as part of a disaster recovery, what is the scenarios and the recommended practice? Check out our documentation about data protection and disaster recovery we wrote this guide for IT administrators and architects who want more information about the data protection and disaster recovery features built into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. The data protection subject is huge and has a lot of branches, let’s focus on a small component which is migrating the VMs from one location to another. The migration could be done between Nutanix hosts, Nutanix Clusters or migration from non-Nutanix Storage to a Nutanix Storage. The simplest scenario is migrating the VMs from one host to another in the same cluster, the VMs will migrate automatically after placing the host into maintenance mode by the recommended practice of the host’s hypervisor, the only CVM that would stay on that host is the Controller VM (CVM) which is responsible for
Let's say you have modified the license assignments, removed a node from the cluster and you got an alert in Prism stating that there is no current license for the cluster. You can reclaim and optionally re-apply licenses for nodes in your clusters. This procedure describes how to reclaim licenses where the cluster is not configured with Portal Connection or the cluster is not connected to the internet (also known as dark-site clusters). After you remove a node, you can also move the node to another cluster. More info. You must un-license your cluster when you plan to destroy a cluster. More info Return licenses to your inventory when you remove one or more nodes from a cluster. You can reclaim licenses for nodes in your clusters in cases where you want to make modifications or downgrade licenses. More info You do not need to reclaim Starter licenses for Nutanix NX Series platforms. These licenses are automatically applied whenever you create a cluster. For more information about rec
Let's say that you have purchased a new node and you wish to make it part of your existing cluster, how would you do that? A cluster is a collection of nodes. You can add new nodes to a cluster at any time after physically installing and connecting them to the network on the same subnet as the cluster. The cluster expansion process compares the AOS version on the existing and new nodes and performs any upgrades necessary for all nodes to have the same AOS version. The process for adding a node varies depending on the AOS version, hypervisor type (AHV, ESXi, Hyper-V, or Citrix Hypervisor), data-at-rest encryption status, and certain hardware configuration factors. Here is the guide to expand a cluster that explains the expansion process and the pre & post checks: expanding a cluster Before you start it's better to check this doc before attempting to add a node to the cluster since the process of adding a node varies depending on several factors considerations based on your A
Let's say that you decided to adopt the Container Deployment approach by deploying a Kubernetes cluster, here is a brief explanation about Kubernetes and it's integration with Nutanix. Karbon orchestrates Kubernetes clusters to simplify the provisioning and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes packages applications in their own dedicated containers together with all of the required operational components for running the application. Containers , which run inside of pods on top of nodes, are the core building block of Kubernetes architecture. Containerized applications are simple to manage, easy to deploy, and portable as they are abstracted from the OS of the host. Since different containers share an operational kernel, they do not require as much compute capacity as a VM, making them "lightweight". Using Karbon to manage Kubernetes operations requires a basic familiarity with key Kubernetes concepts. I made this diagram to illustrate a Kubernetes-Nutanix flow: For more
Let's say that you upgraded your cluster and noticed that the timezone of your AHV has changed, why and what is the recommended practice? When running a health check, you will see a warning stating that "The AHV host's time zone was changed/set to something other than UTC." Nutanix recommends against making any configuration changes on the AHV hosts which includes changing timezone, from AHV version 20170830.58, the default timezone on AHV hosts is set to UTC upon upgrade or installation, for more information check out KB-6834 In this case, no further action is required from your side. To edit the timezone of a user VM, check out KB-3134 To edit the timezone of a CVM, check out KB-1050
Let's say that you are monitoring your cluster's performance or you received alerts regarding high CPU on a CVM. Why high CPU utilisation on a CVM is a critical alert? The CVMs are one of the most important components in a Nutanix cluster. It is crucial that CVMs are healthy and perform their tasks properly as they run Nutanix software and serve all of the I/O operations to the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host. To understand the reason behind the high utilization, begin by identifying patterns of the performance: Is the high CPU constant or periodic? How long has the high CPU been occurring? Is there a similar behaviour on other CVMs? Certain patterns may point towards a cause. For example, a periodic spike may be attributed to antivirus, backup or a similar scheduled task being run in the background. To view the live CPU utilization run top on a CVM. For historical "top" info, review the top logs based on each CVM under/home/nutanix/data/logs/sysstats/top.INFO
Let's say you had an issue in your cluster and you have worked with a Nutanix engineer. If the issue needs deep investigation, we usually create a log bundle locally on the CVM and then we ask you to upload it to the portal, then we drop the remote session so the customer doesn’t have to wait online while we investigate. After generating the bundle, it will be saved locally on your CVM and it's not automatically removed. You can delete the bundles if you don't need it anymore to free more space on the CVM, as the CVM is a very critical component in the Nutanix eco-system and it's very important to have enough space and memory for it to perform it's tasks. Make sure that you do not remove a directory under "logbay" but simply a file or files inside a sub-directory. Usually the two directories that gets populated the most are "/data/logbay/bundles" and "/data/logbay/taskdata", deleting the files inside these directory will free up some space. Check out how to create a log bundle at
Let's say that you performed a vulnerability scan on one of the CVMs and you see that some unused ports are open, what are these ports and why are they opened? For example, some of the ambiguous ports that are open are ports 445 and 2071, but you won't find documentation for this. Port 445 used by CVMs are used by stargate service, a critical service used by hypervisor/UVMs to access our storage Port 2071 is for the NGT regardless of your hypervisor type. Some use cases for NGT for non-AHV hypervisors are application consistent snapshot, file level restore, etc. Closing the wrong port might affect your cluster performance, you should be careful when editing any port. If you are unsure of what a specific port is, contact Nutanix support for information and assist. Here are some commands to modify the ports on your nodes: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Nutanix-Security-Guide-v510:wc-cvm-firewall-block-unblock-ports-cli-t.html Example of firewall ports that mus
In certain scenarios, after upgrading to LCM 2.2.9225 by performing inventory, the inventory objects, software/firmware updates are not displayed in the LCM page on PE (Prism Element) when logged in as an AD user. This issue is generally observed if the AD Domain does not have a service account associated with it in Prism. Service account configuration in Prism was not mandatory in AOS versions older than 5.5. If authentication with the AD Domain was configured when the cluster was running the older versions, you are likely to hit this problem. You can identify the issue either from the Prism UI or from the ncli, for the UI identification: log in to Prism > Settings (gear icon) > Authentication > Check if a service account is configured. For the ncli identification and the solution check out: https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/7598 This is fixed in AOS 5.11, 5.10.6 or later.
Let’s say that you want to dive deeper into the performance of your AHV cluster to understand if the resource allocation has been done correctly and to check how many CPUs, Cores per CPU and Threads reside on each host. To see the CPU components, SSH to a CVM in your cluster and run ”hostssh lscpu”: The result above is an output example of one node, for this host there are: Sockets = 2 Cores per socket = 6 (2x6 = 12 in total) Threads per core = 2 (2x12 = 24 in total) CPUs = 24 (threads in total) If you wish to see more information for each of the 24 CPUs on this host you can run "cat /proc/cpuinfo" on a host shell (not through the CVM). To jump from the CVM to it’s host, run “ssh root@192.168.5.1” and run the command above.
Regardless of the type of data you generate on your VMs, the data has to be backed up and safe. how do you make sure of that? a first step is to understand our basic approaches and how do we guarantee data resiliency. The importance of data protection increases as the amount of data generated by your VMs continues to grow at unprecedented rates by expanding your storage pool, adding nodes to your cluster and deploying new Virtual Machines. To ensure that the data is safe, we have different approaches, here is a brief explanation for each: Protection Domain (two types) Protection domain - Asynchronous DR: is a defined group of entities that consists of VMs and Volume groups that are backed up locally on the cluster and can also be replicated on a remote site. Protection domain - Metro Availability: is a pre-specified and an active storage container in the local cluster linked to an inactive container with the same name on a remote site in which synchronous data replication occurs whe
Let’s say that you need to use Phoenix on a node, how do you know which ISO is best for you? the minimal or a bundle of Phoenix & AOS? How do you create the bundle? The short answer for both questions is, it depends. What is Phoenix? Phoenix is an ISO-based installer that you can use to perform installation tasks on bare-metal hardware one node at a time. Tasks that performed by Phoenix: Configuring Hypervisor settings, virtual switches and more (no need for AOS in this case) Installing the Controller VM which runs the AOS. Installing the Hypervisor on a new or replacement node. Repairing the CVM. If you don’t have access to the CVM and you want to check the data drives’ health, you will be able to see the drives from the Phoenix shell. How do you obtain the correct Phoenix? Looking at the scenarios above, we can see that for each case you might need a different approach and ISO, but all scenarios require the minimal Phoenix ISO. You can download the minimal Phoenix ISO from
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