5 Essential Tips for Maximizing Your Experience at Nutanix .NEXT for Bloggers
Witness VM in Metro Availability Configuration:A "Witness" is a special VM that monitors the Metro Availability configuration health. The Witness resides in a separate failure domain to provide an outside view that can distinguish a site failure from a network interruption between the Metro Availability sites. It can only be configured on AHV and ESXi hypervisors.The main functions of a Witness include:· Making a failover decision in the event of a site or inter-site network failure.· Avoiding a split-brain condition where the same storage container is active on both sites due to (for example) a WAN failure.· Handling situations where a single storage or network domain fails.To learn about the different scenarios you might encounter and the requirements of a witness VM, click here. Did you know?Witness VM can also be deployed if you are using a 2-node cluster! To learn more about how it works in that environment, click here.
Introduced in AOS 5.18 is a feature known as the Recycle Bin, which is enabled by default and allows a 24-hour hold on VM files that were deleted and need to be recovered, unless the cluster free storage space reaches critical thresholds.This feature was introduced to simplify the recovery procedure for accidentally deleted storage entities (Virtual Machines, Volume Groups, or individual disks). You can disable and enable the recycle bin or clear its contents.To restore an entity, you MUST contact Nutanix Support.To learn more about the limitations and how to manage the recycle bin, click here.
What is Fault Tolerance (FT)?FT is how the system ensures that both user VM data and cluster infrastructure data is protected from failure. What are Fault Domains?Failure scenarios can be thought of in terms of fault domains. There are four fault domains in a Nutanix cluster:Disk Node Block RackThis article focusses on Rack Awareness. Rack failure can occur in the following situations:All power supplies fail within a rack Top-of-rack (TOR) switch fails Network partition; where one of the racks becomes inaccessible from other racksWhen rack fault tolerance is enabled, the cluster has rack awareness and the guest VMs can continue to run with failure of one rack (RF2) or two racks (RF3). The redundant copies of guest VM data and metadata exist on other racks when one rack fails.Note – Rack fault tolerance has to be configured manually. Requirements and configuration of Rack Fault Tolerance can be found here.To learn more about Rack Fault tolerance on Nutanix Clusters click here.Now, Rack
By default, the Prism Central login page includes background animation, and users are logged out automatically after being idle for 15 minutes. You can disable the background animation, change the session timeout for users, and override the session timeout completely.Some points to note:1. This setting is not persistent. In other words, if the Prism service restarts, this setting is lost and must be disabled again.2. Disabling or enabling this setting in Prism Web Console does not propagate to Prism Central or vice versa. The setting must be disabled in Prism Web Console and Prism Central UI separately.3. The timeout interval for an administrator cannot be set for longer than 1 hour. For more information on the details and steps, click here.
This article’s purpose is to provide assistance in determining the right amount of resources required to enable various services on Prism Central.Currently, there are multiple services available such as CALM, Karbon, Objects, Files, etc. Each of these services adds their own resource requirements to Prism Central hence, increasing the need for more resources for Prism Central in order to function properly. If enough resources are not configured, you might encounter the alert “Configured resource for the Prism Central VM is inadequate”. The NCC health check pc_vm_resource_resize_check verifies that the configured amount of memory and vCPU resources of the Prism Central VM is adequate. This check is introduced in NCC release version 3.10.0 and applies to Prism Central VMs (version 5.17.1 or higher) only (inapplicable to Controller VMs (CVMs) of Prism Elements clusters).Please refer to KB-8932 for more details.To learn more about the various services available and to determine the Prism C
The Nutanix platform and all products leverage the Security Configuration Management Automation (SCMA) framework to ensure that services are constantly inspected for variance to the security policy. Nutanix has implemented security configuration management automation (SCMA) to check multiple security entities for both Nutanix storage and AHV. It continuously assesses and heals Nutanix clusters to ensure that it meets or exceeds all regulatory requirements. In this process over 1,700 security entities are analyzed and self-corrected across storage and hypervisor (AHV only) layers. Nutanix automatically reports log inconsistencies and reverts them to the baseline.With SCMA, you can schedule the Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG) to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. STIG has the lowest system priority within the virtual storage controller, ensuring that security checks do not interfere with platform performance.To learn more about this feature, click here.
Compression is one of the key features of the Nutanix Capacity Optimization Engine (COE) to perform data optimization. Data Storage Fabric provides both inline and offline flavors of compression to best suit the cluster’s needs and type of data. As of 5.1, offline compression is enabled by default.Inline compression will compress sequential streams of data or large I/O sizes (>64K) when written to the Extent Store (SSD + HDD). This includes data draining from OpLog as well as sequential data skipping it. There is no impact to random I/O, helps increase storage tier utilization and benefits large or sequential I/O performance by reducing data to replicate and read from disk.Offline compression will initially write the data as normal (in an un-compressed state) and then leverage the Curator framework to compress the data cluster wide. When inline compression is enabled but the I/Os are random in nature, the data will be written un-compressed in the OpLog, coalesced, and then compresse
What is vNUMA?vNUMA (virtual non-uniform memory access) is a memory-access optimization method for VMware virtual machines (VMs) that helps prevent memory-bandwidth bottlenecks.The primary purpose of vNUMA is to give large virtual machines (or wide VMs) the best possible performance. vNUMA helps the wide VMs create multiple vNUMA nodes. Each vNUMA node has virtual CPUs and virtual RAM. Pinning a vNUMA node to a physical NUMA node ensures that virtual CPUs accessing virtual memory can get the expected NUMA behaviorBefore enabling vNUMA on Virtual Machines, see AHV Best Practices Guide.To enable vNUMA on your Virtual Machines, check this guide.
This article provides quick links required for troubleshooting the alert – “Invalid Network Mapping Specified” for your Nutanix cluster. This alert can be generated if either the source or destination network configuration is not present in network mapping specified in the remote site, or the networks specified in the network mapping do not exist. To learn more about how to resolve this alert, check KB-10243.To learn how to configure a remote site, check this guide. For more information on Network Mapping, refer to this guide.
This article’s motive is to provide you the information required for troubleshooting the alert “iSCSI Configuration Failed” for your Nutanix cluster.What is iSCSI Configuration? To provide access to cluster storage, Nutanix Volumes utilizes an iSCSI data services IP address to clients for target discovery which simplifies external iSCSI configuration on clients. This iSCSI data services IP address acts as an iSCSI target discovery portal and initial connection point. This IP address is also used as a cluster-wide address by clients configured as part of Nutanix Files and other products.The iSCSI Configuration Failed alert can be generated if Nutanix Guest Tools failed to execute some iSCSI commands on the guest VM.For more troubleshooting, check KB-10118.For information on the iSCSI Configuration, check the iSCSI guide.
Want to check all the alerts on the cluster? Need to resolve them all at once?On the Nutanix web console, you can view a large number of alerts (up to 1000) AND resolve them by navigating to the alerts page from the drop-down on the home screen. But do you want to go the old school way?The Nutanix CLI is designed to display a max number of 100 alerts. You can modify it to show as many alerts as you like and choose how you want to resolve them. For details on how to count the total number of alerts and how to resolve them all in just one command, see KB 1402 in the Nutanix Support Portal.
Prism Pro is a set of additional features that are unlocked when Prism Central is licensed. These features include capacity planning, custom dashboards, and advanced search capabilities. The one-click planning feature that lets you forecast future workload growth so you can expand accordingly to meet the demands.Capacity PlanningThis feature ensures that environment never runs out of capacity. You can forecast shortages of CPU, memory, and storage, defining how much time until a given resource is exhausted. Information is based on machine-learned consumption behavior based on current and past utilization. This also provides a recommendation of scale out options.Just-in-time ForecastingAllows an environment to scale without over or under provisioning. This allows you to define additional workloads to add to an environment and identify whether the environment has resources to handle such workloads. If sufficient resources do not exist, Just-in-time Forecasting can recommend resources to
If you have a storage container on the cluster and the name starts with a “#”, you may see this error while trying to upload an image:"Could not access the URL nfs://127.0.0.1/%23ISO_Images/.acropolis/image/106ac31b-6236-4534-a2ae-808c08bb912f: Failed to parse the file size" That happens because the URL cannot have the # in the name and it gets automatically replaced with %23. Therefore, this creates the inconsistency between the container name and the URL.To resolve the issue, rename the container and remove the # from the container name and retry the image upload.Take a look at KB-10117 for more information.Check this guide on storage containers.
If you want to increase data storage on your Nutanix cluster, but do not want any AHV VMs to run on that node, you can add a Never-Schedulable Node to your cluster. AOS will not run any VMs on a never-schedulable node, whether at the time of deployment of new VMs, during the migration of VMs from one host to another (in the event of a host failure), or during any other VM operations. Therefore, a never-schedulable node configuration ensures that no additional compute resources such as CPUs are consumed from the Nutanix cluster.With the release of Foundation 4.1 and higher, any G6 or G7 node can now be used as a storage-only node. You can add any number of never-schedulable nodes to your cluster!To learn more about the requirements and the procedure to add this node, click here. Also, check out KB-6819 for further instructions.
Did you ever wonder what the blinking green light or the solid amber light on the LED of the network card indicates?Are you confused between a blinking green light and a solid green light? Different NIC manufacturers use different LED colors and blink states. Not all NICs are supported for every Nutanix platform. To know what each blink state means on the different manufactured LEDs, check out this article here.
This article's purpose is to shed some light on the rarely discussed, yet a crucial alert that you may come across on the cluster, that is, the HardwareClockFailure alert. Let us not confuse it with the system time. The system time is maintained by the OS (For example, Linux, Microsoft Windows etc.). The initial value of the system clock is typically retrieved from the real-time clock at power up or is set by the user. The hardware time is maintained by a real clock powered by a battery, which means it will persist a reboot. The alert is generated when the hardware clock time differs from the system clock time. This check is scheduled to run every 10 minutes, by default. To learn more about what causes a hardware clock to fail and how to resolve it, head over to this KB article: KB 4120 in the Nutanix Support Portal.
Application monitoring provides visibility into integrated applications by collecting application metrics using Nutanix and third-party collectors, providing a single pane of glass for both application and infrastructure data, correlating application instances with virtual infrastructure, and providing deep insights into applications performance metrics. The monitoring integrations dashboard allows you to view information about select applications, such as SQL Server instances, running in the cluster. Before you decide to enable this, there are some pre-requisites that you need to follow. To learn more about the prerequisites, click here and for more information about Application Monitoring, check the Application Monitoring Guide.
AHV hosts in cluster running AOS 5.18 or newer may become non-schedulable if bridge configuration across cluster nodes is not consistent. What is a non-schedulable node?A non-schedulable node is used to increase data storage on your Nutanix cluster and does not run any guest VMs on that node.To check if this situation exists on your cluster and to fix the issue, check KB-10217.
Already have an account? Login
Enter your username or e-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.
Sorry, we're still checking this file's contents to make sure it's safe to download. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sorry, our virus scanner detected that this file isn't safe to download.
