5 Essential Tips for Maximizing Your Experience at Nutanix .NEXT for Bloggers
Hey folks,I have created an Alerts dashboard for a cluster. The project is meant to be an enhancement to the Analysis page in Prism in terms of data visualization. You get a single page view of the alert stats generated in your cluster.https://github.com/nkunnath/dash-alerts-ntnx Please feel free to try it out and let me know if this has been useful. Any suggestions/improvements/ideas are welcome. Cheers!
As Nutanix is constantly striving to be an API driven company and exposing more of its core functionality via API’s as well as improving integration with tools such as Ansible and Terraform, we hope you have been making the most of it. For example, did you know how to check the status of NGT and the NGT communication link using API’s? It is easily obtainable using the v3 REST API exposed from your Prism Central. Issue a GET request to https://<PC_IP_address>:9440/api/nutanix/v3/vms/<vm_uuid> Filter through the response to find a block similar to this. "guest_tools": { "nutanix_guest_tools": { "available_version": "1.90.1", "ngt_state": "INSTALLED", "iso_mount_state": "MOUNTED", "state": "ENABLED", "version": "1.1.2", "enabled_capability_list": [ "VSS_SNAPSHOT" ], "guest_os_version": "windows:64:WindowsServer2008R2Enterprise", "is_reachable": false } }
Have you guys been utilizing the Analysis charts feature effectively? It gives you the ability to create charts that can monitor a variety of performance metrics over a week, month, or a custom time range. Here are a few ideas on how we resolved some issues seen in the field. Memory Usage (%) - Create a chart to track memory consumption or one or multiple VM’s over a time interval Hypervisor CPU Usage (%) - Measure the CPU usage of one or more hosts over time and gain a better understanding of resource constraints if any Storage Controller Latency - This is particularly useful if you suspect performance issues. Creating charts ranging to a few weeks back gives you a comparative analysis and a benchmark for the current latency observed Storage Container Usage - A classic use case for this is when multiple VM’s have been migrated out of the cluster over many days but you suspect the storage space has not been reclaimed Replication Bandwidth - Transmitted - If there are
Recently we have introduced a couple of changes in LCM. HTTPS is a requirement for many enterprise customers. Many of our customers employ strict firewalls, Deep Packet filtering algorithms that only let certain HTTPS traffic through the external gateway. And so today we allow LCM to access the Nutanix portal over HTTPS. (The URL accessed when performing inventory is https://download.nutanix.com/lcm/2.0/) Nutanix is transitioning from delivering LCM modules as a payload that is associated with an LCM release to delivering them as release-independent repository image modules (RIM). This includes both software and firmware modules that is available from LCM 2.3.2. That’s great! But how does it affect me?Only if you have blocked HTTP traffic. At the time of this post, we have identified an issue where LCM could incorrectly poll a HTTP endpoint, instead of HTTPS. It has been documented in the release notes as well. (ENG-310334)https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId
You must be familiar with some of the techniques you can use to migrate VM’s onto AHV from other hypervisors. These include our popular Move solution, if you wished to move away from ESXi or Hyper-V. Another way is to add the VM’s into a Protection Domain and migrate the PD itself. Of course, this is only compatible with Nutanix clusters being the source and destination cluster. As much as we would not want you to, there could arise situations where you may need to transfer VM(s) back to a different hypervisor. Currently, Move does not apply to this use-case. The quickest way would be to set up a Protection Domain as described above. However, this is complicated if the VM’s are already being protected and replicated onto other clusters. You would not wish to remove them and affect the processes in place. What do you do then? This document should assist you in the process. On a high level, it includes Powering off the VM Using the qemu utility to convert the vdisk
So you kicked off the one-click Prism Central deployment and left your desk to get a coffee. Now you are back and see it has failed. Wonder what could have happened? Here’s a list of common issues you could take a look at before engaging our world-class Support! The deployed Prism Central is not compatible with the underlying cluster AOS. Check interoperability on the support portal Network issues - If the PC is deployed on a different subnet/VLAN and the CVM is unable to reach the PC network. You would see the PC VM has been created but since genesis service on the PC cannot be reached, the task eventually times out/fails. You could also have firewall rules in place preventing bidirectional communication on ports 80, 9440, 2100. This KB should help you with that. If there is an existing PC binary or metadata file for deployment on a Prism Element cluster, the upgrade may fail with an error indicating the software already exists in the cluster. The b
You may want to unregister a cluster from Prism Central for various reasons. Currently, we don’t provide this option via the Prism GUI as to reduce the risk of accidentally unregistering a cluster. In recent releases, numerous key features such as micro-segmentation, CALM, Self-Service portal, Karbon etc require Prism Central and unregistration could result in these services being unavailable. However, if you still wish to unregister a cluster either because the cluster is decommissioned or to deploy a new PC, these are the high-level steps you would have to follow. SSH into any CVM in the cluster that needs to be unregistered and run the below command. ncli multicluster remove-from-multicluster external-ip-address-or-svm-ips=<PC_IP_ADDRESS> username=<PC_USERNAME> password=<PC_PASSWORD> force=true parameters: PC_IP_ADDRESS, PC_USERNAME, PC_PASSWORD SSH into the Prism Central VM and run the unregistration script. python /home/nutanix/bin/unregistration_
Syslog or ‘System Logging Protocol’ is used by routers, switches, access points, servers and of course Nutanix. It is used to send events and logs to a remote syslog server that collects, organizes and filters these logs. In Nutanix, we provide different log modules for the core services that can be enabled separately and you can configure the logging level required for them as well. For example, if you wish to forward just the warning log messages for Acropolis, this would be the command: ncli rsyslog-config add-module server-name=<server_name> module-name=ACROPOLIS level=WARNING For a more comprehensive look at the various modules and log levels, check out syslog server. Bonus: Would you like to know who powered off that VM while you were sleeping? Or in general, WHO did WHAT on WHICH OBJECT, at what TIME, from WHERE, and what was the OUTCOME? You can forward these Audit logs to your syslog server as well from Prism Central. More information on this can be foun
Have you always wanted to get a peek into the network traffic flowing in and out of your Nutanix infrastructure? Whether you got your first IT job for years or been a veteran for several years, you would have definitely at some point been keen to get a detailed look at your network traffic. At Nutanix, the AHV hypervisor is based on the open-source KVM module and uses the CentOS Linux distribution. And yes, it comes with the popular packet capture utility tcpdump. A few examples when you would want to use tcpdump in your Nutanix infrastructure would be: VM(s) lose network connectivity on a particular host A host has multiple network links and you wish to identify which is active VM(s) are not reachable from an external network In that particularly annoying issue, the switch vendor asks you to contact Nutanix support The good news is that tcpdump is installed by default in AHV hosts and it can be run to inspect traffic on physical NIC’s as well as VM inte
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