My HCI Lab with Nutanix Community Edition-Part 3: Deploy Single Node Cluster

Manish Jha

In last post of this series we discussed about lab setup that is needed to deploy the Nutanix CE platform. In this post we will learn about how to deploy a single node cluster.

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Nutanix Community Edition Introduction

2: Lab Setup

In last post we converted our centos VM to a template to save deployment time. I deployed a new VM from the template and booted it. 

Once the “init image” is loaded at the login, type “install” command to proceed.

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Select your keyboard layout and hit proceed. 

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The installer will now show the disk drives namely sdb and sdc since they are connected to SCSI(0:1) and SCSI(0:2).

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The install wizard script will then detect the performance of the disk attached.

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If the installer is able to detect the required number of IOPS (as specified in sysUtil.py file), you will be presented with below screen to configure IP address for the AHV host and the CVM.

  • Select “Create single-node cluster” option if you wish to have only one node in your setup.
  • Specify the DNS server so that public servers names can be resolved. If DNS resolution fails then we won’t be able to register the Nutanix CE against the Next Community website post install.
  • Read license agreement till last otherwise installer will throw error.
  • Accept EULA and click on Start button to start installation.

Note: Use Static IP if you can. Also please make sure that Host IP and CVM IP are in same broadcast domain. 

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The wizard will now start installing packages and will assign the IP addresses etc provided earlier. The wizard will also create a self-signed certificate we’ll accept when connecting using SSH on both Host and CVM.

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Typically it takes up to 30 minutes for package installation to complete and CVM to boot. 

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Post install you will be presented with the screen to login to the Host. Default credential is root and nutanix/4u. This page also shows the Nutanix CVM IP Address.

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You can connect to both AHV host and CVM via SSH (putty). Credentials for CVM is

  • Username: nutanix
  • Password: nutanix/4u 

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Post install connect to Prism by typing https://<CVM-IP>:9440 and login with admin user and nutanix/4u as password.

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You will be prompted to change password of admin user on first login. Follow the password requirements to set a new password of your choice. 

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Login to Prism with your new password.

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To register Nutanix CE with NEXT community, please enter your NEXT credentials.

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If DNS servers details are correct, CVM will attempt to authenticate against the Nutanix Next Portal to start the registration process.

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Post Nutanix CE activation is successful, PRISM will load the home page.

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And this concludes the single-node cluster installation of Nutanix CE platform. In next post of this series I will demonstrate how to form a multi-node cluster.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing :)

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