Prism Central Deployent on AHV

What is Prism Central?

Software to provide centralized infrastructure management, one-click simplicity and intelligent operations. Prism Central runs as a separate instance composed of either a single VM or a set of (3) VMs.

What does Prism Central provides?

Manage multi-cluster from single pane of glass.
Single sign-On for all registered clusters.
Entity Explorer to search various items.
Global alert and notifications.
Multi cluster analytics dashboard.
Dashboard Customization.
Capacity Forecast and Planning

Prism Central is a must have tool for every Nutanix administrator if they have a multi cluster Nutanix environment. In this post I am not stressing on explaining each features of Prism Central. I will write a separate blog post on that. In this post I will walk through the installation procedure for prism central.

Prism Central can be deployed directly from Prism Element. You can use one-click deploy method or the manual (imaging service) method. In this post I will demonstrate the one click method.

From home dashboard of Prism Element, click on “Register or create new”

Click on Deploy to install a new instance.

If your cluster has internet connectivity then you can download the desired version of Prism Central from internet.

If cluster don’t have internet connectivity, then you can manually upload the installation binary by clicking on “upload the Prism Central binary”.

Note: For offline installer, you need to download the 1-click deploy binary file from the support portal.

In case you are using offline installer, you need to provide the metadata json file and the binary tar file. Click on upload now to stage the installer for installation.

Hit install to start installation.

You can deploy a single vm instance or a 3 vm instance. In this post I am deploying single vm instance.

Provide a name for the PC vm and select the container where it will be installed.

Select right size for the PC vm as per your infrastructure requirements.

Provide the network info for the vm and ht Deploy to start installation.

You can monitor the deployment progress from Tasks page.

Once deployment is completed, connect to PC by typing https://<PC-FQDN>:9440

You will be prompted to change password initially.

And accept the EULA and fill necessary info.

Next screen will take you to Pulse settings. If you want to disable pulse, you can do it from here.

Note: As a best practice, it is recommended to keep Pulse enabled.

This is the home dashboard which you see post login to PC.

Register a Cluster to Prism Central

To register a cluster with Prism Central, login to your cluster (Prism Element) and click on Register or create new button from home page.

This time a warning will be displayed that some features will be come Read-Only once a cluster is registered with Prism Central. Those features can only be managed via Prism Central then. Hit next to continue.