In earlier post we learnt how to deploy Prism Central on AHV using 1-Click deployment. To keep things simple, I deployed only one PC vm as I wanted to test how PC scaling out works.

If Prism Central is deployed as single vm, we can expand it to three VMs. PC scale out helps in increasing the capacity and resiliency. 

Note: Prism Central scaling is supported on AHV and ESXi clusters only.

To scale out a Prism Central instance, login to Prism Central and from gear icon select the “Prism Central Management” option.

Click on the Scale Out PC button.

Note: scale out is a one-way process and once PC is expanded to 3 vm’s, you can’t revert it back to 1 vm. 

Once you have read the below warning carefully, hit continue to proceed.

First you have to provide a VIP for the PC vm’s as they will be clustered once deployed.… Read More

In last post I demonstrated the Prism Central 1-Click installation process. In this post I will walk through the 1-Click upgrade process.

Before you start your Prism Central upgrade, there are few pre-requisites that needs to met. Below screenshot taken from Prism Central Admin guide lists the requirements.

To upgrade Prism Central to a higher version, Login to Prism Central and click on gear icon and select “Upgrade Prism Central”.

If your Prism central have access to internet, you can download the upgrade directly from support portal. 

If Prism Central is not connected to internet, then you need to manually provide the upgrade binaries. Upgrade files are available here

Once upgrade binaries have been downloaded and staged, hit Upgrade button to start upgrade.

Click on yes to proceed.

Sit back and relax. Prism central upgrade is going to take 15 minutes at least.

If you are curious whats happening behind the scenes, then you can monitor the backend tasks from Task page.… Read More

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.… Read More

In earlier post of this series, we learnt how to deploy a single node cluster. In this post we will learn how to deploy a multi node cluster using community edition.

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

3: Deploy Single Node Cluster

During lab setup, I created a template vm to for faster deployments of CE vm’s. To create a multi-node cluster, we node to deploy at least 3 VM’s and during deployment we need to make sure to not to select “Create single-node cluster”

Once all 3 VM’s boots up, connect to any one of the CVM and run command: check cluster status and you will see message that cluster is currently unconfigured.

To create cluster we need to run command: cluster -s <cvm1 IP,CVM2 IP,CVM3 IP> -s create

This command will trigger cluster creation and start the necessary services.… Read More

In last post of this series, I covered installation of Nutanix CE single-node cluster. In this post i will walk through steps of reducing CVM memory.

By default when you deploy Nutanix CE, CVM is configured with 16 GB RAM. You can verify this by logging into Prism and navigating to Home > VM view.

Or you can SSH to AHV host and type command : virsh dominfo

Now suppose you allocated 20 GB RAM to the VM where Nutanix CE is installed, CVM will consume 16 GB out of it, leaving only 4 GB for the AHV host. But we can reduce CVM memory to 12G or 8G for lab purpose.

Follow below steps to change CVM memory.

1: Connect to CVM via ssh and stop cluster by executing command: cluster stop

Wait for clean shutdown of cluster

2: Once cluster is stopped on CVM, connect to AHV host via SSH and run command: virsh list –all to fetch CVM name

Additionally you can run command : virsh dominfo to see details of CVM

3: Stop CVM by typing command: virsh shutdown <cvm name>

4: Reduce CVM memory by typing below commands:

• virsh setmem  12G –config
• virsh setmaxmem  12G –config

Verify that new memory settings have applied.… Read More

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.

Select your keyboard layout and hit proceed. 

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

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

If the installer is able to detect the required number of IOPS (as specified in sysUtil.py… Read More

In last post of this series we discussed about what Nutanix CE is what does it offer and we talked about limitation of the product. In this post I will walk through my lab setup which I used to deploy the Nutanix CE.

Recommended Hardware

Before planning your deployment, make sure to refer to below spreadsheet which lists all necessary piece of hardware you need to have in place. 

In my lab, I don’t have a dedicated hardware server for deployment, so I went ahead with Nested virtualization technique. But if you are interested in deploying CE on dedicated piece of hardware then I would recommend reading this article.

Step 1: Download Nutanix CE bits

Before starting deployment, you need to first register register yourself on Nutanix Next Community . Fill in all the needed details and hit submit.

You will get an email with download links and Getting Started docs. … Read More

Till the time I was working majorly on VMware products, I thought there can’t be a better piece of technology than this. But since the time I started learning Nutanix, my thoughts changed and I must admit that I am in awe of this product.

To learn any new product, home lab is the best place where you can learn things from scratch. Since I don’t have dedicated hardware pieces to deploy Nutanix, I tried my hands on Nutanix Community Edition.

In this post I will outline some basic considerations which you should keep in mind when when planning to go with Nutanix CE and will walk through the steps needed to create lab. Also I will discuss possibilities and limits of using this product.

What is Nutanix Community Edition (CE) ?

Nutanix Community Edition is the free version of Nutanix OS which can be used to test drive main features of Nutanix.… Read More