Nutanix administration do’s and don’ts.note¶
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Nutanix administration do’s and
don’ts
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As a virtualization consultant, I know there’s a wide variety of technologies at every level –
hypervisor, storage, networking, and even server hardware is getting to some degree more complex
in terms of what you need to know to manage it effectively. Everyone can’t be an expert in every
single storage technology as an example, and with more and more options that are radically different
in their architecture, right now I wanted to make my own little contribution to the world for consultants
and admins alike on basic things you should and shouldn’t do with one storage solution – Nutanix.
For us consultants, we often find ourselves within environments with something we’re not totally
familiar with, so some helpful concise guidance can go a long way. Admins, too, may have depended
upon a consultant or previous colleagues that no longer work there for implementation and support,
but now it’s on them, so I thought this would be helpful.
There are quite a few things everyone should know if they ever are working on a environment with
Nutanix that aren’t necessarily obvious. I can see it being pretty darn easy to blow up a Nutanix
environment if you’re not aware of some of these things.
Common stuff
2016-01-08NutanixHyper-VhyperconvergedKVMNutanixvsphere
Contact Nutanix Support before downgrading licensing or destroying cluster to reclaim licenses
(unnecessary if you’re using Starter licensing though). This was repeated many times, so I’m
guessing if this isn’t done, you’ll be hating life getting licensing straight.
Do NOT delete the Nutanix Controller VM on any Nutanix host (CVM names look like: NTNX-
Do NOT modify any settings of a Controller VM, all the way down to even the name of the VM.
Shutdown/Startup gotchas:
It’s probably best to never shutdown/reboot/etc. more than one Nutanix node in a cluster at a
time. If you do more, you may cause all hosts in the Nutanix cluster to lose storage
connectivity.
When shutting down a single host or < the redundancy factor (Nutanix number of hosts it is
configured to tolerate failure in a Nutanix cluster), migrate/shutdown all VMs on host EXCEPT
the controller VM, THEN shutdown the controller VM.
If you are shutting down a number of hosts that exceeds the redundancy factor, you need to
shutdown the Nutanix cluster. There’s also a specialized procedure to start up the Nutanix
cluster in this situation. That’s beyond the scope of this email.
vSphere
When booting up a host, do the following:
start the Controller VM first that resides on it, and verify it’s services are working by SSH
to it using:
Ncli cluster status | grep –A 15
Then have it rescan its datastores.
Then verify the Nutanix Cluster state using the following to ensure cluster services are all
up via same SSH session:
cluster status
Hypervisor Patching
Make sure to patch one hypervisor node and ensure Controller VM comes back up with
services are good before proceeding to the next one. Also do one at a time in a Nutanix
cluster (see above).
Follow shutdown host procedure above.
NEVER use “Reset System Configuration” command in Nutanix.
If resource pools are created, Controller VM (CVM) must have the highest share.
Do NOT modify NFS settings.
VM swapfile location should be the same folder as the VM. Do NOT place it on a dedicated
datastore.
Do NOT modify the Controller VM startup/shutdown order.
Do NOT modify iSCSI software adapter settings.
Do NOT modify vSwitchNutanix standard vSwitch.
Do NOT modify Vmk0 interface in port group “Management Network”.
Do NOT disable ESXi host SSH.
HA configuration recommended settings:
Enable admission control and use percentage based policy with value based on number of
nodes in cluster
Set VM Restart Priority for CVMs to Disabled.
Set Host Isolation Response of cluster to Power Off
Set Host Isolation Response of CVMs to Leave Powered ON.
Disable VM Monitoring for all CVMs
Enable Datastore Heartbeating by clicking Select only from my preferred datastores and
choosing Nutanix datastores. If cluster has only one datastore (which would be common
potentially in Nutanix deployments), add advanced option
das.ignoreInsufficientHbDatastore=true to avoid warnings about not having at least two
heartbeat datastores.
DRS stuff:
Disable automation of all CVMs
Leave power management disabled (DPM)
Enable EVC for lowest processor class in cluster.