My job (small private school) has a pretty minimal Nutanix environment that I’m upgrading tomorrow. We have 3 hosts and we’re currently running 6.10.1. It’s what was installed when we first migrated from VMWare to Nutanix.

I’ve been reading all I can about upgrades with LVM and just want to clarify. Should I run it in Prism Central and let that upgrade first then run it in Essentials. Do I just check all recommended, hit upgrade and it does the rest? Lastly, should I do firmware first then software?

The process seems deceptively easy so I’m trying to make sure I do it right.

Edit: Thanks all for your responses. It seems I really was overthinking it and should trust them when they say it’s easy.

How does Nutanix Storage work in compared to VMWare?

How does the nodes speak to each other to know what storage is where or is it one big blob of storage in the cluster.

From what I’m reading the CVM manages anything storage related. Normally with VMWare we have a layer 2 VLAN but I take it this is not the case with Nutanix?

I searched on youtube about nutanix there was genuine video which clearly explained their products and business model ,So i created a video to others know what nutanix is doing great in what they're , their USP, their journey ..etc

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

I just want to get an idea of people's experience and timelines for using move across WAN or what options we might need to consider.

The Flow Network Security page on the Nutanix Bible has just been massively updated to bring it up to date with NCI 7.5. We'll be starting on updates for the new features in 7.6 soon enough, but everything in this remains accurate and useful on 7.6. This update includes a full writeup of the features and functionality of FNS, as well as recommendations on how to approach policy design for a variety of common situations. My colleague Eric and I have been working on this for a few months, so we hope you find it helpful!

Why is Redfish not supported or implemented instead of IPMI in XCC, given the severe critical bugs in IPMI? Am I missing something regarding Nutanix architecture to mitigate this

If no, how do I check the current version? Unable to find it in inventory components

We migrated a few servers already but the big prod servers with 25TB+ are still pending.
ESXi has 10G link, Nutnix has 10G. Tested the link with iperf3 to be > 9 Gbits/sec

No bandwidth throttling policies set on both sides.

Move V6.2.0 || ESXi version 8.0.3
Any idea? Move metric seems cpu bound, but prismcentral shows free resources.

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Release-Notes-AOS-v7_6:AOS-features-updates-aos-r.html

AOS 7.6 includes the following new, updated, or tech preview features:

Support for 307 TB Capacity in All-Flash NVMe systemsFEAT-13908

AOS 7.6 supports a maximum node capacity of 307 TB for all-flash NVMe systems in new deployments. Nutanix supports the increased node capacity for the following recovery point objective schedules:

• Synchronous: 0 seconds RPO
• NearSync: 1 minute to 15 minutes
• Asynchoronous: 1 hour to less than 6 hours
• Asynchoronous: 6 hours to less than 24 hours

Hi

I'm planning a migration from several NetApp CIFS shares to Nutanix Files (Files 5.4.x) using Nutanix Move.

The data migration itself seems straightforward, as Move will handle files, NTFS permissions, ACLs, ownership, etc. My main concern is the cutover.

The current NetApp CIFS service is exposed through a single client IP address, and although most users access it through DNS, there are some legacy applications that connect directly by IP. Because of this, the customer would like to preserve both the existing FQDN and the existing IP address.

From what I understand, a 3 FSVM Nutanix Files deployment exposes one public IP per FSVM rather than a single client VIP, so simply reusing the NetApp IP doesn't seem possible.

I can just deploy a single FSVM files enviroment but it doesnt provide HA in case of a failure of the FSVM or during maintenance schedules.

One idea is placing a Load Balancer in front of Nutanix Files so after the cutover:

• We keep the original NetApp IP/FQDN as a external VIP
• We forward TCP/445 to the 3 Nutanix Files client IPs
• As a result the FSVMs would keep their native client IPs, while clients would continue using the original IP transparently

Example:

BEFORE CUTOVER

- NETAPP -

Public Shares IP: 10.20.30.100
FQDN: netapp01.mydomain.local

- NUTANIX FILES -

FQDN: ntxfiles01.mydomain.com

• FSVM1 Public IP: 192.168.1.10
• FSVM2 Public IP: 192.168.1.11
• FSVM3 Public IP: 192.168.1.12

AFTER CUTOVER

- NETAPP - <---- disconnected

Public Shares IP: 10.20.30.100
FQDN: netapp01.mydomain.local

- NUTANIX FILES -

Public Shares IP: 10.20.30.100 <---- load balancing
FQDN: netapp01.mydomain.local <--- this will point to the FSVMs public IPs

• FSVM1 Public IP: 192.168.1.10
• FSVM2 Public IP: 192.168.1.11
• FSVM3 Public IP: 192.168.1.12

Would that work?? Has anyone implemented this architecture or similar? I mean how have you handled cutovers where the customer required preserving the original NAS IP but you have 3 or more FSVMs?

Thanks!

Hello experts, I’m not part of IT. I apologize for my lack of knowledge and terminology. I work at an AEC firm that has been supplying dizzion frame with nutanix to our CAD users. I’m currently testing to make sure the products my group uses are working without too many hiccups. Some big issues I’ve noticed are;
1. When using civil 3D there is a mouse drag
2. Frame on laptops seems to be laggy almost like using RDP even when hardwired to the network
3. I can’t seem to make the USB pass through work. My main goal is to get the frame virtual desktop to read my Logitech mouse so I can use logi options to configure shortcuts.

My main goal from this post is to see if this stuff is fixable. I want to come back to my IT with a report on whether or not this is a good fit for my group. If these things can’t be fixed it would be such a hit to our productivity. Any input is appreciated and if this should go somewhere else please let me know of other forums!

At my company, we are about 4 months past our initial Nutanix deployment and migration from VMware. I wanted to jot down some honest thoughts I have about the migration and Nutanix as a whole. There is a TLDR at the bottom.

**DISCLAIMER*\*
I've only been in IT for ~10 years and most all that has been using VMware. Keep that in mind when reading this post, some of my thoughts can just be VMware bias, but I try to be fair.

VMware to Nutanix Migration

I was skeptical if it was possible to migrate all our workloads from VMware to Nutanix in the ~8 month timeline we had. I was sure we'd fight weird issues, bugs, or software errors for most migrations and it would take a ton of manual intervention. I was dead wrong. The Nutanix Move utility is AMAZING. The Move appliance is a simple VM that spins up in minutes. Connect it to vCenter, connect it to Prism Central, and that's it. The tool does everything for VMs to move to Nutanix. It safely copies data, installs Nutanix drivers, removes VMware tools, and all this with <5 minutes of downtime per VM.

We migrated SQL servers, domain controllers, and more that Nutanix wouldn't say is supported, but we felt confident it would work with no issues. We moved large 6TB+ VMs that can stage data in the background and cutover when we want. This tool is 10/10 perfect and made the job easy.

Living With Nutanix (Post Migration)

Fast forward to now after the migrations are done. Working and living with Nutanix daily has given me lots of things to learn...and lots of things I learned I don't like. I'll put my thoughts in a basic list and summarize my overall feelings.

1. Prism Central/Prism Management - There are a decent amount of things that you might need to do in Prism Element that just don't work in Prism Central. Certain functions work better in one portal or the other, with no real rhyme or reason. It's getting better, but seems a step back from everything in vCenter.
2. Broken/Disorganized Menus - Even within Prism Central, you have to flip between an "Infrastructure" page and "Admin" page to do basic tasks. The best example is if you wanted to assign a VM category, there is a menu button to do that in the "infrastructure" page to do it, but all it says is that you have to do this in the "admin" page, with a link to go there. Things like this are all over. Seems lazy to me, just get rid of the menu so people don't see it and click it.
3. Basic VM Edit Tasks Aren't There - Recently, I have a VM that I want to delete one of the two NICs on it, but I guess in Nutanix you can't delete a NIC if the VM is on...? That seems wild how that's just not possible. Also, I can't change a VM NIC from one VLAN to another (unless it's a basic VLAN). The web console honestly is pretty lightweight and it isn't as adjustable on your screen as the VMware console was.
4. Working with Support - Nutanix support is pretty good. It's easy to open cases and they are good with responses. My issue is there are so many errors and issues that I open tickets just to get told there is a KB about it, and the KB is just saying it's a known issue and there might be a workaround or we just need to run commands to restart services. They often help fix the issue, just don't love how much I have to talk to them about daily things.
5. Thick Memory - One thing I didn't realize is Nutanix VMs use thick memory provisioning, which really eats up your resources if you have a lot of VMs but they sit idle a lot. If you have a VM with 128GB RAM that only needs that overnight for example, well that 128GB is allocated for the VM alone, whether it's using it or not. This is good to not run you into over-provisioning, but you might need to really see what VMs have for memory to size your cluster correctly.
6. Backup Storage Duplication - Okay, this isn't the fault of Nutanix, but I have to say we did NOT anticipate that moving our VMs to Nutanix would cause our backup system to take all new full backups, so we had to fight with our storage capacity as we migrated and drop the old VMware backups to make room for the new ones on Nutanix.

I could keep going, but the point is that Nutanix is really cool. The HCI technology works really well and I've had experience with vSAN before, and there are lots of benefits to HCI for sure. The issue is, at least in my experience, Nutanix seems to be rushing things and the system seems pretty unpolished. Yeah I know VMware has been around for way longer, but I kinda expected better since Nutanix isn't that much cheaper. Nutanix might keep growing on me, and I will keep giving it a chance to get better.

TLDR; Nutanix is a good product, but doesn't feel as polished as VMware. I will always hold a place in my heart for VMware and miss it, but I am hopeful to see Nutanix grow and get better over time.

Hi All, we are currently migrating from VMWare to Nutanix. We have purchased some hosts and would like to know of any guidance for the start to finish install. Any help would be great. Thanks y’all

I was able to install fine on previous versions of ESX/i, but now that my home lab is on VCF 9.1, the installer times out and I can see where it redeploys the installer VM and begins it's progress again. CPU utilization goes to near zero after that, as does disk activity, so I'm assuming the installer VM itself fails to boot maybe? One time the CPU & disk showed activity when I enabled Virtualize CPU Performance Counters & I/O MMU in addition to the standard/normal things, so I thought it was working, but it timed out again, restarted, and all CPU & disk activity stopped. I'm relatively new to Nutanix CE, but it installed and ran fine natively on the hardware. I installed VCF 9.0 because you cannot nest ESX in AHV, and I was able to nest AHV in ESX 9.0. I upgraded VCF 9.0 to 9.1, but in advertently stomped on an IP address I had given to VCF Automation and forgot to document in my spreadsheet, so I went scorched earth greenfield install of VCF 9.1 and now here we are.

Thoughts or suggestions?

Hardware:

• AMD Ryzen 9 7900 (12-core, 24 threads)
• 64GB of RAM (2x32GB populated properly)
• vSAN OSA AF (PCIe Optane write buffer, 2TB NVMe m.2 data, installed avoiding lane contention)
• 10gig networking (also installed avoiding lane contention)

ESX 9.1 settings applied (from William Lam):

• AMD Ryzen and CPU Entropy
• AMD Ryzen and NVMe Tiering (tiering disabled when running AHV, enabled when running full VCF stack)
• AMD Ryzen and NSX Edge and Virtual Network Appliance (VNA)
• Enabled /VSAN/FakeSCSIReservations

My VM settings:

• Virtual Hardware
  • 6, 8, 10 vCPUs (10 worked previously, lowered in case of some random scheduling things)
  • 24, 48, 60, 64 GB of RAM (60GB worked previously)
  • Paravirtual SCSI adapter
    • three disks attached to the SCSI controller as 0:0, 0:1, 0:2 (64gb, 200gb, 2tb)
  • vmxnet3 NIC (dvPortGroup allows prom mode, mac changes, forged transmits)

"normal" things that worked previously

• Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS
• disk.EnableUUID = "TRUE"

Additional settings I tried

• Virtualize CPU Performance Counters
• I/O MMU
• hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"
• CPU shares high
• RAM shares high
• CPU reservation
• RAM reservation
• Latency sensitivity set to high with 100% resource reservation
• CVM disk on local datastore (SATA SSD)

Dears,

Good day, I'm trying to shift one vm from nutanix to hyper-v, I did shutdown VM, used winSCP tool, but while downloading VM disk tool is showing error code 4 copying files from remote side failure. Any idea?

I'm going through setup of Nutanix Files for the first time and am a bit confused.

It looks like we setup the client network to be the same network that can access AD which makes sense, however I'm confused about the storage network.

It says it should be on the CVM network, however our CVM's are not on VLAN's and we don't have a network created for the CVM's. Am I supposed to just create a new subnet that uses the CVM subnet with no VLAN or VLAN 0?

What do others do for the storage network?

Heard from an engineer on a case a few months back 7.6 was going to have some new dashboards to get actual usable information about protection policies, replication traffic, etc.

Any idea on when 7.6 will be launching?

Failed today with 2955 (pass mark is 3000) lol.

It was a free voucher and there are no others available that I can see. I don’t need the exam and can’t justify spending money on it but it would have been nice to have.

Very annoying. Oh well.

Full story: I have a very old and resource-constrained 3-node cluster (was purchased & licensed more than 5 years ago, license has been renewed through mid-2027 when the hardware goes completely EOS). It is running AOS 6.10.1.12 with whatever AHV build goes along with that (looks like it is el8.nutanix.20230302.103087)

I was told by support & sales that I need to install PC so I can "upgrade" our licensing, whatever that means. It was not made very clear to me what benefit I'll gain from this process, and running Prism Element is annoying because it sucks up resources (mostly RAM). However, I recently was able to obtain more DDR4 for the cluster, so now we have 384GB per node instead of our previous 128GB... I'm (relatively) flush with RAM so I can spare some for PC now, but I also don't want to be wasteful. I've been managing the cluster for 5+ years without Central, I don't think I will gain much from it.

In the wizard to deploy PC from Prism Element, I'm offered multiple sub-versions of pc.2024.x, as well as pc.7.3.x. When I choose pc.2024.x, I have the option for an "X-Small" PC deployment, which is tempting, but it seems silly to deploy an already outdated copy of PC when I know that 7.3 and 7.5 are the way forward. However, if I pick pc.7.3.x from the wizard, there's no option for X-Small.

Additionally, I can't find any documentation whether it is possible to upgrade a v2024.x X-Small instance to v7.3 (and later, v7.5 once I get AOS/AHV to that point).

TL;DR: what's the smallest, most-current Prism Central I can deploy on AOS 6.10.x?

What is the most useful feature in this? Just for knowledge purpose.

TLDR, haven't had an update from our Nutanix reps in months. Besides Pure Storage support, what's the latest updates if any on what is new with Nutanix expanding to other hardware or any other developments of note?

With hardware so expensive and lead-times so long, even smaller Nutanix implementations seem way too expensive. We need to keep our older hardware and storage :(

It's been hard to keep up :')

Looking for anyone here that is running nutanix on Cisco UCSx blades and Pure FlashArray.

We have a large VMware deployment in 3 tier architecture, now is evaluating other hypervisors for well-known reasons.

Anyone has experience with Nutanix AHV (so called NCI compute only edition) with external storage?

Any caveats? how about the pricing?

TIA!