Category: Nutanix HCI

A “power supply down” alert on a hyperconverged node looks alarming, and it’s tempting to treat it as a straightforward parts failure: pull the PSU, rack a new one, move on. But that instinct can send you chasing the wrong fix. PSUs fail on their own often enough, but they can also report the exact […]

Before anything else: if you suspect a drive has failed, open a case with Nutanix Support straight away. Don’t pull a disk on your own judgement. Support will confirm the drive has genuinely failed rather than been marked offline for another reason, identify the correct physical slot, dispatch the replacement, and — importantly — check […]

Before anything else: if you are not certain what a task is doing, contact Nutanix Support before you touch it. What follows edits the cluster’s task database directly. It is an advanced troubleshooting procedure, not routine housekeeping, and the wrong task aborted at the wrong moment can leave an operation half-finished with no record that […]

Sooner or later on a Lenovo ThinkAgile HX cluster you’ll need to get into the XClarity Controller and find that nobody knows the password. The person who racked the nodes has left, the credentials never made it into the password manager, or a security review has just told you the default USERID account needs rotating. […]

Controller VM memory is one of those settings that gets chosen once, at deployment, and then quietly stops being right. The cluster grows, you enable a few more services, VM count creeps up — and one morning Prism raises a critical alert telling you RAM usage on a CVM is high. The good news is […]

This one turns up on almost every Prism Central deployment eventually: a warning alert saying disk space usage for /home/log/audit has exceeded 75%. It looks alarming — a full filesystem on the management plane is not something you want to ignore — but in most cases it’s routine housekeeping rather than a fault. The audit […]

A full cluster shutdown isn’t something most Nutanix admins do often, which is exactly why it goes wrong when it’s needed — a data centre power maintenance window, a planned electrical cutover, a physical move. Unlike a single node reboot or an LCM upgrade, there’s no wizard walking you through it: you’re stopping every guest […]

Every so often an LCM firmware upgrade doesn’t come back. The node was booted into Phoenix — the small Linux environment LCM uses to flash firmware — the update failed or stalled partway, and now the node is sitting at a Phoenix prompt with its CVM and hypervisor both in maintenance mode. Prism shows a […]

Upgrading a Nutanix cluster is one of those jobs that looks intimidating the first time and routine the tenth. Life Cycle Manager (LCM) does most of the heavy lifting — dependency resolution, rolling reboots, VM evacuation — but the order you do things in, and what you check before you press Apply, is still on […]

Creating a VM on AHV, installing a guest OS on it and then enabling Nutanix Guest Tools is one of those end-to-end tasks that comes up on nearly every engagement. It’s straightforward once you’ve done it a few times, but there are a couple of places where the order of operations matters — particularly attaching […]

Nutanix’s native Data Protection lets you group VMs into a Protection Domain and take scheduled local (and optionally remote) snapshots of them, without needing a third-party backup product. On a recent engagement we set up a second protection domain on a cluster that already had one running, to put a different set of VMs on […]

Nutanix Flow is the microsegmentation and network security layer built into AHV — it lets you write intent-based security policies between VMs and application tiers instead of relying on VLAN-level firewalling. Before any of that is usable, though, two things have to be switched on in Prism Central: the Network Controller, and Microsegmentation itself. On […]