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About 2 years ago I decided to try out Nutanix and learn a little about how it worked along with Veeam. Like most people this started with a Google search and several blog posts of others who have deployed Nutanix CE in their home labs, mostly nesting inside their VMware environments to save on necessary hardware. So, why not. I downloaded CE, carved out a VM on my VMware host, went through the steps and before long I had a single node cluster running. I setup a couple small VMs on it, added to my Veeam server, setup backups and backup copy jobs, and was off and running. Over time I left it running and didn’t really think much about it. Occasionally, someone would ask about Veeam capabilities with Nutanix and Cloud Connect, or something else, and I could show them, or test out what they wanted to try, but otherwise just left it running.

 

Not too long ago, Nutanix released CE 2.0, however I waited, no rush to change what was working. Then there was the IT crash heard around the world . Time to kick the home lab up a notch and get to learning some new things again. Let’s move beyond having 1 – 1 node cluster, how about 1 – 3 node cluster to run as a production site and 1 – 1 node as DR? Back to searching for blog posts again on how to build this out, make more space in the environment to nest more Nutanix nodes, and download CE 2.0. Let the fun begin.

 

I proceeded to install the software on 3 VMs nested onto 2 separate VMware hosts and onto different datastores, and soon the 3 nodes were ready to create the cluster. I logged into the CVM and run the cluster create command and waited. Watching the screen, I noticed it would get to a step about halfway into the create and it just looped there, I left it running all night. No go, stuck looping on that step. Well, that is not good, try number 2, take 1 of my physical hosts (I use Intel NUC gen 10i7s with 64gb ram) and convert it to run Nutanix native and keep 2 nested. Another challenge, Nutanix requires 3 physical hard drives, Intel NUCs only have 1 SSD slot and 1 NVMe slot. Lucky Nutanix CE hypervisor can boot and run from usb3 , so order a 64gb thumb drive and here we go again. Now 1 physical node and 2 nested, and run the cluster create command again. And………. Stuck on same step into same loop. Time to search the community and see if anyone else is running into this. Yup, appears to be an issue with hard disk serial numbers on the nested nodes being similar. No go on nested more than 1 node. So physical nodes it is for the 3 node cluster.

 

Time to hit eBay for 2 more NUCs. Here is what I have:

1 NUC Gen10i7 64GB ram, 64GB boot thumb drive, 256GB NVMe for CVM, 500GB SSD for Data

2 NUC Gen10i7 32GB ram, 64GB boot thumb drive, 256GB NVMe for CVM, 500GB SSD for data

 

Nutanix installed, and 3 node cluster built. And was able to create the 1 node cluster nested. Now the lab is up and running, connected to Veeam. Still in process is setting up Nutanix replication and testing DR.

 

Some thoughts: 32GB ram is minimal setup and the CVM, to run well, will require 20GB of that, leaving 12 for VMs. Recommend 64 for more capacity to run workloads. Get USB 3 sticks if using Intel NUCs for boot drive. Also would say that ok to run a nested node in a 1 node cluster to test and learn, but if you want to have a 3 node cluster, build it out on physical hardware.

 

In the end, worth the time and effort to get it in the lab. I like that Nutanix offers this community edition, and that Veeam fully supports working with it. You can backup up the workloads and can recover from the Nutanix snapshots with Veeam like our other storage integrations.

 

Link to Nutanix CE Getting started:

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Community-Edition-Getting-Started-v2_0:Nutanix-Community-Edition-Getting-Started-v2_0

 

Link to download – you will need to create a community account:

https://next.nutanix.com/discussion-forum-14/download-community-edition-38417

 

 

Great post about your experience @skitch210 !
With everything happening these days I think it’s time to learn some of Nutanix.

I have to agree time to learn Nutanix some.  Great post @skitch210 

Wow that's amazing. I'll try community edition ASAP. Thanks for sharing @skitch210 

Great post for Nutanix CE deployment @skitch210 👍

As an update on this, I was able to install Proxmox on bare metal NUC with 1 - 1TB NVMe drive, then nest Nutanix CE on that with 3 drives created. This makes it not need the USB boot drive, and now I can learn 2 in 1 🙂 Although I have Nutanix VM taking all the resources. I may reconfigured my other NUCs this way.

nice post! 

Great post.
I am hoping Veeam will start supporting XCP-NG.
I could see Veeam creating a management console around this platform with backups and workload orchestration.

Thanks for sharing yor experience, @skitch210 ! If I'm not mistaken, Nutanix has made CE available since the first releases of AOS/AHV/Prism and this definitely contributed to the solution being more widespread and known by users. 👏🏻

Another update, I found a fix for nesting on VMware for those that want to learn without adding new hardware. When you create the VM in VMware, choose Linux-CentOS 7-64bit, 32GB ram, 64,200,500 hard drives, and set the Expose hardware assisted virtualization to guest OS check box under CPU. Set access Promiscuos mode on the network switch, and the key to pass serial numbers to the hard drives (which is what I missed before) edit the VM Options - Advanced - Configuration Parameters and add disk.EnableUUID = True. Then Nutanix will see serial numbers on the disks and a 3 node cluster will work nested.

Great post. works very well with these instructions. Now test to see it's capabilities

Did you manage to connect it to VBR?

Thanks @skitch210 I recently setup a single node in Proxmox. However, just barely got it working on my very humble lab setup. I was not able to deploy Prism Central (it errors out while extracting the tarball) which I know is resource related. I was able to run a VM and the Veeam components to get a backup done followed, just for kicks, v2v instant restore to Hyper-V. I really like what I am seeing with Nutanix the only unpleasant thing in relation to the Kubernetes stuff I normally do is again is the need for a lot more resources. No surprise here but it reminded me of why I got so exited with Kubernetes since you can do so much on so little. I am also going to do a eBay search for some NUC’s as I would really like to get this thing up and running with a few nodes and Prism Central. 

 

@jos.maliepaard I do have it setup with VBR and performing backups and restores. Need to make sure you have the cluster IP and iSCSI IP setup for the VBR deployment to work.

 

@Geoff Burke I am also having a resource issue trying to get Prism Central deployed. Trying to get it deployed to my big VMware host. I am a fan on NUCs from eBay. Gen 10s can be purchased for a decent price and can handle up to 64GB of ram.

 

I am starting to work with the Rest API for auto restores into AHV

@jos.maliepaard I do have it setup with VBR and performing backups and restores. Need to make sure you have the cluster IP and iSCSI IP setup for the VBR deployment to work.

 

@Geoff Burke I am also having a resource issue trying to get Prism Central deployed. Trying to get it deployed to my big VMware host. I am a fan on NUCs from eBay. Gen 10s can be purchased for a decent price and can handle up to 64GB of ram.

 

I am starting to work with the Rest API for auto restores into AHV

Interesting. In that case maybe I will just play with Prism Element for now. Please make sure to tell us when you get it going and what finally worked. They have a good community over there too but I have not had enough time. 

I guess this should be expected as Prism Central is as I understand it like their version of Vcetner as a rough comparison. You can’t have tons of features on too much minimalism. 

Proxmox is great for my home lab but is far from Vsphere or Nutanix in features. I installed Oracle Linux KVM yesterday for fun and that went smoothly, need to connect it to my vbr but was getting a cert error and it was late in the day so pushed that off.

If anyone here wants to know sources for studying Nutanix, let me know.
I also frequently receive free vouchers for Nutanix exams

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