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:
Link to download – you will need to create a community account:
https://next.nutanix.com/discussion-forum-14/download-community-edition-38417
