Cluster has dual stack enabled. Cannot register to a PC (Nutanix)

Posted on 18/03/2025 by Stephan Wibier

So, you have a brand new Nutanix cluster deployed.
Now you want to register your Prism Element cluster to a Prism Central instance!

So, let’s start.

‘Register or create new’

‘Connect’

‘Next’

Fill in the appropriate fields, and hit ‘Connect’

WAIT, What is that?

Cluster has dual stack enabled. Cannot register to a PC.

Uh, so this has to do with some networking issue, I guess?

Nutanix, help.
OK, search the KB’s and we find: KB-17342

I’m on AOS 7, so that is AOS 6.5 and Newer.
Easy they give me two commands and I’m done.

manage_ipv6 unconfigure; manage_ipv6 disable

Let’s try this.
Hmm not successful.

What’s in the log?

Well, the first part is about the ‘manage_ipv6 unconfigure’. This is complaining about a gateway that cannot be removed.
The second part is about the ‘manage_ipv6 disable’. This is complaining about an ipv6 address still being present.

In KB-17342 there are all kind of commands, but none of these where a success in my environment.

This log line is interesting:
Failed to unconfigure IPv6 address on 192.168.100.171. Error: Failed to remove the default IPv6 gateway fe80::9ada:c4ff:fe86:31d4

Let’s see if this is true 😉

/sbin/route -A inet6

No nothing to see here.

sudo ip -6 route show

THERE YOU ARE!

Hmm, what if I add and delete the gateway in 1 step?

sudo /sbin/route add -A inet6 default gw fe80::9ada:c4ff:fe86:31d4 eth0 && manage_ipv6 unconfigure && manage_ipv6 disable

And success

And in Prism also visible:

Nutanix CE 2.1 marks disks wrong (SSD/NMVe as HDD)

Posted on 10/02/2025 by Stephan Wibier

So you installed Nutanix CommunityEdition (CE) version 2.1.
Everything went well, created the cluster and then you login to Prism and see (some) of your disks marked wrong, i.e. a SSD or NVMe is shown as HDD.

This sometimes happens as the current CE is almost on par with the full blown flagship product. If you then install it on non-enterprise grade hardware (i.e. homelab!) it defaults to non-expected values.

In Prism

And on the CLI

But there is an easy way to correct this 🙂

SSH into the (or an) CVM
get the DISKID with ncli disk ls
change disk type with ncli disk update id=DISKID tier-name=TIERNAME

For TIERNAME you can use:

DAS-SATA (HDD)
SSD-SATA (SSD)
SSD-PCIe (NVMe)

After this the disks will be shown correctly.

In Prism

And on the CLI

Nutanix CommunityEdition (CE) 2.0 – Terminal to small…uh

Posted on 07/10/2023 by Stephan Wibier

"Terminal screen is not large enough to run the installation script. Please resize the terminal and rerun the script."

Ok, so I was installing the Nutanix Community Edition 2.0 (download here: https://next.nutanix.com/discussion-forum-14/download-community-edition-38417 ) on a HP Z620. These boxes do not have a videocard onboard, so you have to be present at the machine instead of using AMT for this!

Booting up from a freshly made USB stick, running some time through the installer and then, yes this odd little fellow came along:
"Terminal screen is not large enough to run the installation script. Please resize the terminal and rerun the script."

Well, what does my best friend Google has to say about that. Well actually very little.
Some folks say well put the box in LEGACY mode in the Bios. But this version needs UEFI so that is a no-go.

But then a solution came to mind. What if we go into Phoenix, enable SSH and do the installation from there?

So here we go:

Get the IP address of the box. This is probably a DHCP address. Otherwise ifconfig will get it for you 😉
Start SSH: systemctl start sshd.service
SSH into the box from a workstation. User root, PW nutanix/4u
restart the installation with ./ce_installer && screen -r

And there she goes, off to another new CE installation.

Have fun

Password hash in CentOS 7/8

Posted on 02/10/2023 by Stephan Wibier

If you want to create a password hash that you want to put into your cloud-init configuration, it is possible to use a plain-text password. But you can use a hash so nobody can see the password.

Some Linux distributions have the mkpasswd utility, but on CentOS this is not available.

You can use a python one-liner to generate a SHA512 password hash:

python -c 'import crypt,getpass; print(crypt.crypt(getpass.getpass(), crypt.mksalt(crypt.METHOD_SHA512)))'

Execute the one-liner and type in your password.

More info here: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/examples.html

Nutanix CommunityEdition (CE) 5.10

Posted on 15/03/2019 by Stephan Wibier

Hi, so this is a new one. And it’s different, more technical. Also very nice to do and to play around with.
I’m talking about the CommunityEdition (CE) of the Nutanix stack.

Wait the what?

Nutanix is a vendor that provides a Hyper-Converged datacenter solution. Enterprise Cloud. One OS. One Click. Any Cloud.
Hm I think you need to know more about this!

They make IT invisible! But what does this mean? I think it means a lot.

It means I can make more time for things that are important, instead of, for instance, updating my servers.
Continuous Innovation, which means they are adding more functionality to the product. And that means I achive more with the same product! Nice 😉
Because it is a Hyper-Converged solution, it is possible to pay only for what you actually use. Well I like that idea.
And there is a thing called ‘Time to Market’, which means how fast can I get a appliction available to my users. Uh very fast, like in for instance five minutes.

When you look at the Gartner Quadrant (Jan ’18) it is clear that there is a distinct leadership.

Untitled

And the beauty of this all, you can explore all of this for free. Yes for FREE.
Nutanix offers a Community Edition of there product. Just register and you are good to go.

And then we are good to go: HOW-TO Install Nutanix CommunityEdition (CE) 5.10 on VMware ESXi 6.7

Nice intro video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEQ72n6-Bv4

HOW-TO Install Nutanix CommunityEdition (CE) 5.10 on VMware ESXi 6.7

Posted on 15/03/2019 by Stephan Wibier

So in my last post I gave the address of where to get the nice and free bits to play with:

Nutanix CommunityEdition (CE) 5.10

At the moment there is no ISO to download, so we have to go with the manual installation. This is not so hard but we have to take a few extra steps.

Extract the image and rename it to ce-flat.vmdk. Then you have to make a descriptor file, VMware got you covered here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1002511
This is rather a long post so here is a little shortcut. All credits to: https://www.virtuallifestyle.nl !

Create a text file with the name ce.vmdk and copy this in the file:

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
encoding="UTF-8"
CID=a6fec276
parentCID=ffffffff
isNativeSnapshot="no"
createType="vmfs"

# Extent description
RW 14540800 VMFS "CE-flat.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base 
#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "905"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.longContentID = "7cd3219978337481ae6b4edaa6fec276"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 94 64 30 98 a0-5d 85 e3 5b e8 b7 c5 e5"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "14"

Then save both files to a datastore on your VMware environment.

And now we start! So fire up your VMware web client and let’s roll.

2019-03-14 20_32_49 2019-03-14 20_33_16 2019-03-14 20_33_37 2019-03-14 20_33_44

You better install this on SSD storage for best performance! 2019-03-14 20_33_54 2019-03-14 20_34_04

Pick a Linux version (Cent OS will also do ;-)) 2019-03-14 20_34_51

There are a few settings to be made:

CPU: minimal 4 Cores

Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS

Enable virtualized CPU performance counters

I/O MMU enabled

RAM: minimum of 16GB –> My minimum is 24GB 😉

2019-03-14 21_39_44

The add a existing hard disk and point it to the ce.vmdk file you uploaded! So first remove the already added disk and replace it. 2019-03-14 20_37_25 2019-03-14 20_38_15 2019-03-14 20_38_28