Nutanix Community Edition 4 Node Cluster Nested On ESXi 6.0

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#Nutanix Community Edition 4 Node Cluster Nested on ESXi 6.0

POSTED BY MICHAEL WEBSTER ON JULY 11, 2015 IN NUTANIX, VMWARE | 9,996 VIEWS | 12 RESPONSES
1 of 8
07/11/16, 2:40 PM
A great way to learn Nutanix technology is by using the Nutanix Community Edition, which is a community
supported, free, but fully functional version of the Nutanix software and Acropolis Hypervisor. If you dont
have spare hardware lying around your house or lab then a great way to use this initially is nested on top
of ESXi. Recently my 8yr Old Son Sebastian passed the Nutanix Platform Professional Certication and I
decided to give him his own home lab as a reward and also as a late birthday present. I had some Dell
T710 servers from my VMware lab prior to Nutanix that I thought would make a great rst home lab, and
theyre connected into 10G switches. This article will cover how I put this environment together and give a
high level overview. It was super easy, and anyone can do it. You can build very powerful demo or learning
environments this way.
Firstly I would like to acknowledge three great resources that I used to help get this up and running. In no
particular order:
JOEP PISCAERof Virtual Lifestyle #NextConf running Nutanix Community Edition nested on Fusion
Albert Chen How to install Nutanix CE into ESXi 6.0
William Lam Emulating an SSD Virtual Disk in a VMware Environment
FEATURED VIR
I took the work that Joep and Albert did and mixed in a bit of William Lams magic to fool Community
Edition into thinking that a plain virtual disk was an SSD so that I could get the environment up and
running on VMDKs running on a normal datastore. This was for functional testing only and just for a home
lab for my son, so its not going to be breaking any performance records anyway. What I am about to
describe assumes you are setting the environment up for a minimum of 3 Nutanix CE VMs. Here is the
high level process I went through:
1. Start with a funning ESXi 6.0 Host that has some storage attached
2. Create a Portgroup on a Virtual Switch to attach the Nutanix Community Edition VM to and ensure
that the security settings allow Promiscuous Mode (I called this NXCVM)
Note: If you wish to trunk multiple VLANs to the Nutanix CE VMs you can use VLAN 4095 on a
standard switch or Virtual Port Trunking on a Distributed Switch. The Default or Native VLAN that
Nutanix CE is connected to should have DHCP on the network (or use static addresses).
3. Download the Nutanix Community Edition Image File
4. Unzip the image le and rename it <image le name>-at.vmdk
5. Upload the at.vmdk le using the datastore browser to the datastore on the ESXi 6.0 host
6. Upload the ce.vmdk descriptor le using the datastore browser to the ESXi 6.0 host (descriptor I used
included below)
7. Using the vSphere Web Client via vCenter Create a new VM (You will see why its important to use the
web client in a second)
8. Congure Compatibility as ESXi 6.0 and later
9. Congure the new VM as a CentOS Linux 4/5/6/7 64Bit VM
10. Congure at least 4 vCPUs and expose hardware assisted virtualization options to the guest OS
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Tweets
11. Congure at least 16GB RAM (this allows to run VMs on top of the Acropolis Hypervisor as well as the
Nutanix Software etc)
12. Change the Network Adapter to E1000
13. Change the SCSI Controller to PVSCSI i.e. VMware Paravirtual (yes this works just ne), and delete the
16GB virtual disk that is listed by default
14. Add an Existing Hard Disk and use the ce.vmdk image that you previously uploaded attached to SCSI
0:0
Best of luck
this week
@
@
15. Add a New Hard Disk, I used 500GB thin provisioned, this will act as the virtual SSD, and attach it to
SCSI 0:1 on the PVSCSI Adapter
16. Add a New Hard disk, I used 500GB thin provisioned, this will act as the HDD, and attach it to SCSO 0:2
on the PVSCSI Adapter
Note: when using thin provisioned VMDKs they will not grow until real data is written to them. This
means you can run lots of virtual Nutanix Community Edition clusters without taking up much if any
storage space. All of the Nutanix data optimization and reduction features also work on top of this
reducing the real data footprint even further :). In my case however Im only running one CE Node per
ESXi host, but you could run many for a training or demo environment for example.
17. Click VM Options, Expand Advanced and Edit the Conguration Parameters and Add a new row with
the following:
SUBSCRIBE TO
Enter your em
receive notic
Email
DISCLAIMER
The views exp

mine and not
anyone else. A
or warranty ex
purposes and
18. Click Next and then Finish

19. Clone the VM youve just created so that you have a template that can be used later
20. Power on the Nutanix CE VM youve just created
Note: Depending on how powerful your hardware is and if you are using a real SSD or not you may
want to modify the/home/install/phx_iso/phoenix/sysUtil.py le and change theSSD_rdIOPS_thresh =
50 andSSD_wrIOPS_thresh = 50 using vi by logging in as root. Then you can exit and run through the
install process.
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21. Deploy your additional Nutanix CE nodes by cloning from the template you created. No need to run
through the above steps again.
Here is the ce.vmdk descriptor le that I used:
# Disk DescriptorFile
version=4
encoding=UTF-8
CID=4470c879
parentCID=
isNativeSnapshot=no
createType=vmfs
# Extent description
RW 14540800 VMFS ce-2015.06.08-beta-at.vmdk
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.adapterType = lsilogic
ddb.geometry.cylinders = 905
ddb.geometry.heads = 255
ddb.geometry.sectors = 63
ddb.longContentID = ac2a7619c0a01d87476fe8124470c879
ddb.uuid = 60 00 C2 9b 69 2f c9 76-74 c4 07 9e 10 87 3b f9
ddb.virtualHWVersion = 10
Now you have deployed your Nutanix CE VMs (assuming more than one) you can create a Nutanix cluster.
This is done simply by logging into the Nutanix CVM on one of the VMs using either the DHCP IP address
or the static IP address you used. Use the username nutanix and password nutanix/4u. Run cluster -s
<cvmip>,<cvmip>,<cvmip> create and it will create your cluster. Add DNS Servers to the cluster using ncli
cluster add-to-name-servers servers=<dns server>,<dns server>.
Youre done. Log into the CVM IP address of any of the nodes on HTTPS port 9440 and you can update the
PRISM Admin User Password and begin to create VMs.
After creating a cluster to ensure everything is working successfully I recommend running a diagnostics
test. To do this log out of the CVM and back into the CVM again using the Nutanix user. Issue the following
command:
diagnostics/diagnostics.py display_latency_stats run_iperf run; diagnostics/diagnostics.py cleanup
The output will include network performance, latency stats and IO stats for random and sequential reads
and writes. Your performance will be completely dependent on the hardware you deploy on, and as this is
not meant for performance, but functional testing, expect it to be lower than you would get from a real
production / enterprise class Nutanix system.
Once everything is complete you should have something similar to the following to use and learn from:
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07/11/16, 2:40 PM
Final Word
TIP: If you want better network performance and less dropped packets in your nested environment you
should install the VMware Fling Mac Learning Filter Driver as described in this article and further explained
by William Lam in this article.
Nutanix Community Edition is a great tool to use to try out Nutanix software and become familiar with the
interface and the power and simplicity of Nutanix solutions. Its free, supported by the community, and
runs on a wide range of hardware or nested on ESXi as Ive shown here. Its suitable for home labs, demos,
API integration testing, and training environments. It is a bit easier to get running if youre using bare
metal, as you can just dump the image on a USB stick and boot into the installer and be up and running a
bit quicker, but running nested gives you a lot more exibility and the ability to over provision hardware
for dev/test/training/demo environments.Its meant for experimentation. So register to get Nutanix
Community Edition today and try it out.
This post rst appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog atlongwhiteclouds.com.ByMichael
Webster +.Copyright 2012 2015 IT Solutions 2000 Ltd andMichael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not
to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
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POSTED IN NUTANIX, VMWARE | TAGGED CE, COMMUNITY EDITION, NUTANIX, VMWARE, VSPHERE ESXI 6.0
5 of 8
07/11/16, 2:40 PM
About the Author

Michael Webster
Michael is Manager of Business Critical Applications Engineering at Nutanix. He has been using
VMware products since 1998 and has been deploying ESX solutions since 2002. He specializes in
designing virtualization solutions for Unix to Linux migrations, business critical applications,
disaster avoidance, and mergers and acquisitions. Michael has been in the IT industry since 1995
and consulting since 2001. Michael is Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) #007. In addition to VCDX he
holds VCP, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DCD, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-CID, VCAP-CIA, ITIL Foundation, MCP I, and
MCSE (NT4 2K3).
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Comments (7)
Chris Ruotolo July 12, 2015 at 5:24 am | Permalink
Michael, Thanks for the excellent guide, worked like a charm!
Rate This
Reply
ithop July 12, 2015 at 6:40 am | Permalink
Nice article
I deployed the latest CE of Nutanix, but when I try to create the cluster, I have this error
cluster: command not found
Can you please help ?
thanks.
Rate This
Reply
vcdxnz001 July 13, 2015 at 12:18 am | Permalink
The best place to get help is the Nutanix .Next Community Forums for Community Edition. Just
click the Community Edition button on the home page. Make sure you've followed the
documentation, as usually a problem like that is caused by something very simple.
6 of 8
07/11/16, 2:40 PM
Rate ThisReply
Nutanix Community Edition Deployment Options | Invisible Infrastructure July 15, 2015 at 7:01 pm | Permalink
[] 6.0:http://chenalbert.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/how-to-install-nutanix-ce-intoesxi-6.htmlandhttp://longwhiteclouds.com/2015/07/11/nutanix-community-edition-4-node-cluster-nestedon-esxi-6-0/ Whitebox example : []
Rate This
Rapid Provisioning of SQL Server Test Environments with Nutanix | Long White Virtual Clouds August 7, 2015 at 11:10
pm | Permalink
[] as successful as other hypervisors. Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor changes all that, itis so easy my 8yr old Son can
use it and create his own VMs. Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor isavailable in both the []
Rate This
NPX Link-O-Rama | vcdx133.com October 29, 2015 at 5:05 pm | Permalink
[] #Nutanix Community Edition 4 Node Cluster Nested on ESXi 6.0 by Michael Webster NEW! []
Rate This
br December 11, 2015 at 6:57 am | Permalink
Would it work on ESXi 5.5?
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Reply
vcdxnz001 December 11, 2015 at 7:37 am | Permalink
Yes it would. ESXi 5.5 is ne.
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Reply
benjamin rualthanzauva December 12, 2015 at 3:01 am | Permalink
What is the root password yo used to login before installation?
Rate This
benjamin rualthanzauva December 12, 2015 at 3:15 am | Permalink
I found it here including the work around for

INFO: A set of disks matched the minimum requirements was not found.
https://kallesplayground.wordpress.com/2015/06/13/running-nutanix-communityedition-nested-on-vmware-workstation/
Rate This
Nutanix Community Edition on ESXi | rtfmp December 24, 2015 at 9:23 pm | Permalink
[] to deploy it. The good new is, it can be deployed as a nested virtualization. Following this blog post, I was able to
deploy one myself on ESXi []
Rate This
Nutanix CE Cluster on MAC Mini - xenappblog April 9, 2016 at 4:45 am | Permalink
7 of 8
07/11/16, 2:40 PM
[] CE Cluster in my lab let me learn and experience more real world stu compared to running a nested Nutanix CE
[]
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