Nutanix Community Edition: Single-Node Cluster

Hi!
I’ve been looking at other virtualization options for a while, and this one caught my interest.

Nutanix developed its own CVM (Controller VM), which runs the services needed for HCI, as well as its own hypervisor, AHV.

They have also made the Community Edition available to the public,

which includes the hypervisor, CVM, and Prism management. It supports up to four disks per node and up to four nodes in a cluster—great for trying out and learning the product.

Now I’ll show, with screenshots and explanations, how to deploy Nutanix CE in my lab. In my case, it is nested on an ESXi 8 host as a single-node cluster.

A single-node cluster is a one-node cluster with the CVM, Prism, and network and storage management capabilities. It’s a cluster with just one member, which is useful for certain applications and, in our case, for an initial introduction.

Let’s go…

Open the following link and follow the simple steps: register with the community, download the ISO from a forum post, and continue with the setup.

Nutanix requires resources. In my case, the machine running the single-node cluster had
4 vCPUs, 32 GB of RAM, and three disks: 64 GB for the system, a 200 GB SSD, and a 400 GB HDD.

Here are the initial specifications: disks, NICs, vCPUs, and so on.

At this step, the installer selects the disks automatically. Leave its selections in place, then enter the IP addresses: one for the host and another for the CVM (Controller VM) on each node, along with the DNS server.

Done! After a while, the installation completes. Eject the ISO, answer yes, and let’s continue.

It takes a while because it needs to start all the services in the CVM and then run the post-installation scripts. I left it alone until these results appeared in the VM console.

Let’s get started. In a browser, enter the CVM IP address we configured earlier, using HTTPS.

It will ask us to change the predefined password, nutanix/4u, to a different one.

Here it asks for our community credentials to license the node or cluster.

Boom! There’s an error: no DNS server is configured on the CVM, so it cannot register. Let’s fix that.

Connect to the node over SSH using the IP address configured at the start. The username is root and the password is nutanix/4u.

From the node, connect to the CVM over SSH. Use the IP addresses configured earlier; the username is admin and the password is nutanix/4u.

Here’s the command to add a DNS server to the CVM network configuration:
ncli cluster add-to-name-servers servers=1.1.1.1

I chose 1.1.1.1 as an external DNS server. If you have an internal DNS server, you can use that instead.

Now it accepts the configuration. Let’s continue.

Here it is: the first screen of our working single-node cluster!

This is a single-node cluster with one host and one block, running the AHV hypervisor.

That’s all for this post. In a future post, we’ll tune the environment and create our first inventory to check that everything is up to date and apply any available updates.

We’ll also try different network and disk configurations.

It’s a great way to try AHV and get an introduction to Nutanix features.

Regards.