Upgrading vSphere from Nutanix Prism

May 11, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Nutanix customers love the fact we give them their weekends back by having 1-click upgrades for the Acropolis operating system, BIOS, BMC, Firmware and the Hypervisor. When speaking to some customers still go through a multi-step process to include:

Download Updates in VUM
Create a new baseline
Attach Hosts to baseline and scan hosts to validate
Place DRS to manual and evacuate guests from the host
Issue shutdown command to CVM
Place host into maintenance mode
Proceed with remediation wizard
Complete upgrade
Reboot host
Power on CVM
Validate RF in Prism and move on

Yes, a couple of these steps are added compared to non-Nutanix environments, however there are still a number of steps that need to be completed.

With Prism, as long as the cluster is managed with vCenter, we are able to manage the entire process for you, by simply opening the upgrade tab, uploading the offline upgrade package with the json file from the Nutanix support portal and off you go! It’s as simple as that, and here’s another video to show the process.

Filed Under: Enterprise Cloud, Nutanix, Nutanix, VMware, vSphere Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Expanding a Nutanix Cluster

May 5, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Number two in the video series……

One of the major appeals of Nutanix is pay as you grow economics. Start small and grow large, no forklift upgrades and having to forecast what your growth will be over the next ‘N’ years. Once you have your initial three node cluster, you can expand out your cluster at any time simply and non disruptively via Prism, you can even mix model types too to run different workloads in the same cluster. 

As you will have seen from the last video (if you haven’t it can be found here), foundation is now CVM based, therefore you can image nodes at the same time you expand out a cluster. Foundation will look at the baseline of the cluster (AOS version ‘X’ and Hypervisor version ‘Y’) and allow you to image a factory configured node to the same settings as your cluster and immediately add the capacity (storage and compute) to that cluster. This is the same regardless of adding a node or a block….

Here’s a video (sped up again) to show the process:

Filed Under: Enterprise Cloud, HCI, Nutanix, Web-Scale Tagged With: ,