Nutanix Kubernetes Engine, or NKE (formerly Karbon), is a solution to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters in a Nutanix infrastructure.
With NKE, we can deploy Kubernetes clusters, upgrade them, add or remove workers, configure RBAC based on Prism Central, and more in a pretty simple way.
The purpose of this article is to provide a walkthrough on how to prepare a Nutanix cluster for use with NKE and how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster.
Nutanix Community Edition 2.0 is compatible with the commercial version of Prism Central (PC), and we can use the 1-click Internet Method to deploy the PC, which significantly simplifies the deployment procedure.
For those who don’t know, Prism Central provides the ability to manage multiple Nutanix clusters from a single pane of glass, as well as additional features for managing, monitoring, reporting, and access control that are not available from the Prism Element interface. Also, Prism Central is required for deploying services like Nutanix Kubernetes Engine, Objects, Flow, and so on.
The purpose of this article is to provide a walkthrough on using 1-Click PC deployment.
Veeam workers are the VMs running in the Nutanix cluster used in large environments to speed up the backup and restore processes.
Veeam Backup and Replication manages those VMs. During backup or restore procedures, VMs are powered on to process the data, and when backup or restore is finished, they are powered off.
We can consider workers as temporary proxies, working only during backup or restore procedures.
In this article, we will look at how to add workers to the backup infrastructure and how it works.
In 2022, I had the opportunity to take the Nutanix Certified Expert — Multicloud Infrastructure (NCX-MCI) certification exam, and in this article, I would like to talk a little about the certification and give some tips for preparation.
Notice: This is a translated version of my original post, written in 2022 after I passed this exam. Since then, a few things have changed, but the overall process is still the same.
As I wrote a few months ago, Nutanix released a new training and certification related to Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) – Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration.
To get Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration 6 status, and badge, you don’t need to take both exams, but just one of them. So, schedule an exam today using a discount code and take an exam after April 30.
It’s not a common situation, but it does happen sometimes, especially in test clusters.
To change the admin password we need to connect to the CVM, for example, using the nutanix user, and reset the password:
$ ncli user reset-password user-name=admin password=MyStrong@Passw0rd
Password of user 'admin' reset successfully
Please login again with new credentials.
The password should be strong and between 8 and 255 characters. It should differ by at least 4 characters from previous password and it should not be from last 5 passwords.
Now you can connect to Prism and use the password you just set.
I have previously written about how to connect VBR to a Nutanix cluster, as well as how to create backup tasks and restore.
In this article, we will talk about a very important VBR functionality – Instant Recovery, support for which was added with the release of Nutanix AOS 6.0 STS and AOS 6.5 LTS.
VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 2b is out and contains a lot of bug fixes. One of the fixes I want to mention is a bug in CBT:
Changed Block Tracking (CBT) might not work as expected on a hot extended virtual disk:
In vSphere 8.0 Update 2, to optimize the open and close process of virtual disks during hot extension, the disk remains open during hot extend operations. Due to this change, incremental backup of virtual disks with CBT enabled might be incomplete, because the CBT in-memory bitmap does not resize, and CBT cannot record the changes to the extended disk block. As a result, when you try to restore a VM from an incremental backup of virtual disks with CBT, the VM might fail to start.
As a workaround, there were two options: not to use hot extend and perform disk extend operations when the VM is powered off, or create periodically full backups to reset the CBT.
So, if you’re running ESXi version 8.0 Update 2, you should consider updating to the 8.0 Update 2b as soon as possible.
With this article, I close the series on the basics of Ceph deployment. Previously, we looked at how to deploy Ceph, and how block and object access is provided.
This article will briefly describe the procedure for providing file access in Ceph using CephFS. This topic is very extensive and a lot may be missed, so please refer to the official documentation for more information.
