A few tips for preparing for the Nutanix Certified Expert — Multicloud Infrastructure exam

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.

Continue reading “A few tips for preparing for the Nutanix Certified Expert — Multicloud Infrastructure exam”

Loading

What’s new at Nutanix University?

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.

It contains two free online courses:
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration (NC2A-AWS) – Configuring and administrating NC2 in the AWS environment;
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure Administration (NC2A-Azure) – Configuring and administrating NC2 in the Microsoft Azure environment.

And two exams:
Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration – AWS (NCP-CI-AWS) 6.7;
Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration – Azure (NCP-CI-Azure) 6.7.

Both exams are exiting the beta stage and will be available from April 30.

And the good news! Until April 19, two 100% discounts are available:

NCP-CI-AWS 6.7 exam discount code: NXFRCIAWS67;
NCP-CI-Azure 6.7 exam discount code: NXFRCIAZ67.

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.

Loading

Quick fix: Nutanix. Restore admin password

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.

Loading

Quick fix: VMware. Some of the disks of the virtual machine failed to load.

I have faced an issue with one of the VMs running on VMware ESXi, 7.0.3, 20328353.

Symptoms:

1. VM is running. There are no reports from users;

2. vMotion fails with an error:

The object or item referred to could not be found.

3. After vMotion in hostd.log we can find the following:

Failed to find file size for /vmfs/volumes/.../VM_NAME.nvram: No such file or directory

4. In the vCenter UI under VM a message is displaying:

Some of the disks of the virtual machine VM_NAME failed to load. The information present for them in the virtual machine configuration may be incomple

5. No issues with the storage layer. All VM’s files are located on the datastore;

6. Other VMs on the host and datastore works fine;

7. Recommendations like “Rescan Datastore” don’t work.

Solution.

Before you begin, make sure that you have a backup.

The solution for me was simple, but it required downtime:

  1. Power off the VM;
  2. After that, the VM will be in an inaccessible state;
  3. Remove VM from the vCenter inventory;
  4. Locate VM’s files on the datastore and find vmx file;
  5. Register VM;
  6. Power on the VM.

After that VM should be up and running without issues.

Loading

Veeam Backup & Replication Instant Recovery to Nutanix AHV

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.

Continue reading “Veeam Backup & Replication Instant Recovery to Nutanix AHV”

Loading

VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 2b is out

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.

You can read about other release notes here.

Loading