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Using SSH key-based authentication and Lockdown mode in Nutanix clusters

Last year, a new check added to the NCC module may require your attention:

“Password-based remote login is enabled on the cluster. It is recommended to use key-based SSH access instead of password-based SSH access for better security.”

Although this check has a severity level of “Info”, if you dig a little bit deeper, you can find, that password-based authentication will be a deprecated authentication method since 2024. And we can only guess when key-based authentication will be not a recommendation, but a requirement.

In this article, we will look at Cluster Lockdown Mode and how to enable key-based access to the cluster.

Protecting vCenter Server using vCenter HA functionality

In some cases, when we need a highly available vCenter Server, we can use vCenter HA functionality. In short – it’s a second copy of your vCenter VM (and a witness node), with configured replication between active vCenter node and passive vCenter node.

If something happens to the active node, the standby node will take over the entire process and it will reduce the overall downtime of the vCenter Server.

Let’s look at how to enable vCenter HA, and what we need to do.

Backing up and restoring VMware vCenter Server. Part 2 – Veeam Backup and Replication

In the previous article, we talked about how to restore vCenter using native backup. In this part, we will talk about how to restore VMware vCenter Server using Veeam Backup and Replication.

Although restoring a VM using Veeam is a simple task, but when we are talking about vCenter Server a few moments should be considered.

Let’s get started.

Quick Tip: How to change the MAC address on a vSphere VM by editing the VMX file

Someone may know that a vSphere 8.0 Update 2 bug prevents you from setting a static MAC address for a VM (KB 95189).

The symptom is simple – you change the MAC address in the VM’s network interface settings, but after you click OK, nothing changes.

As a workaround, there is a solution – do the same using vSphere Host Client (ESXi Web interface). But in my case, this workaround doesn’t help, I’ve received an error:

Failed to reconfigure virtual machine pleasechangemymac. Invalid configuration for device '4'.

If you are in this situation and you need to change a VM MAC address, one good old hack still works – edit the VM’s VMX file.

Next – how to change the MAC address.

Backing up and restoring VMware vCenter Server. Part 1 – Native backup

vCenter server is a critical part of the VMware infrastructure stack, and most components and 3rd-party solutions depend on it. Although downtime of vCenter may not cause a problem with overall infrastructure and will not cause a VMs downtime, it will affect the provision of new resources, management, backups, and so on. So, keeping your vCenter up and running is a priority task in most cases.

In the few articles, we will look at how to backup and restore the vCenter server, if something goes wrong. There are a few strategies for protecting the vCenter server, but all of them depend on the required availability of the service. It can be backup, replication, vCenter HA functionality, or even deploying a new vCenter and connecting hosts manually.

We will look at two options – backup and restore vCenter using the native backup function and backup and restore vCenter using 3rd party backup software.

In this article, we will take a closer look at how to backup vCSA using native backup, available in VAMI.

How to backup Nutanix AHV using Veeam Backup and Replication 12.1 and Veeam Plug-In for Nutanix AHV v5

In this article, we will look at backing up Nutanix AHV virtual machines using VBR 12.1 and Nutanix AHV Plug-In v5.

The main difference between the v4 plugin and v5 is the possibility of creating backup jobs related to Nutanix AHV VMs right in the VBR console. You don’t need to connect to the backup appliance deployed in a Nutanix cluster to create a backup job.

Also, please make sure, that you’re using version 5.1 of the plugin or higher because of the critical bug found in v5.0.

What’s new at Nutanix University?

Nutanix has updated the Nutanix End User Computing Administration (NEUCA) course, which focuses on managing virtual desktop infrastructure, to version 6.5.

Following the course, according to tradition, the Nutanix Certified Professional – End User Computing (NCP-EUC) v6.5 exam has been updated.

The exam is currently available to take free of charge. You must register by December 28, 2023. When registering for the exam, you must use the code NXFREUC65.

How to create a bond interface and VLAN using nmcli

In this short article, we will look at how to create a bond interface and VLAN on top of it using nmcli.

Updating the VMware vCenter server from version 8.0 U1 to 8.0 U2 using the Reduced Downtime Upgrade procedure

With the announcement of vSphere 8.0 Update 2 a new interesting feature called vCenter Reduced Downtime Update (RDU) was introduced.

This feature can reduce overall vCenter Server downtime during updates and upgrades.

In a nutshell, RDU is a vLCM feature that creates a new already updated vCenter Server virtual machine and copies all data from running vCenter to the new copy. After data is copied, all we need to do is to switch over to the updated copy of vCenter. Switchover takes less time than the full upgrade procedure and minimizes the downtime of vCenter.

In this article, we will look at how to update the vCenter server from version 8.0 Update 1 to version 8.0 Update 2 using RDU.

Deploying Nutanix Community Edition 2.0 on VMware vSphere 8

This year Nutanix Community Edition 2.0 (CE 2.0) was released, based on Nutanix AOS 6.5 – the most actual LTS version at the time of writing.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how to deploy a three-node Nutanix CE 2.0 cluster on a VMware vSphere 8 infrastructure.