Nutanix Basics – Nutanix Foundation – part 4

Nutanix Foundation is evolving very quickly. With every release Nutanix engineering is adding new features or supported platforms.

Few, most important new features in Foundation 3.11.X :

• You can configure network segmentation for a cluster. Network segmentation separates management traffic from backplane traffic for improved security.
• Foundation supports single-node clusters. Single-node clusters are clusters with one node that are capable of running a limited number of user VMs. These clusters are unlike the single-node replication targets, which are mainly for replication and backup purposes. Single-node clusters are fully supported for NX-1175S-G5. Limited user VM use is supported on NX-1155-G5 depending on the compute available and only supports AHV.
• Foundation supports Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016.
  Note: Hyper-V 2016 is not supported on nodes with Ivy Bridge CPUs.
• Foundation supports Hyper-V on NX-1175S-G5 nodes.
• You can use Foundation to image NX-9030-G5, which uses RDMA NICs. During imaging, Foundation configures pass-through between the CVM and the RDMA NICs.

Let’s get started.

Download foundation applet or foundation VM from portal.nutanix.com

NOTE: to see how to use java applet see my Nutanix basics – Nutanix Foundation – part 3

• On first screen you choose server platform

Nutanix Foundation start screen

• From node config page, choose Nutanix nodes and provide IP addresses for IPMI, Hypervisor and CVM and hypervisor hostnames

Node IP configuration page

• On next screen, provide netmask, gateways, DNS , CVM memory and cluster timezone

Global Config Foundation Page

• From Node Imaging choose AOS package version and hypervisor version. If you need to upload never AOS or Hypervisor version, click on Manage and upload binaries onto Foundation

Node imaging

• Last page is where you can create new cluster

Create new Cluster

Once you verified all information, click on Verify and install button to proceed with cluster provisioning and configuration process. Whole process may take from 20 minutes to 60 minutes depending on what hypervisor will be used during deployment.

Watch video to see the process