Continuing my journey with trying out varying Hypervisors, I thought Nutanix would be a great next stop after Proxmox.

Nutanix Community Edition is the free edition of the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform and was first released in 2015. Although it is not meant for production use, it is a great way to get a feel for the Nutanix platform.

My overall install process was straightforward, with the only problems I experienced being of the normal homelab self-created variety. This post walking through the CE requirements and deployment process is very helpful. Unfortunately, my issues were caused by hopping right into trying to deploy without looking at the requirements as one might do in a homelab.

System Requirements

There are several other requirements listed in the post I mentioned, but the ones I wanted to focus on are these:

CPU

Processor Type: Intel CPUs (Sandy Bridge or newer with VT-x and AVX) and AMD CPUs (Zen or newer).Core Requirement: Minimum of four cores, with two dedicated to the Controller VM (CVM).Intel E-core: Disable Intel Efficient cores (E-cores) in BIOS, as CE doesn’t support them.

System Memory

Minimum: 32 GB of system memory.Recommended: 64 GB or more for AOS features like deduplication, compression, or multiple user VMs.

Storage

Boot Device: At least 32 GB capacity, using a high-reliability device (internal or external, like SATA DOM, M.2 SSD, or SATA SSD/HDD).Cold Tier: Minimum of 500 GB, up to 18 TB (typically 3 x 6 TB HDDs), using HDD or SSD.Hot Tier (Flash): At least one non-NVMe SSD of 200 GB or larger.

I have a recent Intel NUC with 64GB of memory, so the CPU and Memory requirements weren’t an issue. Storage was my problem as I only had one NVMe disk installed. Once I booted up and realized I needed to select three different drives for different purposes it turned into a bit of a mess which took me a bit to get sorted.

I ended up with a 250 GB SSD I had lying around which I installed into the NUC, and I used a 64GB thumb drive for the boot device. With these, I was able to get the installation going.

Installation

To download and use Nutanix CE, I first needed to create an account. Here is the link. Shortly after signing up, I received an email with the direct link where I was able to download the iso for deployment.

After using Rufus to create a bootable thumb drive, I was able to start deploying to my NUC.

Deployment

Once Nutanix CE boots up I was presented with the installer.

I went through each disk and selected its role by using the “h”, “c”, or “d” keys. These are for the Hypervisor, CVM, and Data disks respectively.

Unlike VMware where a vCenter is needed to unlock most of the functionality, each node for Nutanix comes with its own “vCenter” in the form of the Cluster VM(CVM) which is always deployed. With this in mind, we see why this screen also requests separate IPs for the Host and the CVM.

Another note about the IPs is Nutanix will configure an internal IP for the CVM on 192.168.5.2. Although I am not sure of the impact if your home network is also on 192.168.5.0/24, I imagine that may cause some issues.

After finalizing the disks and IPs, the next page is the EULA.

The one thing to be aware of is you need to scroll down to the bottom of the EULA, either with the down arrow or Page Down. It will let you proceed to the next screen without doing so, however, that next screens tells you to go back and read the EULA.

I was honestly a bit surprised but this was all this was needed for the installer.

One other issue I had which is probably best mentioned here is I had the installer succeed here a couple times, but then started failing on some of the following configurations. The cause was I didn’t have the networking plugged in during the installation process. Even though I plugged it in shortly after, it seemed networking was required during the installation or something with the CVM broke. Sure, this seems obvious, but is more due to my homelab being a bit disjointed than not wanting to have it plugged in during the installation.

Configuration

After the reboot, we need to let the first boot processes complete. It is mentioned in the post this can take up to 20 minutes.

First, we log into the Hypervisor IP as root via ssh.

The default password is “nutanix/4u”.

Second, we log into the CVM from the Hypervisor as nutanix via SSH. The IP used here is not the one we previously configured, but the internal IP for the CVM. This is 192.168.5.2. The password is the same.

We run our command to create the cluster. This will be a single node so our command is:

cluster -s cvm_ip --redundancy_factor=1 create

There are other options if you are creating a multinode cluster. The documentation for this command and the following commands is here.

As the cluster starts creating, we see regular updates as various services are starting.

Finally, we see the cluster is up.

Next, we need to name the cluster.

ncli cluster edit-params new-name=cluster_name

Configure DNS.

ncli cluster add-to-name-servers servers=public_name_server_ip_address

And create the VIP. This would be more prominently used multinode cluster.

ncli cluster set-external-ip-address external-ip-address=cluster_ip_address

Once done, you can hit either the CVM IP or the VIP in a browser. Make sure it is HTTP though.

Password is again “nutanix/4u”. Then there is a prompt to update it.

Followed by a prompt to log in with the account you created on the Nutanix site.

Now we are all done and get into the dashboard.

For me, the first stop is to find Dark Mode.

Much better.

Hopefully, this has been helpful. Soon, I will have additional posts exploring the UI and creating VMs among other things.

Thanks!