Contemplating on our move from VMware to other platforms, one of which is Nutanix. Now there is much fuss about nutanix needing a "storage VM" on each host, using 8 CPUs. This is from upper management being at a conference, talking to other managers, not knowing what they're talking about :-)

But I have read about it, but not sure on the specifics. So each node will have such storage VM, using 8 CPUs, is that 8 vCPUs that can be overcommitted? Or 8 cores non-overcommit?

What is going through those VMs, is that meta data (like Hyper-V) or real IO? Are they automatically deployed when I add a new host to the cluster and removed when putting a host in maintenance or removing a host? Do they give much headaches in day-two operations?

If we choose Nutanix, it will be NVMe for storage.

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for opinions from anyone with deep Nutanix AHV Disaster Recovery experience because we recently encountered a very strange behavior that we’re still investigating with Nutanix Support.
Environment
Two Nutanix AHV clusters:

Production site
DR site
DR configured through Prism Central using Protection Policies and Recovery Plans.
Asynchronous replication.
No Witness VM deployed.
According to the design, failover should always be manual.
Network
Each site has two FortiSwitch top-of-rack switches configured in an active-active setup.
The customer upgraded the switches one at a time:
Upgrade started on Switch 1.
Switch 1 rebooted as expected.
Switch 2 remained online (as expected).
However, during the reboot, the production Nutanix cluster unexpectedly lost connectivity because traffic did not continue through Switch 2 as it should have.
So far, this points to a networking issue.
The strange part
Instead of simply having the production cluster become unavailable, the Recovery Plan automatically started on the DR site.
The protected VMs booted automatically on the DR cluster.
No one clicked “Failover.”
There is no Witness VM.
Replication is asynchronous, not synchronous.
Our understanding is that, without a Witness, the Recovery Plan should never execute automatically.
Investigation so far
We already opened a case with Nutanix.
Support has reviewed the logs and verified the Protection Policy and Recovery Plan configuration. According to them, the configuration appears correct, and they also agree that the observed behavior is unexpected. The investigation is still ongoing.
Questions
Has anyone ever experienced an automatic Recovery Plan execution without a Witness?
Is there any known bug in Prism Central or Nutanix DR that could trigger this behavior?
Could a temporary loss of communication between Prism Central and the production cluster somehow cause an unintended failover?
Are there any logs or internal services we should specifically ask Nutanix to inspect?
I’d really appreciate hearing if anyone has seen similar behavior or has ideas on what could explain this.
Thanks!

We are planning a migration from a legacy virtualization platform to Nutanix AHV, using Nutanix VPCs to separate VM networks instead of relying only on traditional VLAN-based segmentation.

The target environment is large-scale, around 1,000 VMs, so we are trying to understand how mature and operationally manageable Nutanix VPCs are in production.

For those already using Nutanix VPCs in production:

- How stable has the feature been in your environment?
- Are most issues diagnosable by the customer, or do they usually require Nutanix Support?
- Are there any design limitations, operational gotchas, or troubleshooting challenges we should be aware of?
- Would you recommend using VPCs broadly for production workloads, or only for selected use cases?

We recently saw an issue where AHV hosts with VPC enabled had host CPU running steadily at 100%. The issue appeared to be with AHV host CPU, not CVM or user VMs. A rolling reboot cleared the condition, but we are still investigating the root cause. This raised some concerns about production readiness and troubleshooting options.

Any real-world experience, lessons learned, or recommended design practices would be appreciated.

Thanks.

I’m looking for some advice on a networking design for AHV.
I have an existing Nutanix environment with multiple AHV clusters that are connected and managed without any issues.
I now need to connect a new AHV cluster from a subsidiary.
The problem is that the management subnet used by my existing Nutanix environment is already in use somewhere else in the subsidiary’s network. Because of this IP overlap, they cannot route traffic to my clusters’ management network.
Is there a supported way to assign a secondary management IP/interface to the CVMs and AHV hosts so that inter-cluster communication can use a different, non-overlapping subnet?

Without this capability, cross-cluster live migration won’t be possible.

Does Nutanix support application-aware snapshots of Active Directory that triggers the NTDS VSS writer as well as support VM Generation ID and whatever else so that upon boot up it does not trigger a USN rollback.

We are moving to Nutanix from VMware and today we use Veeam replication to replicate our Domain Controllers into our DR environment bubble. With Veeam's application aware processing the Domain Controllers boot up nicely without any issues.

I'm trying to determine if this similar process is possible with Nutanix using the built-in replication features and by using the Application-Aware processing option. Would booting up the Domain Controllers on the DR side cause a USN rollback? Have been trying to research but not finding any conclusive answers.

Hello,

Ive used esxi standard in my enterprise for 14 years and am now looking to move hypervisors for obvious reasons. Are any of you using starter, and what kind of pricing are you receiving?

TIA

Migrating VMware NSX to Nutanix Flow

Yours truly has been working on getting this published for a few months now and we've finally crossed enough t's and dotted enough i's, here it is! This covers tips and recommendations for both migrating from NSX Networking to Flow Virtual Networking as well as NSX Distributed Firewall to Flow Network Security! Of course, Nutanix Professional Services is always your easy button to make migrations smooth and easy, but sometimes you wanna roll your own, here's where you can get started.