First Nutanix Build in the year 2020

The year 2020 started with a small Nutanix Enterprise Cloud deployment consisting out of 3 servers. This post gives some background information on the video showing the rack & stack work combined with the Nutanix Foundation process.

Hardware

• • 3x HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 
    • 2x  Intel XEON Gold 6140 processoren (18-cores) 
    • 768 GB geheugen 
    • 6x 6TB SAS 
    • 2x 2TB SSD 
    • 2x 10GE NIC 

The 3 above-listed servers will become one Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Backend cluster that is to be complemented with a Front-End cluster. That Front-End cluster also consists out 3x HPE Proliant DL380 Gen10 server each with 2x NVIDIA GRID T40 graphics cards for VDI purposes. This Front-End cluster will not be deployed on Nutanix as it will instead utilize the Citrix Virtual Apps platform.

For networking, the Nutanix Backend servers will be connected to 2x HPE FlexFabric 5710 Top Of Rack switches. The ToR’s will redundantly connect all 3 Backend servers’ 10GE and IPMI (Out of Band management) NIC ports.

Nutanix Foundation

The video shows an impression of the work involved with racking & stacking these Backend servers and ToR switches at the datacenter. It continues showing the process of installing the Nutanix servers using the Foundation tool installed on my trusty Mac. As part of that Foundation process, I connect the servers to my “flat” L2 network switch. SFP transceivers are required to connect one 10GE port per server to my switch for successfully completing the Foundation process. SFP transceivers are not always required but only in particular cases such as this one.

VMware ESXi v6.7U2 was chosen as the Hypervisor for the Backend cluster, which is installed on all 3 servers as part of the Foundation process. The last step in the Foundation process is to deploy a Nutanix Controller VM on each server to be run on (in this case) VMware’s ESXi hypervisor.

Post-Configurations

The video does not show the steps that followed this initial Foundation process:

• • Creating the Nutanix cluster using the newly installed Backend servers
  • Post configurations on the Nutanix Backend cluster using Nutanix Prism