My HCI Lab with Nutanix Community Edition-Part 4: Deploy Multi Node Cluster

In earlier post of this series, we learnt how to deploy a single node cluster. In this post we will learn how to deploy a multi node cluster using community edition.

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Nutanix Community Edition Introduction

2: Lab Setup

3: Deploy Single Node Cluster

During lab setup, I created a template vm to for faster deployments of CE vm’s. To create a multi-node cluster, we node to deploy at least 3 VM’s and during deployment we need to make sure to not to select “Create single-node cluster”

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Once all 3 VM’s boots up, connect to any one of the CVM and run command: check cluster status and you will see message that cluster is currently unconfigured.

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To create cluster we need to run command: cluster -s <cvm1 IP,CVM2 IP,CVM3 IP> -s create

This command will trigger cluster creation and start the necessary services. Wait for 5 minutes or so for this task to complete.

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Finally when all services are initialized, cluster state will report as success.

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If we run cluster status command now, it will show services from all 3 CVM’s with status as UP. 

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Connect to Prism by typing https://<cvm-ip>:9440.

Note: You can connect to cluster using IP address of any cvm here.

You will be prompted to change password of admin user add your Nutanix Next account for activation.

The main dashboard of Prism looks like below.

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Click on Unnamed to provide name for the cluster and define cluster virtual ip address. You can connect to prism from next time onwards by typing Cluster VIP.

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From health dashboard, make sure Data Resiliency status is OK and there are no critical alerts in the cluster. 

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That’s it for this post. In next post of this series we will learn how to change cluster settings.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing :)

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