When Nutanix nodes are delivered, they are factory installed with Nutanix OS (NOS) and KVM. Not every organisation will use KVM as the hypervisor, so Vmware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V has to be installed. Prior to Acropolis 4.5 (formerly known as NOS), the Nutanix Foundation VM is used to image the nodes.
Normally this is a quite robust method to image the Nutanix nodes. However lately, I struggled imaging the nodes… As a last result I decided to change plans. I chose an alternative method to implement these blocks…
The blocks came preinstalled with Nutanix OS 4.1.3. So, the embedded Foundation is not yet available for these nodes. To overcome this, I attached a monitor and a keyboard, so I was able to determine the IPv6 address of one of the nodes…With this address I was able to browse to the cluster_init page of the nodes.
I created a cluster. After cluster creation, I was able to update the NOS version to 4.5.1.2 using the Prism web interface. With this version of Acropolis installed, the embedded foundation can be used for imaging.
So, after the successfull update I destroyed the cluster. Using the Foundation Applet, the upgraded nodes are discovered. Now, the embedded Foundation can be launched on one of the nodes. From now on the normal deployment process could be followed.
From what I understood, only 4.5 nodes will be transported. So maybe, it is not a problem anymore. If you ran into this problem, you can always use these method. It is a little more work intensive, but the result is there.
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