Nothingworks: Converting ESXi to Acropolis Hypervisor - Part 2

In the previous post, Converting ESXi to Acropolis Hypervisor - Part 1, I showed you how to destroy your ESXi cluster and get back to square one with the new and improved Foundation 3.0 process, which is now baked into the CVM as of Acropolis Base Software 4.5. This is a nice improvement over the old way of using Foundation. If you're using Nutanix, you likely recall that a Nutanix SE or a partner SE had to come onsite with a laptop and plug into your network (or a local switch with all the Nutanix nodes plugged in) in order to initialize the cluster for the first time.

Moving Foundation into the CVM allows customers to perform this process on their own. This post will highlight the new Foundation 3.0 wizard.

As mentioned in part 1, point your browser to the IPv4 or IPv6 (link local) address of the CVM on port 8000, followed by a /gui. One key thing to note here is that while IPv4 will work, it will NOT allow you to change your CVM IPs. If you need to change CVM IPs, you're going to need to pull the IPv6 address from a CVM (via SSH, ifconfig and look for the inet6 addr of eth0) and go there instead. IPv6 will also require that the device you're browsing from (like your laptop) be plugged into the same L2 broadcast domain as the Nutanix CVMs.

IPv4 example: http://192.168.100.10:8000/gui
IPv6 example: [fe80::5b54:fg:fe8d:435b]:8000/gui
Note the brackets are required before and after the IPv6 address!

Before starting the wizard and blindly clicking next, think about what Redundancy Factor you want in your cluster. Now is the time to decide if you want any containers with RF3. RF3 keeps three copies of data, but does require a minimum of five nodes. You can select which RF factor you want by clicking the 'Change RF' link in the top left corner of Foundation.

I only have a four node cluster, so RF2 is my only choice.

Select all available nodes and click the Next button in the bottom right corner.

Step 2 is all about cluster properties and high level network information for the CVMs, the hypervisor, and the IP Management Interface. These are things like subnet mask, default gateway, DNS, etc. Don't forget to choose your CVM memory size (like I did in the screen shot below). I recommend 24GB minimum, and 32GB or more if you plan to use dedupe.

Click Next

Step 3 let's you define hypervisor host names and IPs, along with IPs for the CVMs and IPMIs. The range fields are nice because they auto-populate the manual input fields with data, resulting in a lot less typing and less chance of errors. If you use contiguous blocks of IPs for each one, you can type the last octet of the first IP into the top field and it will auto-populate the rest. That's slick.

If you've used Nutanix at all you know that your CVM IP and host hypervisor IP need to be in the same subnet. You'll also notice that there is no option for defining a VLAN ID here. I always tell customers using VLAN tagging to set the default VLAN (untagged) for those ports to the VLAN assigned to the respective CVM/hypervisor subnet. That way the traffic can pass through untagged and setup is nice and easy. You can use VLAN tags later for VM traffic.

Click 'Validate Network' to continue.

If all goes well, you should be prompted for images. You're going to need both Acropolis Base Software (previously known, and still sometimes referred to, as NOS) images as well as hypervisor images. However if you're deploying AHV, it's included in the...
Don't make the mistake I did once before and accidentally use an older version of Acropolis. Remember, Foundation wasn't made available in the CVM until 4.5, so if you go to an older version, things are going to get weird.

Yes, it is a little strange that if you're already running Acropolis Base Software 4.5.1.2 that you have to upload 4.5.1.2 binaries, but I think that's because there isn't a copy stored locally on the CVMs. Plus, the CVMs are ESXi VMs, not AHV VMs, so they will need to be deleted and redeployed anyway.

Notice that it detected that I was already running ESXi 6.0.0-3073146. If you click the AHV link (in the middle), you'll notice that the installer ISO has already been "uploaded" since it's part of ABS already. In other words, if you're moving to AHV, you don't need a separate hypervisor ISO for that, just the Acropolis Base Software binary.

Once both Acropolis Base Software and Hypervisor boxes show that the software has been uploaded, click Create Cluster.

This process will take some time. For four nodes you can count on approximately 45-50 minutes. If you're really impatient like me you can use the handy log links to view what's happening. The log link next to the Overall Progress bar will give you general cluster creation info. There are separate log links for each node, which are much more detailed.