Installing Nutanix Community Edition above Vmware ESXi without SSD

No detailed write up. Just the points.
I wanted to test Nutanix Community edition. I have Dell poweredge M630 blade server with only two HDDs ( 512 GB) in RAID-1 configuration. Nutanix CE requires minimum 2 SSDs. Inorder to emulate this, I installed VMWare ESXi hypervisor. The steps for this is easily available. Now create a VM in this VMWare ESXi hypervisor, which will be our Nutanix AHV host. So it is a hypervisor over hypervisor.

 

Download Nutanix Community edition

Nutanix CE version can be downloaded from https://next.nutanix.com/ forum. Latest ISO image is http://download.nutanix.com/ce/2020.09.16/ce-2020.09.16.iso Create an account. Email id will be verified. This account is also required while loging in to the Prism management UI after installing nutanix cluster. So remember this account details. Upload this downloaded ISO to ESXI datastore.

Creating the VM inside ESXi

CPU	8	Note: Expose hardware virtualization to be ticked
Memory	32GB
Storage	Need 3 harddisks. a) 16GB for AHV hypervisor, b) 200GB for CVM c) 500Gb for User VM data. Since I had less storage, I allocated storage as thinprovisioning
HDD1	16Gb, Use SATA Controller 0
HDD2	200Gb, Create SATA Controller 1 and choose it here
HDD3	500Gb , Use SCSI Controller 0 here
Network	Use the network created in ESXi here. ( Note: Make sure the security policy applied on this network should be "Allow promiscuous mode Yes". This settings wasted my two days to make the setup working )
CDROM	In the CDROM, select the datastore ISO, and select the uploaded CE ISO image.

Nutanix installation

Power on the VM. Follow the Nutanix CE installation docs from the community forum. Be ready with two IP addresses, one for the AHV and one for the CVM. Nutanix will get installed succefully. I selected the Single node cluster option during installation. Default username/passwords are root/nutanix/4u for AHV and nutanix/ nutanix/4u for CVM

Basic configuration

In single node cluster config, the cluster will get automatically created. But it takes some time about ( 5 mins ) to finish after the AHV Ip started pinging.

Proxy setting

Since my servers are behind proxy, the Proxy needs to be configured for internet access. After installation of Nutanix, in the first login to the Nutanix Prism web management portal, it will connect to internet to verify our Next.Nutanix.com account. So I logged in using console to AHV, afrom AHV sshed to CVM. ncli http-proxy add name=Internet address=proxy-server.com port=3128 proxy-types=http,https . After setting the proxy, login to the CVM IP using browser.