Host multiple Prism Centrals on single Prism Element

This week I attended the .NEXT OnTour event in Copenhagen, Denmark. We had the opportunity to have some EBX sessions with the worldwide CTO of Nutanix, Manosiz Bhattacharyya.

The session focused on us as an MSP and what we would like to see going forward to be able to deliver services on the Nutanix platform. One major setback that I have been discussing for a couple of years is the ability to host multiple Prism Centrals on the same Prism Element.

This feature was available before Nutanix changed their Prism Central architecture to be based on microservices. You could actually deploy multiple PCs on the same PE, but you had to deregister the PE from the PC and deploy the new PC. This was time-consuming since Nutanix added the blacklist feature, and then you had to reregister the PE to the old PC etc. As you can understand, this was hard to do at scale with many manual steps.

There were also some other limitations: you could not enable Nutanix Disaster Recovery and use the Witness functionality in Prism Central if the PE hosting the PE was not registered to the PC where you wanted to enable Nutanix Disaster Recovery feature.

But in the session mentioned above, I had deep discussion with Mano and found out that this feature is now generally available in Prism Central 7.3. And now, the fantastic part about Nutanix—even though they are a global company—Mano set up a Slack chat with their Director Engineer for Prism Central, and 1–2 hours later I got the detailed steps on how to deploy this.

Unfortunately, the official documentation is not yet updated, so I thought I’d write this blog post about the topic in case someone else wants to try this feature out as well :)

First, make sure that you're on AOS version 7.3 or later (this is where this feature is enabled). Log in to your Prism Element instance directly (not through cluster quick access).

Click the button in the Prism Central widget saying “Deploy new Prism Central.”

Give your Prism Central a suitable name and choose your version.

Choose your size and scale.

Configure your VLAN and network settings.

When you hit deploy, you will get a couple of new tasks in the Prism Element’s task list. If all your network requirements are in order, you should have your new Prism Central instance ready in approximately 30–40 minutes, depending on your deployment.

Now you can log in to the new PC, and as you can see, there are no registered PEs to our PC 😄

Also, we can now enable Nutanix Disaster Recovery.

As you might notice, the pre-checks have changed to “Prism Element on which this Prism Central is hosted is registered to this Prism Central or trust exists between the two.”

After you click enable, you will soon see that the feature is enabled.

If we head over to Settings -> Witness Service,

We see that the Witness is available as well.

Thank you for changing this Nutanix! And thank you for being such a flat organization where even the global CTO chimes in and helps a small MSP in Sweden with their issues :)

Until the next time! Cheers!