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Virtualization with Nutanix

SUSE is a Nutanix ecosystem partner and SUSE Manager has obtained the Nutanix-ready certification in the "Nutanix AHV integrated" category.

For more information about Nutanix integrations, see https://www.nutanix.com/partners/technology-alliances/suse

You can use Nutanix AHV virtual machines with SUSE Manager by setting up a virtual host manager (VHM). To begin, you need to set up a VHM on your SUSE Manager Server, and inventory the available VM hosts.

1. VHM Setup

The Virtual Host Manager (VHM) runs on the SUSE Manager Server.

Ensure you have installed the virtual-host-gatherer-Nutanix package on the SUSE Manager Server.

To run a VHM, your SUSE Manager Server must have port 9440 open to access the Nutanix Prism Element API.

Procedure: Creating a Nutanix VHM

  1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Systems  Virtual Host Managers.

  2. Click Create and select Nutanix AHV.

  3. In the Add a Nutanix AHV Virtual Host Manager section, use these parameters:

    • In the Label field, type a custom name for your VHM.

    • In the Hostname field, type the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or host IP address.

    • In the Port field, type the Prism Element API port to use (for example, 9440).

    • In the Username field, type the username associated with the VM host.

    • In the Password field, type the password associated with the VM host user.

  4. Click Create to save your changes and create the VHM.

  5. On the Virtual Host Managers page select the new VHM.

  6. On the Properties page, click Refresh Data to inventory the new VHM.

To see which objects and resources have been inventoried, navigate to Systems  System List  Virtual Systems.

Connecting to the Nutanix Prism API server from a browser using HTTPS can sometimes log an invalid certificate error. If this occurs, refreshing the data from the virtual host manager fails. A valid SSL certificate (not self-signed) is required on your Nutanix API server. If you are using a custom CA authority for your Nutanix SSL certificate, copy the custom CA certificate to /etc/pki/trust/anchors on the SUSE Manager Server.

Re-trust the certificate by running the update-ca-certificates command on the command line, and restart the spacewalk services.

After your VHM has been created and configured, Taskomatic runs data collection automatically. If you want to manually perform data collection, navigate to Systems  Virtual Host Managers, select the appropriate VHM, and click Refresh Data.

SUSE Manager ships with a tool called virtual-host-gatherer that can connect to VHMs using their API, and request information about virtual hosts. virtual-host-gatherer maintains the concept of optional modules, where each module enables a specific VHM. This tool is automatically invoked nightly by Taskomatic. Log files for the virtual-host-gatherer tool are located at /var/log/rhn/gatherer.log.