Installing Nutanix CE 2.0 into the Intel NUC

In this blog post, I will share on how to install Nutanix CE 2.0 into the Intel NUC. We are going to build a 3 node Nutanix cluster and we will need to install Nutanix CE 2.0 manually into each and every node. We will need the following

1. Intel NUC
2. Nutanix Installer
3. Network Cable

We will need to configure the following IP addresses

Node	Host IP	CVM IP	Subnet Mask	Gateway
Node 1	192.168.10.1	192.168.10.11	255.255.255.0	192.168.10.254
Node 2	192.168.10.2	192.168.10.12	255.255.255.0	192.168.10.254
Node 3	192.168.10.3	192.168.10.13	255.255.255.0	192.168.10.254

Step 1: Connect Intel NUC’s ethernet port into “Port 1” of the TP-Link ethernet switch.

Step 2: Connect the “Nutanix Installer” USB thumb drive into the front port of the Intel NUC and power on the NUC

Step 3: Press “F10” and boot into the USB thumb drive

Step 4: Wait for the thumb drive to boot and you will see an error screen stating some “list index out of range” and you will see a bash input screen that shows “[root@phoenix ~]#”. This is because Intel NUC’s network interface card (NIC) driver is not found in Nutanix CE binary.

Step 5: Let’s load the custom NIC driver by running the following commands. In this lab, the Nutanix USB installer is mounted as /dev/sdc1. So we will run the following command to mount the Nutanix USB installer to a default mount point

mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt

Step 6: Remove the old NIC driver

rmmod igc

Step 7: Load the patched NIC driver

insmod /mnt/igc-patched.ko

Step 8: Unmount the Nutanix USB Installer

umount /mnt

Step 9: Re-run the Nutanix Installer

./ce_installer && screen -r

Step 10: The network driver will load and you will see the following screen

Step 11: The installer will take several minutes to load and you will see the following screen

Step 12: Once the installer is fully loaded, you should see the screen below

Step 13: We will choose the hypervisor as AHV and assign the following hard drive accordingly

• Hypervisor Boot —> 64GB USB
• CVM Boot —> 1TB SSD
• Data —> 1TB NVME

Step 14: Let’s enter the IP address for the 1st Nutanix node as stipulated in the “Nutanix IP Address List” table above, ensure the “Create single-node cluster” option is not selected and click “Next Page”.

Step 15: Scroll down the EULA before selecting “I accept the end user license agreement”. After that, tab to “Start”

Step 16: The installation will take a while and you should see the following screen when it’s installed successfully. Remember to plug out the thumb drive before keying “Y” and hitting the “Enter” key.

Step 17: Repeat all the above 16 steps for the other 2 Intel NUC except for Step 1, where

• Node 2 should plug into Port 2 of the TP-Link switch
• Node 3 should plug into Port 3 of the TP-Link switch

With all the 3 nodes installed, we are ready to proceed to the next blog post where I will share on cluster creation procedures.