Proper Shut Down of Nutanix 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster

Happy 2015!! I’m seriously backed up and delinquent on blog posts so prepare for a deluge of interesting topics soon.

As painful and hopefully unlikely as this scenario may be, better to have a planned and controlled outage vs unplanned with potential data loss, or worse. This post covers the cluster shutdown process for Nutanix with Hyper-V. In case you didn’t know, Nutanix is not dependent on Windows or vSphere for clustering, as it handles its own HA mechanism. This does require, however, that you consider the independent Nutanix cluster services to ensure a graceful shutdown.

In the references at the bottom, you’ll notice that for vSphere clusters, the method described there is to shut down the Nutanix cluster first, then the vSphere cluster. For Hyper-V the procedure is reversed, requiring that the Hyper-V cluster be shut down first, then the Nutanix cluster. If you shut down your Nutanix cluster services first, you won’t be able to connect to your Failover Cluster to properly shut it down.

Shut Down Failover Cluster

1. Gracefully shut down all VMs (Not Nutanix CVMs, yet!!)
2. Open Failover Cluster Manager (cluadmin.msc) and connect to the Failover Cluster
3. Right-click the cluster name, select “more actions” –> “shut down cluster”, select “yes” to confirm
• Alternatively, in PowerShell enter: “Stop-Cluster”

Once the Hyper-V cluster is shut down, you can begin to shut down the Nutanix cluster.

Shut Down Nutanix Cluster

1. SSH or connect to any CVM console, log in
2. Enter “cluster stop” (root not required)
3. Once completed successfully, you will see confirmation that all services have stopped on all CVMs:
4. Shut down each CVM on all hosts:
5. Lastly, shut down each physical Hyper-V node - This can be done of number of ways, onesy twosy, PowerShell, or via the Remote Shutdown UI (shutdown /i) for bulk operation:

Startup is the reverse, ensuring that your Nutanix cluster is up and running properly before starting your failover cluster.

References:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2013/08/23/10443912.aspx

http://port5480.blogspot.com/2014/10/shut-down-nutanix-cluster.html