Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism Central (PC) Integrations At a Glance
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The need for visibility and insights
IT organizations must ensure they are delivering digital experiences that delight customers. Delivering outstanding digital experiences can boost customer satisfaction and enhance brand reputation, potentially leading to increased sales and revenue. Operational costs can decrease due to fewer support requests, and the insights gained can drive strategic business decisions.
However, complex IT operations and lack of visibility can:
● Obscure the ability to swiftly identify and resolve system issues, leading to prolonged downtimes and poor user experiences
● Result in inconsistent system performance, reduce resource optimization, and hinder informed decision-making
● Lead to security vulnerabilities going unnoticed, risking data breaches and loss of customer trust
Simplified operations with enhanced monitoring, health validation, and inventory visibility are essential to optimize performance and proactively manage distributed infrastructure across data-center and edge environments from a centralized vantage point.
Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism Central integration
Cisco and Nutanix continue to expand the integration between Cisco Intersight® and Nutanix Prism, delivering greater visibility and a more unified Day-1 operating experience for Cisco® Compute with Nutanix environments. Through the Cisco Intersight Device Connector for Nutanix Prism Central (PC), customers gain centralized visibility across Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) clusters, Cisco Unified Edge, and Cisco Compute-Only deployments.
The integration now extends beyond cluster and node monitoring to include richer inventory views, Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) initiation from Intersight, storage-container visibility, deeper VM details, and external-storage relationships.
● Simplify operations: Use a single Cisco Intersight dashboard to monitor Cisco compute infrastructure running Nutanix software across multiple Nutanix Prism Central instances, including HCI, Cisco Compute-Only, and edge deployments
● Enhance visibility: A bi-directional interface provides a unified view of Nutanix clusters, nodes, VMs, storage containers, external-storage relationships, NCC status, alarms, licensing, and key inventory details, including VM disk associations and related storage links when available
● Validate health proactively: Initiate Nutanix Cluster Check directly from Cisco Intersight and receive NCC reports by email, with the option to add additional recipients
● Ease of use and flexibility: A single view to manage Cisco Intersight licenses and Nutanix licenses, automatic upgrade of Cisco Device Connector (DC) through Intersight, and support for Cisco Intersight SaaS, Cisco Intersight Connected Virtual Appliance (CVA), and Private Virtual Appliance (PVA)
● Efficient troubleshooting: Use centralized health, alarm, inventory, VM, node, and storage views to accelerate issue resolution. Future cross-launch capabilities can further streamline navigation between Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism Central or Prism Element
Intersight displays Nutanix cluster details, alarms, node health, storage utilization, licensing, and NCC status
Nutanix Prism Central (PC) can be a managed target connected to the Intersight portal through a Cisco Device Connector (DC). The DC application (Opt-in) must be downloaded from the Prism Central Marketplace and installed in PC. Once the DC is installed, it builds a bidirectional secure communication channel bridging Cisco Intersight with PC. Cisco Intersight uses Prism Central v4 Management APIs to display and monitor different Intersight services for clusters running Nutanix software (as also described in the Benefits section, above).
● All Cisco Hyperconverged, Cisco Compute-Only, and Cisco Unified Edge servers are officially supported**
◦ HCI/HCO M6, M7, and M8 rack servers
◦ HCI/HCO M7 and M8 X-series modular servers
◦ HCO M6 X-series modular servers
◦ Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix XE130c M8 Edge Server
● UMM (UCSM Managed Mode), ISM (Intersight Standalone Mode), and IMM (Intersight Managed Mode) clusters are supported.
Note: UMM is considered as a legacy deployment mode and will not be supported with M8 platforms.
● Nutanix software
◦ Nutanix Prism Central 2024.3 or later
◦ Nutanix AOS 6.8 or later
◦ Nutanix Life Cycle Manager (LCM) 3.1 or later (for device connector upgrades)
◦ Cisco Device Connector (DC) 4.3.0 or later
◦ Support for both- Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) and ESXi hypervisor
● Cisco software
◦ Support for Cisco Intersight SaaS
◦ Support for Cisco Intersight Connected Virtual Appliance (CVA) and Private Virtual Appliance (PVA) (1.1.2-0 or later)
To learn more about supported versions for specific features and prerequisites, see the Intersight documentation.
Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism Central Day-1 integration scale limits
● Standard configuration: Each PC instance can support up to 65 clusters, 260 nodes, 1300 virtual machines, and 5000 alarms.
● Large-scale configuration: Each PC instance can support up to 300 clusters, 1200 nodes, 6000 virtual machines, and 20,000 alarms with a PC resource resize.
● For scale beyond the standard configuration, customers should contact the Nutanix support team for assistance with PC and DC sizing.
For information on Cisco Compute Hyperconverged Infrastructure with Nutanix, visit cisco.com/go/computehyperconverged.
For information on Cisco Intersight, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/intersight.