Every software of hardware system should have an easy and simple way to recover from failures, and Nutanix is not different. For test purposes I removed a host from my lab environment for few days and now I need to recover from the failure.

All I need to do is to go to the Hardware tab and select Diagram. Here I can clearly see my Nutanix block with 4 nodes. I can also clearly identify the failed note, and all I need to do is to select ‘Enable Metadadata Store’.

After selecting ‘Enable Metadadata Store’ the Nutanix cluster will start to ensure that cluster metadata is distributed and consistent across nodes.

NDFS has a native feature called disk balancing which is used to ensure uniform distribution of data throughout the cluster. Disk balancing works on a node’s utilization of its local storage capacity and is integrated with NDFS ILM. Nutanix ILM will determine tier placement dynamically based upon I/O patterns and will move data between tiers and nodes. It’s goal is to keep utilization uniform among nodes once the utilization has breached a certain threshold.

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For more information refer to The Bible – Disk Balancing by Steven Poitras.

This article was first published by Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) at myvirtualcloud.net.