I recently had access to four Dell VxRail E560F nodes and wanted to see if I could repurpose them for a Nutanix AHV lab environment. This is not intended as a supported production design, but as a practical lab exercise for reusing existing hardware.

First, we need to convert the VxRail node to an ordinary PowerEdge server. Please see this link for more information: Changing a Dell VxRail Identity

First Issue: BIOS Settings

The first challenge appeared during the Nutanix Foundation process. Foundation seemed to have trouble applying some of the required BIOS settings on the server, so I had to help it along manually.

The two main settings I changed manually were:

• Disable Secure Boot
• Change the boot mode from UEFI to BIOS

I would recommend doing these two settings before moving on

Second Issue: (more) BIOS Settings

When I ran Foundation the first time, the imaging job failed while applying (further) BIOS settings. In the logs, the relevant lines looked like this:

INFO Confirming BIOS settings were staged successfully...
INFO Confirmed BIOS settings were staged successfully
INFO Queueing job to apply settings on next boot...
INFO Successfully queued job to apply settings on next boot
ERROR Exception in <ImagingStepInitIPMI
File "/home/nutanix/foundation/lib/foundation-platforms/tartarus_dep/tartarus/command/bmc/dell_idrac9_redfish.py", line 446, in pre_boot_bios_settings
    raise Exception("Unable to locate expected job")

Even though Foundation failed, I noticed that iDRAC had actually created a BIOS settings job scheduled for the next reboot.

I powered the server on again and waited for that BIOS settings job to complete. After that, Foundation was able to boot from the ISO and continue further into the installation process.

Third Issue: No Suitable SVM Boot Disk Found

The next issue appeared when the installation process tried to select a suitable boot disk for the Nutanix CVM/SVM:

To resolve this, I replaced at least one of the disks with a supported Intel SSD. Once that disk was installed, I ran Foundation again.

This time, the installation succeeded, and Foundation was able to deploy both the CVM and AHV on the node.