Fault Tolerance Status shows only FT2 in case of 2N/2D

One of my customers is running a five node Nutanix cluster, which is configured for FT2 (2N/2D). This means, that if the storage containers are configured with RF3, two of the five nodes can fail. Now I stumbled over the “Cluster Resiliency / Fault Tolerance Status” widget on the dashboard, which clearly showed that only a single node failure would be tolerated. This was a bit confusing, because the cluster is configured for FT2, which should allow two node failures (in case of RF3 for the storage containers).

The explanation for this was easy and the answer was right in the next dialog.

There was still a single container configured with RF2!

In my case, it was the NutanixManagementShare, which is system-managed. So you cannot simply change the replication factor for this container in Prism. But you can connect to a CVM, login as “nutanix” and change the RF for the container using the “ncli” command line tool.

ncli -h true
ctr update name=NutanixManagementShare rf=3 force=true

Depending on the amount of data, it may take a while until the “Cluster Resiliency / Fault Tolerance Status” widget on the dashboard shows the correct FT2 status.