Howto: Bitdefender GravityZone on Nutanix AHV

This is a quick reference for running the Bitdefender GravityZone Enterprise control center virtual appliance on Nutanix AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor).

The Bitdefender GravityZone appliance can run on several different hypervisors, different formats are available for download. Depending on the type of hypervisor you download the correct format.

Download the gravityzone appliance virtual disk:

We will be using the .raw format with Nutanix AHV.

Before we can use this image we have to extract the GravityZoneEnterprise.raw from the archive.

On Windows 7zip will do the trick.

Using the “Image Configuration” option in the Prism user interface we can import the .raw file as a virtual disk:

In figure below you can see the selected .raw file that is used to create an image of type “disk”. Give it a name and a description and you’ve uploaded your image.

Next step is to create a virtual machine and attach the just uploaded image as a disk.

Create a new virtual machine according to the specifications.

In this case 4 vCPU, 6 GB RAM without CDROM and adding a disk from the image library (the one just uploaded).

Notice in the screenshot above the BUS Type chosen is SCSI, unfortnunately this is not what is expected. After powering up the newly created virtual machine we see the result in the screenshot below…

As you can see in the screenshot above the virtual machine cannot boot from the harddisk (which is PCI).

Turning off the VM and changing the BUS TYPE to PCI doesn’t solve this…

Remove the old disk and add the disk again with the correct BUS TYPE does solve it however.

After booting up you will see the VM prompting for a new Unix password, this is the password you will need to login with when configuring the appliance.

In the menu shown after the login on the console of the appliance you will have the option to change the ip-settings if you wish. You’ll also have the option do an Automatic install, this is the easiest way of setting up the appliance with all roles needed to get going.

During the first time logging into the appliance you will be asked to add a license and a register this using a MyBitdefender Account, if you haven’t already created one you can do so right away.

Now you’re good to go!

At this moment the only two hypervisors that integrate with the inventory of GravityZone (allowing hypervisor invertory browsing and security server deployment) are XenServer and VMware vSphere. Hyper-V and AHV are supported but not integrated in the same way as with XenServer and vSphere unfortunately.

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