Foundation Central Appliance
Boy oh boy – it has been a busy start to the year which is a big reason for the lack of posts. There’s so much to talk about still from the end of 2025 and already into 2026 so let’s get into it.
Hopefully you’ve seen the three (3) part series for FlashStack with Nutanix (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). The amount of interest this solution has driven in the industry has been honestly a bit unreal. It’s going gangbusters and it’s only version 1!
I don’t plan on getting into the details of the document but it is worth noting that as of February 6th, the official FlashStack with Nutanix CVD (Cisco Validated Design) has been released. Check it out here.
Foundation Central Enhancements
In Part 3, I made a small mention of using the Cisco Field Install Guides (FIGs) and nothing else. This statement still very much holds true and needs to be more than just a 'small statement' ... Do not use anything other than the Cisco guides!!! You've been warned! Now that you've heeded the warning, there are details that are specifically worth pointing out.
Foundation Central Appliance
Not everything has been rainbows and unicorns for Cisco. One of the biggest complaints has the requirement to use Foundation Central as the deployment engine. The introduction of requiring FC was new and mostly unknown for customers and partners who had been doing Nutanix deployments for years.
So why did Cisco choose to go down this route? There’s a lot more to this but the short of it is that Foundation Central is the way forward for Nutanix. You may hear otherwise in different pockets or some folks not agree with the above statement but I’m fairly confident that the above statement will age well.
That said, this requirement hasn’t gone away, but Nutanix has introduced an appliance based Foundation Central (Foundation Central Appliance - FCA) which removes the need to deploy the full version of Prism Central. Prism Central on its own cannot run on a laptop and is a fairly big appliance, which made Cisco deployments sometimes challenging for greenfield environments. This has now been fixed with the introduction of the Foundation Central Appliance.
The process is very similar to how it was done with the Foundation VM but now, a deployment engineer will deploy the FCA on their laptop instead allowing them circumvent the need for an existing infrastructure. Once the initial cluster is deployed, the deployment engineer can choose to deploy a permanent Prism Central (or keep using FCA) on that cluster to continue multi-cluster deployments or for permanent management.
Foundation Central Versions
Unfortunately, some potential confusion was introduced with the latest release. Here’s what should be known (and also specifically called out in the field install guides) – use FC (or FCA) 1.10 with Cisco UCS. Any other version of FC will not work. There are plans to merge the two forks of FC (1.10 and 2.0) but at this time if anyone tries to deploy Cisco UCS with 2.0, it will not work. This applies to both HCI and CI (FlashStack with Nutanix) deployments.
Be mindful during upgrades as the version that will be suggested from the interface of an existing deployment will not be version 1.10. Some manual download/upload tasks will be required.
Firmware Selection
Definitely not as important as the Foundation Central Appliance release but definitely a nice quality of life improvement is the ability to select the firmware that will be installed at the time of deployment.
A customer can now not only select the firmware version they’d like to deploy but also make sure that if the deployment needs to finish quickly, they choose the version that was installed from the factory, which for large cluster deployments, can save hours.
Web Server
Another minor quality of life improvement is the inclusion of a webserver in FC/FCA. For now, these are CLI actions, which means there’s still room for improvements, but it does remove the need to deploy a dedicated web server for FC to pull from.
Conclusion
The deployments still need some enhancements but the introduction of version 1.10 has made significant strides to make the process easier and closed some major gaps along the way.