Nutanix

Nutanix delivers a hyperconverged infrastructure solution purpose-built for virtualization and cloud environments. This solution brings the performance and economic benefits of web-scale architecture to the enterprise through the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, which is composed of two product families – Nutanix Acropolis and Nutanix Prism.

Attributes of this solution include:

  • Storage and compute resources hyperconverged on x86 servers.
  • System intelligence located in software.
  • Data, metadata, and operations fully distributed across entire cluster of x86 servers.
  • Self-healing to tolerate and adjust to component failures.
  • API-based automation and rich analytics.
  • Simplified one-click upgrade.
  • Native file services for hosting user profiles. 
  • Native backup and disaster recovery solutions

Nutanix Acropolis provides data services and can be broken down into three foundational components: the Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF), the App Mobility Fabric (AMF), and AHV. Prism furnishes one-click infrastructure management for virtual environments running on Acropolis. Acropolis is hypervisor agnostic, supporting three third-party hypervisor – ESXi, Hyper-V, and XenServer—in addition to the native Nutanix hypervisor, AHV

Acropolis Hypervisor

Nutanix ships with AHV, a built-in enterprise-ready hypervisor based on a hardened version of proven open source technology. AHV is managed with the Prism interface, a robust REST API, and an interactive command-line interface called aCLI (Acropolis CLI). These tools combine to eliminate the management complexity typically associated with open source environments and allow out-of-the-box virtualization on Nutanix—all without the licensing fees associated with other hypervisors.

In addition to AHV, Nutanix Acropolis fully supports Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere. These options give administrators the flexibility to choose a hypervisor that aligns with the existing skillset and hypervisor-specific toolset within their organization. Unlike AHV, however, these hypervisors may require additional licensing and, by extension, incur additional costs.

 

Nutanix Acropolis Architecture

Acropolis does not rely on traditional SAN or NAS storage or expensive storage network interconnects. It combines highly dense storage and server compute (CPU and RAM) into a single platform building block. Each building block is based on industry-standard Intel processor technology and delivers a unified, scale-out, shared-nothing architecture with no single points of failure.

The Nutanix solution has no LUNs to manage, no RAID groups to configure, and no complicated storage multipathing to set up. All storage management is VM-centric, and the DSF optimizes I/ O at the VM virtual disk level. There is one shared pool of storage composed of either all-flash or a combination of flash-based SSDs for high performance and HDDs for affordable capacity. The file system automatically tiers data across different types of storage devices using intelligent data placement algorithms. These algorithms make sure that the most frequently used data is available in memory or in flash for optimal performance. Organizations can also choose flashonly storage for the fastest possible storage performance. The following figure illustrates the data I/O path for a write in a hybrid model (mix of SSD and HDD disks)

Nutanix

The figure below shows an overview of the Nutanix architecture, including the hypervisor of your choice (AHV, ESXi, Hyper-V, or XenServer), user VMs, the Nutanix storage CVM, and its local disk devices. Each CVM connects directly to the local storage controller and its associated disks. Using local storage controllers on each host localizes access to data through the DSF, thereby reducing storage I/O latency. Moreover, having a local storage controller on each node ensures that storage performance as well as storage capacity increase linearly with node addition. The DSF replicates writes synchronously to at least one other Nutanix node in the system, distributing data throughout the cluster for resiliency and availability. Replication factor 2 creates two identical data copies in the cluster, and replication factor 3 creates three identical data copies.

Local storage for each Nutanix node in the architecture appears to the hypervisor as one large pool of shared storage. This allows the DSF to support all key virtualization features. Data localization maintains performance and quality of service (QoS) on each host, minimizing the effect noisy VMs have on their neighbors’ performance. This functionality allows for large, mixed workload clusters that are more efficient and more resilient to failure than traditional architectures with standalone, shared, and dual-controller storage arrays. When VMs move from one hypervisor to another, such as during live migration or a high availability (HA) event, the now local CVM serves a newly migrated VM’s data. While all write I/ O occurs locally, when the local CVM reads old data stored on the now remote CVM, the local CVM forwards the I/O request to the remote CVM. The DSF detects that I/O is occurring from a different node and migrates the data to the local node in the background, ensuring that all read I/ O is served locally as well.