How Nutanix Works Ebook
How Nutanix Works Ebook
How Nutanix Works Ebook
Hyperconverged
Infrastructure
Table of Contents
IT at a Crossroads........................................................................................................................5
Time for a Different Approach?.............................................................................6
What is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?..........................................................6
The Nutanix Solution ................................................................................................................7
Nutanix Community Edition and Community Edition On-Demand.... 8
Prism and Acropolis ..............................................................................................................8
How Nutanix Software Is Deployed.............................................................................. 9
Nutanix Leads the Pack..............................................................................................9
Acropolis .......................................................................................................................................11
Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) ................................................................................. 11
Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)............................................................................................. 11
App Mobility Fabric (AMF)................................................................................................ 11
Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF)....................................................................... 12
Infrastructure Resilience.......................................................................................... 13
Tunable Redundancy........................................................................................................... 13
Replication Factor versus RAID........................................................................... 13
Data Path Redundancy....................................................................................................... 13
Nutanix Software Upgrades and Data Path Redundancy.......................14
Integrity Checks.....................................................................................................................14
Availability Domains.............................................................................................................14
Performance Acceleration ..................................................................................................15
Intelligent Tiering................................................................................................................... 15
Data Locality............................................................................................................................ 15
Automatic Disk Balancing................................................................................................. 15
VM Flash Mode.......................................................................................................................16
Shadow Clones....................................................................................................................... 17
Capacity Optimization ..........................................................................................................19
Deduplication..........................................................................................................................19
Compression............................................................................................................................19
Pro Tip: Compression ..............................................................................................20
EC-X.............................................................................................................................................20
1.
IT at a Crossroads
IT is increasingly being asked to spend less time on infrastructure
and allocate more time and budget to application services that
add business value. Despite a continuous stream of IT hardware
and software enhancements, the infrastructure challenges faced by
IT teams continue to rise. The IT infrastructure and virtualization
software required to meet the needs of business is complex and
expensive, and datacenter management has become painful. Far
too much time and effort are focused on just keeping the lights on.
Legacy infrastructurewith separate storage, storage networks, and
serversis not well suited to meet the growing demands of
enterprise applications or the fast pace of modern business. The
silos created by traditional infrastructure have become a barrier to
change and progress, adding complexity to every step from ordering
to deployment to management. New business initiatives require
buy-in from multiple teams, and IT needs have to be predicted
3-to-5 years in advance. As most IT teams know, this is almost
impossible to get right. In addition, vendor lock-in and increasing
licensing costs are stretching budgets to the breaking point.
1.
2.
3.
4.
INHERENT COMPLEXITY
INEFFICIENT SILOS
FORKLIFT SCALING
PAINFUL MANAGEMENT
2.
VIRTUALIZATION
SERVER
CONVERGED
COMPUTER, STORAGE
& VIRTUALIZATION
STORAGE
NETWORK
STORAGE
Prism
Acropolis
Infrastructure
Management
Operational Insights
Planning
3.
Acropolis
Nutanix Acropolis has three major components:
DISTRIBUTED STORAGE FABRIC (DSF)
11
Nutanix Controller VM
Tier 1 Workloads
NODE 1
VM
VM
VM
NODE 2
CVM
VM
VM
VM
NODE N
CVM
VM
VM
VM
HYPERVISOR
HYPERVISOR
HYPERVISOR
X86
X86
X86
CVM
Clones
Compression
Deduplication
Locality
Tiering
DR
Resilience
FIGURE 4: Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric joins HDD and SSD resources from
12
Infrastructure Resilience
The Nutanix platform is fault resistant, with no single points of
failure and no bottlenecks.
TUNABLE REDUNDANCY
13
INTEGRITY CHECKS
AVAILABILITY DOMAINS
14
4.
Performance Acceleration
DSF includes a number of capabilities that enhance performance:
INTELLIGENT TIERING
15
SSD
SSD
SSD
SSD
HDD
HOT
16
SHADOW CLONES
17
18
5.
Capacity Optimization
DSF incorporates a wide range of storage optimization technologies
that work together to make efficient use of the available capacity in
a cluster.
DEDUPLICATION
19
EC-X
20
6.
Data Protection
Nutanix offers natively integrated data protection and continuous
availability at the VM level. A range of options is available to meet
the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective
(RTO) of different applications.
RPO
RTO
Nutanix
Feature
Minutes
Minutes
Time Stream
Hours
Hours
Cloud Connect
Minutes
Minutes
Async
Replication
Zero
Sync
Replication
Zero
MINOR
INCIDENTS
MAJOR
INCIDENTS
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines how much time you have
to recover if an IT failure occurs.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the maximum amount of
data you are willing to lose.
21
22
CLOUD CONNECT
23
7.
Security
Nutanix Acropolis is hardened by default. It utilizes the principle
of least privilege, and delivers a true defense-in-depth model. Its
custom security baseline exceeds the requirements of the U.S.
Department of Defense.
Nutanix combines features such as two-factor authentication and
data-at-rest encryption with a security development lifecycle. This
is integrated into product development to help meet the most
stringent security requirements. Nutanix systems are certified
across a broad set of evaluation programs to ensure compliance
with the strictest standards.
DATA-AT-REST ENCRYPTION
25
26
8.
27
28
MICROSOFT
HYPER-V**
AHV
64
64
Unlimited
128
64
160
4TB
1TB
2TB
1,024
1,024
Only limited
by RAM
8,000 (2,048
per datastore
w/ HA)
8,000
Only limited
by RAM
Offloads
VAAI support
ODX support
Full integration
Monitoring and
Mgmt
Monitoring
Monitoring
Entire lifecycle
**Hyper-V 2012 R2
29
Simplicity
Scalability
Security
VM-centric policies
VM management scales
Custom STIG
Complements pay-as-you-
High automation
grow economics
30
31
32
9.
Datacenter Management
with Nutanix Prism
Nutanix Prism provides an easy way to manage Nutanix
environments end to end. Prism combines multiple aspects of
datacenter management into a single consumer-grade product that
lets IT admins manage infrastructure and virtualization, gain access
to operational insights, and fix problems all with a few clicks.
Just as Acropolis creates a data plane that spans the entire cluster,
Prism creates a cluster-wide management plane. High Availability is
built right into the product removing the need to have to manage
the management solution.
33
Management
Prism
REST API
HTML 5 UI
Policy
Analytics
Virtualization Management
CLI
Acropolis
Services
VMs
Distributed Storage
Fabric (DSF)
Hypervisor(s)
Volumes
Containers
Managed
Objects
App Mobility
Fabric (AMF)
Cloud
34
35
36
Central Management
Prism Central
Prism
Element
Prism
Element
Prism
Element
Cluster
Cluster
Cluster
Local Management
37
38
39