Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/

I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned and congruent to the organization’s data architecture and business plans.

The announcement of Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant on Integrated Systems (read hyper convergence) has put Nutanix as the leader of the pack as of August 2015. Clearly, many of us get caught up because it is the “greatest feeling in the world”. However, this faux feeling is not reality because there are many factors that made the pack leaders in the Magic Quadrant (MQ).

First of all, the MQ is about market perception. There is no doubt that the pack leaders in the Leaders Quadrant have earned their right to be there. Each company’s revenue, market share, gross margin, company’s profitability have helped put each as leaders in the pack. However, it is also measured by branding, marketing, market perception and acceptance and other intangible factors.

Secondly, VMware EVO: Rail has split the market when EMC has 3 HC solutions in VCE, ScaleIO and EVO: Rail. Cisco wanted to do their own HC piece in Whiptail (between the 2014 MQ and 2015 MQ reports), and closed down Whiptail when their new CEO came on board. NetApp chose EVO: Rail and also has the ever popular FlexPod. That is why you see that in this latest MQ report, NetApp and Cisco are interpreted independently whereas in last year’s report, it was Cisco/NetApp. Market forces changed, and perception changed.

The most glaring gap of the Gartner MQ is, it does not measure how good each technology is against the competitors, and therefore, boxes like Nutanix and Simplivity, and also the motley crew of so-called EVO:Rail partners, are simply betting on how good they pitch to get into the MQ Leaders Quadrant as part of their agenda.

It is not common that a vendor would do a bake-off against a competitor because one might fall flat on his/her face if they lose the bake-off. Recently we witnessed the big shouting match between Nutanix and VMware, each trying to out-boast the other with claims and counter claims of how good their performance was. Here is VMware’s Chuck Hollis’ piece and here is Nutanix’s piece (part 4 anyway). It was hounding the blogosphere with so much *bleep* that it felt like a game of Kabaddi. (Look up the game of Kabaddi).

The dare, double-dare and triple-dare went on for a few weeks between VMware and Nutanix until Storage Review, an online “independent” storage articles and news aggregator, probably got sick of this undignified spat. Storage Review ran the Nutanix’s tests (and blogged about it) and came up with some unexpected results. Nutanix got disillusioned and started to dictate what should be in the performance tests and went through some “innocent” and “hilarious” acts to justify the results. You can read about them here. Page 2 of that article started the “We ask you not to …” comments to Storage Review, which I thought was really funny.

That’s just it. The Hyper Converged vendors spend a lot of the resource and marketing on hypping up performance, and little of everything else. It is true that storage performance is needed for 25-30% of the active data. However, in any organization, we know very well that 70-75% of the data in the entire data lifecycle is non-active, Tier-3 or archived data. Hyper Converged systems and platforms ignore this passive data space. They do not play with inactive data landscape because the $/GB or $/TB is too expensive.

Furthermore, if we look at the entire HC thingy more close, it is just Software-Defined because it is just a wonderful piece of proprietary software running on an ODM (original design manufacturer) x86 platform. EMC VSPEX is rumoured to be running on the Quanta systems and Nutanix on Supermicro. Why do we need to pay a premium price for a piece of whitebox hardware?

We must overcome the hype and read beyond the messages that vendors, partners who tend to oversell their technology. We must look at what is required in our business, in our operations and look at our data requirements. I constantly share that we must look at our data landscape and use the 7 points that I always use to consider a technology – Availability, Performance, Protection, Accessibility, Management, Security and Compliance. Is the HC technology and the solution relevant to your organization’s business?

So, if you want to Hyper Converged, please Hyper Converge responsibly. Your data landscape architecture will thank you for it.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Originally posted at http://vcdx133.com/

If you have just heard about Hyper-Converged infrastructure and Nutanix, read my Tech101 – Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform article.

First point, Nutanix has just announced the name change of their Virtual Computing Platform (VCP) to Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) with the release of Acropolis and their new “Invisible Infrastructure” paradigm during the Miami .Next 2015 conference.

If you are not a Nutanix Customer, Partner or Employee, it is going to be very challenging getting your hands on their technology, KB articles and documentation. They have released the Nutanix Community Edition to get you started, but it will provide limited value for their Enterprise platform.

Nutanix need to update their policies on who can access their binaries, KB articles and documentation. Particularly if they want non-customers to investigate and become familiar with their technology. I have been informed they are trying to fix this. For example:

• If you take the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform Administration 4.1.1 course for NPP, some of the training material links to Nutanix documents that require a valid support contract.
• You must be a Nutanix Partner or Employee to download the Foundation and Phoenix binaries.

The Nutanix documentation (HTML, EPUB or PDF) you want to get your hands on for NOS 4.1:

• Setup Guide (publicly available)
• Advanced Setup Guide
• Field Installation Guide
• Hardware Administration and Reference
• Upgrade Guide
• Web Console Guide (publicly available)
• vSphere Administration Guide (publicly available)
• Acropolis Virtualisation Administration Guide (publicly available – previously “KVM Administration Guide”)
• Hyper-V Administration Guide (publicly available)
• NOS Advanced Administration Guide
• Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) Guide
• Command Reference (publicly available)
• API Reference (HTML only – publicly available)

General observation, Nutanix documentation is very well written with an elegant font and format; very easy to read and understand.

The Nutanix Portal areas (HTML, EPUB or PDF) you want to checkout (if you have access):

• Knowledge Base Articles
• End of Life Bulletins (& Policy)
• Field Advisories
• Security Advisories
• Support (for Support Request creation and management)

General observation, Nutanix support is very prompt and helpful, even for low priority requests.

The Nutanix hardware, software, binaries and licences you will need to start your journey:

• Nutanix XCP block (any model), even as a PoC for a few months
• Foundation (2.1 at time of writing) with the embedded Phoenix images for ESXi, KVM and Hyper-V
• Nutanix Installer Package (2.1.3 at time of writing)
• Prism Central (4.1.3 at time of writing – separate Hyper-V and ESXi versions)
• Professional/Ultimate Edition Licences for your Cluster (for advanced features)
• Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC – 1.4.1 at time of writing)
• Nutanix Community Edition (with whitebox hardware or nested virtual)
• Nutanix supported version of ESXi ISO image from my.vmware.com
• Nutanix supported version of Hyper-V ISO image from microsoft.com
• Nutanix KVM Hypervisor upgrade bundle
• Various Tools and Firmware (eg. SCVMM Clone AddIn, SCOM Management Pack etc.)

What can you do to get started:

• Register for Nutanix Training and get certified (free and paid options)
• Register for the Nutanix Next Community to access Blogs, Activities and Forums
• Register for the Nutanix Community Edition and deploy it in your lab (nested or physical)
• Contact your local Nutanix office and request a PoC for your company
• Work with a Nutanix SE to witness and participate in the deployment process in your PoC
• Become a Nutanix Customer
• Join a Nutanix Partner
• Join Nutanix

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Originally posted at http://vcdx133.com

In my opinion, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is the future of Private and Hybrid Cloud infrastructure. If you are designing a greenfield data center and HCI is not on your list for serious consideration, then it should be.

With that being said, every technology has its Pros and Cons; nobody rides for free. The advantages of HCI are many and outweigh the disadvantages, here is what you need to watch out for:

• People – If your server virtualization, network and storage teams operate in silos and are constantly at war with each other, then HCI is probably not for you at this time. Successful HCI projects are built upon a very close collaboration between these teams. In fact, it makes more sense to merge these three teams into one “Enterprise Infrastructure” team. It is also very important to cross-skill these team members and let them evolve into “Enterprise Architects”, “Enterprise Administrators” and “Enterprise Operators”. However, make sure you keep your Backup/Recovery/Archive responsibilities separate (see RBAC point below).
• Data Center Facilities – A data center full of legacy, 3-tier infrastructure is not the same as one packed with HCI. The resource density ratio is around 4-8 to 1 depending upon your current legacy infrastructure. You need to design for 25+kW racks with a matching cooling system. If you use a traditional, legacy data center (designed for 5-8kW per rack), then you will have problems down the road (hot spots and power exhaustion).
• Switch Fabric – By moving to HCI, you need a scalable LAN fabric that provides non-blocking throughput for East-West traffic. Legacy network switch design (Core – Distribution – Aggregation – Access layers) is not going to cut it for large scale HCI, which is optimised for North-South traffic. You may get away with it initially, however you will need plans to migrate to a non-blocking leaf and spine switched LAN. HCI has made Fiber Channel infrastructure obsolete, but the same principles that drove SAN design now apply to your LAN with the move to IP storage.
• Controller VM – The storage processor of legacy storage arrays has now become a virtual appliance running on the host itself. Make sure your administration/operations staff, Standard Operating Procedures and monitoring systems understand the importance and give it the respect it deserves. The current version of NOS with ESXi still allows vSphere administrators to modify the CVM (Nutanix Acropolis does not allow this for CVMs with Nutanix KVM). For example, an untrained vSphere Administrator powers off all Nutanix Controller VMs and reduces the RAM from 24GB to 8GB to provide additional resources for adding new VMs across the entire cluster.
• Role Based Access Control – When I consider failure scenarios for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, my nightmare risk is not a natural disaster, but the disgruntled rogue administrator, who has all of the keys to the kingdom, taking out every system. With HCI and the “Enterprise Administrator”, this risk is compounded. So it is very important to separate the administration/operations responsibilities for operational data and backup/recovery/archive. This way if either one is wiped out across all data centers, you still have the other to recover from. Apply this concept to physical data center security as well.
• Data Locality and the Working Set – “Data Locality” is the amount of local storage resources (capacity and performance) presented via the Controller VM to the Hypervisor for serving your virtual workloads. The “Working Set” is the active footprint (capacity and performance) of those virtual workloads. As an organization (architects, administrators and operators), you need to make sure that the “Working Set” of your virtual machines have the optimum fit with respect to the “Data Locality” of each node in your HCI solution. Nutanix XCP has many different models, you need to make sure you select the correct fit for your needs.
• Processes and Procedures – In my opinion, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is the future of Private and Hybrid Cloud infrastructure. If you are designing a greenfield data center and HCI is not on your list for serious consideration, then it should be. With that being said, every technology has its Pros and Cons; nobody rides for free. The advantages of HCI are many and outweigh the disadvantages, here is what you need to watch out for:
• People – If your server virtualization, network and storage teams operate in silos and are constantly at war with each other, then HCI is probably not for you at this time. Successful HCI projects are built upon a very close collaboration between these teams. In fact, it makes more sense to merge these three teams into one “Enterprise Infrastructure” team. It is also very important to cross-skill these team members and let them evolve into “Enterprise Architects”, “Enterprise Administrators” and “Enterprise Operators”. However, make sure you keep your Backup/Recovery/Archive responsibilities separate (see RBAC point below).
• Data Center Facilities – A data center full of legacy, 3-tier infrastructure is not the same as one packed with HCI. The resource density ratio is around 4-8 to 1 depending upon your current legacy infrastructure. You need to design for 25+kW racks with a matching cooling system. If you use a traditional, legacy data center (designed for 5-8kW per rack), then you will have problems down the road (hot spots and power exhaustion).
• Switch Fabric – By moving to HCI, you need a scalable LAN fabric that provides non-blocking throughput for East-West traffic. Legacy network switch design (Core – Distribution – Aggregation – Access layers) is not going to cut it for large scale HCI, which is optimized for North-South traffic. You may get away with it initially, however you will need plans to migrate to a non-blocking leaf and spine switched LAN. HCI has made Fiber Channel infrastructure obsolete, but the same principles that drove SAN design now apply to your LAN with the move to IP storage.
• Controller VM – The storage processor of legacy storage arrays has now become a virtual appliance running on the host itself. Make sure your administration/operations staff, Standard Operating Procedures and monitoring systems understand the importance and give it the respect it deserves. The current version of NOS with ESXi still allows vSphere administrators to modify the CVM (Nutanix Acropolis does not allow this for CVMs with Nutanix KVM). For example, an untrained vSphere Administrator powers off all Nutanix Controller VMs and reduces the RAM from 24GB to 8GB to provide additional resources for adding new VMs across the entire cluster.
• Role Based Access Control – When I consider failure scenarios for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, my nightmare risk is not a natural disaster, but the disgruntled rogue administrator, who has all of the keys to the kingdom, taking out every system. With HCI and the “Enterprise Administrator”, this risk is compounded. So it is very important to separate the administration/operations responsibilities for operational data and backup/recovery/archive. This way if either one is wiped out across all data centers, you still have the other to recover from. Apply this concept to physical data center security as well.
• Data Locality and the Working Set – “Data Locality” is the amount of local storage resources (capacity and performance) presented via the Controller VM to the Hypervisor for serving your virtual workloads. The “Working Set” is the active footprint (capacity and performance) of those virtual workloads. As an organization (architects, administrators and operators), you need to make sure that the “Working Set” of your virtual machines have the optimum fit with respect to the “Data Locality” of each node in your HCI solution. Nutanix XCP has many different models, you need to make sure you select the correct fit for your needs.
• Processes and Procedures – Moving from legacy, 3-tier infrastructure to HCI is a big change, so do not underestimate or ignore the imperative to update all of your processes and procedures. HCI will simplify and improve your infrastructure, consequently simplifying your operational procedures, but you will need to change how you do things with respect to people, process and technology.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?