Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

Originally posted at vcdx133.com.

This post provides a Tech101 breakdown of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. If you have heard the buzz-words “Nutanix”, “Web-Scale” and “Hyper-Convergence” and want to learn more about it, this post is for you.

The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform (VCP) is a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution. Termed the “iPhone” of infrastructure, what is the big deal?

Short answer: Ease of use, fast deployment, linear scaling of performance with capacity and richness of product features.

Why should you care? If you live in the world of monolithic and vertically scaled storage, you may have experienced the initial, massive cost of purchasing your storage solution with a 5 year ROI. Then comes the honey-moon period where you experience amazing performance as workloads are moved to the new array. Well before the 5 year ROI mark, you will probably experience performance degradation as the capacity of the array is consumed. Which then initiates discussions with your storage vendor about how you need to spend another boatload of money adding additional controllers, SSDs and disks to the array.

Furthermore, think about how long it takes for the storage team, the server team and the network team to agree on a particular design for a project and the time it takes to order, deliver, install, configure and test that solution. Have you ever asked yourself, “There must be an easier way to do this?”

Enter Hyper-Convergence, where you can now buy individual blocks of infrastructure at an entry price and quickly scale-out your solution (performance and capacity) one unit at a time as you grow.

What is it? Nutanix has taken the “Web-Scale” infrastructure model of Google and Facebook and made it available to the Enterprise. You buy a Nutanix Block (rack mounted chassis) that contains Nutanix Nodes (hosts), storage, power and cooling. This creates a Nutanix Cluster (Software-Defined Storage), which are comprised of Controller Virtual Machines (CVM).

How does it work? The Controller Virtual Machines connect directly to the physical SCSI Controllers on each node (Pass-Through mode) and the CVMs are configured to create a “Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) Cluster” (storage pool) via the 10GbE network. All of the pooled storage is classified as local or remote from the point of view of each CVM and VM data is protected based upon a Replication Factor (RF) policy of two or three, which replaces the concept of RAID. RF-2 means a local and remote copy is maintained and RF-3, a local and two remote copies of said data.

Where is the magic? Since each node has its own Controller VM, SSDs and HDDs, NDFS can provide linear scaling of capacity and performance for locally stored data. When a CVM goes down, a remote CVM will takeover serving data I/O to the local hypervisor. When the local CVM comes online, it resumes service. This fundamental concept is what allows Nutanix to provide a “rolling upgrade” of the Nutanix Operating System (NOS). What is the caveat? During periods of CVM failure, local workloads that access remotely stored data will experience degraded performance until the local CVM is restored.

The major components of the Nutanix VCP solution are:

• Nutanix Node – a single host with CPU, RAM, SCSI Controller and Network that resides in a Nutanix Block
• Nutanix Block – rack mounted chassis that contains nodes, storage, power and fans
• Prism – User Interface and APIs
• Prism Central – aggregator of separate Prism Clusters to a single UI
• Cluster Virtual Machine – Software-Defined Storage that supports NFS, iSCSI or SMB3
• CVM operating system is known as “NOS” – Nutanix Operating System
• CVM file system is known as “NDFS” – Nutanix Distributed File System
• Hypervisor – VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM supported
• OEM Hardware – Supermicro and Dell with PCIe SSD and HDD
• Licencing – Starter, Pro & Ultimate

It comes in a number of OEM Hardware flavours (Dell and Supermicro) with the following uses:

• ROBO, Test & Development – NX-1000, Dell XC 720xd A5
• EUC/VDI – NX-3000, NX-7000 (GPU & PCoIP Offload), Dell XC 720xd B5/B7
• Compute Intensive – NX-3000, Dell XC 720xd B7
• Data Intensive – NX-8000, Dell XC 720xd C5/C7
• Business Critical & Mission Critical Apps – NX-9000 (All Flash)

The major features of the Nutanix Operating System (current version NOS 4.1):

• One-Click Upgrades of NOS and Hypervisor (rolling upgrade)
• Data Protection Cloud Connect (to AWS)
• Data At Rest Encryption
• Metro Availability (<5ms RTT)
• Deduplication
• Compression
• Data Tiering
• Snapshots and Clones
• Advanced Data Protection

Alternatives

• Server-Side Flash-Cache Acceleration – VMware vFRC, PernixData FVP, EMC XtremSF/XtremCache, etc.
• Converged Infrastructure Solutions – NetApp FlexPod, VCE vBlock, HP ConvergedSystem, Dell, etc.
• Other Hyper-Converged solutions – VMware EVO:Rail, Maxta, SimpliVity OmniCube, Scale Computing, Pivot3, etc.

Nutanix is hyper-converged infrastructure, which is currently a major concern in the world of IT. New players are appearing in hyper-converged infrastructure like Simplivity, VMware EVO: Rail, EMC ScaleIO, and so forth.

Waht is Hyper-Converged?

Hyper-Converged is the solution to combine Computer (Server), Storage and Networks in one solution or in one hardware. This solution will reduce complexity of the management and also the price. So like in Nutanix, the 2 U Server, in which there are four independent servers (nodes), who each have 2 Socket CPU, RAM, 2x10GbE, 2x1GbE, 6 Disks. Bringing the total in 2U Server (Series NX-3450) there are 80 CPU Cores, 2TB RAM (assuming 512GB per node), 8x10GbE and 16TB SATA Row, Row 3.2TB SSD.

Storage in Nutanix (Converged Storage), reduces the complexity of the storage layer, because it does not need LUN, Volume, Zoning, etc as when we configure FC Storage. Storage in Nutanix is NFS, NFS is the benefit of reducing the overhead of the disk groups and LUNs.

Nutanix Architecture

Inside there is a term Nutanix nodes and blocks.Block is a 2U rack mount chassis in which there are four nodes.Hardware Nutanix is OEM Super Micro or Dell.

In each of these nodes are Nutanix Controller VM (CVM). CVM is a storage appliance or controllers which use VMware Direct Path for direct access to the LSI Disk Controller. This is what allows the CVM to control the disks directly without passing through the hypervisor (ESXi or Hyper-V or KVM). Nutanix does not use RAID and no RAID Controller therein. Nutanix Distributed Files System (NDFS) algorithm is owned (proprietary) by Nutanix system for distributing files or replicating data to each Node. NDFS is a similar technology as used by Googles Files System, Facebook and other Web-Scale Technology.

Hypervisor is installed in the SATA DOM (Disk on Motherboard) module. So there is a flash chip in the motherboard 64GB per node (read article unboxing Nutanix). CVM is a VM running on the hypervisor, which has the configuration of 8 vCPUs and 16-24GB RAM.CVM has two vNICs that one vNIC to connect to the production network and one vNIC to connect to a private vSwitch. Private vSwitch VMkernel adapters have and currently do not have physical network adapter (Punic). Private network used for communication from the host to the CVM for mounting NFS datastore of Nutanix Storage Cluster.CVM uses public vNIX for communication between the CVM in other nodes and also for monitoring cluster plus replicate data.

The figure below is a diagram per Node:

And the image below is a diagram per Cluster Nutanix:

And some of the questions often asked are:

1. What happens when CVM failure in one node? Autopathing will redirect IO to the CVM in other nodes in the same cluster.
2. What happens when a disk failure on one node?Nutanix Storage Cluster will "sustain" the current single disk failure, and the system will redistribute data through Cluster.When the rebuild or redistribution is complete it will Cluster Healthy back.This process is very fast (ms).
3. What happens when one node failure?The process is almost the same as point 2, the data will redistribute within the Cluster.Only this process Nutanix uses MapReduce to speed up the process.If we have three nodes in one cluster, then only allowed one node failure.Therefore, at least 3 nodes required to form 1 Nutanix Cluster.

Management Console

Management Console in Nutanix is PRISM.PRISM is a web interface as shown below.

The first time we log in, then the initial menu as shown above.Visible top left is the ESXi hypervisor is installed, if you use Microsoft Windows, the look is Hyper-V.Then also seen versions of ESXi, below is the total storage capacity, a total of VMs (VMs 230), total node (5) and total blocks (2).In the middle column visible performance monitoring IOPS, bandwidth, CPU and Memory.And the rightmost column is the Events and Alerts.

Top left corner there is a drop down menu (Home), then I moved to the Storage menu Diagram View.It will appear as shown below.

Now we move to the VM menu, which will give us the details of the VM is running in the cluster.Seen there total VM, total CPU and Memory.Then there is also a report by IOPS, Latency IO, Memory Usage and CPU Usage.

Then we move to the VM Table, it is seen in detail per-VM, as shown below. If we look at the information that there is, then I think this function together with VMware vCenter Ops, which did not exist just Forecast Analysis. Here we can search the VM and then perform analysis per-VM performance based on CPU, Memory, IOPS, Latency, or Network.

And now we move to the Storage menu Diagram.Seen all information relating to such Usage Storage, IOPS, bandwidth IO, IO Latency. And in the top right corner, there are two menus of "Container" and "Storage Pool".

Storage Pool, is the union of all disks that exist in all Nodes.Container is as Datastore. We can make some Container in 1 Storage Pool.As with traditional storage, we can make some LUNs in 1 Disk Group.

Interestingly here is Nutanix without RAID but using NDFS, no volume or LUNs. For example, we will create one Container, then I click menu in the top right corner Container, the menu will appear below.

Interestingly, we we would like to mount the new container to multiple hosts / nodes, we just need to do the check as shown below.Imagine if we use the SAN, must do Zoning first, then setting WWN ID to each of the hosts, and so on.

And we can compress or dedup the container that we have made, and only one click then completed as shown below. Interesting is it not it?

And no less, that is build-in replication. We can do replication N-Way means can perform replication to 3rd place (A-> B-> C) upto 6th place (A-> B-> C-> D-> E-> F). Which greatly facilitates that we can do per-VM based and fixed per block-level replication. Imagine in traditional storage, replication must be done LUN to LUN.So if there are 50-VM per LUN, then total all 50 VM will be replicated to the LUN in the DR Site.Replication in Nutanix, can be integrated with VMware SRM.

Likewise reviews Nutanix, although not as complete but could be an additional complete our knowledge. And we will come back to a Nutanix detailed discussion at a later time.

Thanks to Nutanix for allowing me to "box-test" Nutanix lab in Singapore.
I would like to thank the team for greater Nutanix Reviews their help in providing the access to Reviews their lab and willingness to answer questions during our process.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

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?

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?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

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 support?

How was the initial setup?

What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

What is most valuable?

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?

What was our ROI?

What other advice do I have?

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

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 was the initial setup?

What was our ROI?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

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 support?

How was the initial setup?

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

What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?