The entire world’s IT infrastructure is driving towards the virtualization to reduce the IT costs by consolidating the small and mid-range workload environments. When it comes to Virtualization, hypervisors are ruling the market and VMware is top among those. Microsoft Hyper-V,Oracle VM for X86 and Redhat Enterprise Virtualization(RHEV) also competing with each other on the hypervisor market along with VMware. Now the questions is that how to reduce the IT cost further in hypervisor virtualization ?
Typical Virtualization environments consists (Ex: VMware vSphere ), X86 Physical server , Shared storage and networks.From these components ,we can easily say that shared storage is the costliest and it requires the specialized FC network to get the required performance. Is it possible to eliminate the shared storage on the hypervisor Virtualization ?. Yes. We can. Please check out the below options.
- VMware vSAN
- Nutanix
Why Nutanix ? Why not VMware VSAN ?
In VMware SAN , you can’t extend the VSAN container to other compute clusters, and you can only have one container per compute cluster(See the below image).Depending on vSphere and application licensing (e.g., databases), VSAN can potentially create silos of capacity and performance.
VMware VSAN
Nutanix, on the other hand, is not bound to a vSphere compute cluster. So while you could architect a solution similar to VSAN, you have the choice to create one large storage clusters – regardless of licensing of the compute layer.
Nutanix
Nutanix delivers the web-scale-IT which is not new to the world but its new but its new to the enterprise IT. Google and Facebook internet giants are already using the web-scale IT where they can add the capacity on demand without additional configuration on the new X86 boxes. These web-scale environment can grow without any limits with very low cost of ownership.
How Nutanix’s Web-Scale IT is different from traditional infrastructure architecture ?
Traditional VMware vSphere environment will be look like below if we use FC SAN.It normally consists the X86 servers ,Network switch,Routers ,FC switches and Storage.
FC-SAN
Image Source: thehyperadvisor.com
CONVERGED:(Storage Network & Network will be combined)
If we use the iSCSI storage , our environment will look like below . In this architecture ,we are completely eliminating the FC network and FC switches .
Image Source: thehyperadvisor.com
Hyper-Converged:(Nutanix’s)
The below image shows that how the Nutanix’s Hyper-Converged environment looks.
Image Source: thehyperadvisor.com
What Nutanix appliance consists ?
Nutanix appliance consists standard X86 server with hard-drives(HDD) and Solid State drives (SSD).The storage capacity and server configuration differs for each model.It eliminates the FC SAN or ISCSI storage by utilizing the local storage .It can match the FC SAN performance by using the SSD as cache.Hyper-convergence reduces the datacenter space significantly and reduces the power consumption as well.
How can we scale the IT infrastructure using the Nutanix appliance ?
Using the Nutanix intelligent software, we can the scale the IT infrastructure easily as needed. These web-scale systems are 100% software defined and no reliance on hardware for resilience and performance. New functions or features can be added to the without any hardware upgrades.
How Nutanix works ?
Nutanix software distributes the data ,metadata and operations across the entire cluster without any bottlenecks in the control paths. The environment can grow without any limits.The Nutanix Distributed Filesystem (NDFS) is at the core of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. It manages all metadata and data, as well as enables all core features. NDFS is the software-driven architecture that connects storage, compute resources, controller VM, and the hypervisor.
Nutanix’s Availability:
web-scale IT systems are built for an “Always On Operations” . It has automatic self healing mechanism which helps to recover quickly from the individual components failures without degrading application and data availability. It also reduces the total operating cost by 40% .
Nutanix also supports the de-duplication, compression, thin provisioning ,snapshots ,clones and advanced data protection. We easily start with low end systems and easy to add on demand basis. Nutanix supports VMware vSphere , Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Redhat’s RHEV .
Nutanix Architecture:
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