Doug, Thank you for the detailed response. I am going to go start reading about the ins-and-outs of nutanix. :-)
On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 8:16 PM, Doug Hughes <[email protected]> wrote: > No practical experience yet, but we are in the process of making a quite > large purchases (1000s of vms), and I have done a number of technical > deepdives on converged and hyperconverged options of various sorts. > > Nutanix and Simplivity are probably going to substantially outperform a > traditional converged architecture. Why? Because the I/O is local to the > VMS. The architecture is arranged such that the VM always has a local I/O > option with remote (in many cases rack-aware) duplicates. Mirrors are > declustered as in the sense of GPFS/GSS or Isilon, as an analogy. The local > copy is on the node, but the remote copy could be on any node. If a disk is > gone, it is quickly reconstructed in appropriate chunks on many other > nodes. Nutanix doesn't have a special card, it's just a commodity node. You > save a lot in cost, but you may not be quite as fast. For most workloads, > it probably won't matter. > > Simplivity, in particular, includes an NVRAM backed FPGA ($$$$) that means > all writes are accelerated, coalesced, deduped, and then finally written > out in chunks. the SSD is used as a read cache for hot data. Nutanix also > does coalesce, dedup and aggregation to their underlying distributed object > store. Metadata is stored in Cassandra that is replicated across nodes. Hot > data is mirrored plus ECC checksum on SSD and cold data is distributed > using erasure coding to spinning disk. Rebalancing is automatic. > > If you have a lot of VMS, you get a lot of advantages from this Dedup. > Pretty much all of the O/S data will be deduped (unless you are using > something like BitLocker or OS-level encryption! Use some other encryption > at rest to get dedup and compression.) > > All data in a converged architecture (Netapp, Nimble, Infinidat, whatever) > has to go through a switch which will reduce bandwidth. Either 10g for > ISCSI or FC. You will immediately be limited by your interconnect. (You > could theoretically use Infiniband, but most storage nodes don't support it) > > You can test Nutanix for free. You can't do that with Simplivity because > of the card. > > Rebalancing on adding more nodes is a matter for Simplivity engineering > support engagement. Nutanix does it more or less automatically. > > Simplivity is architected in notions of clusters of 8 machines and you can > federate up to 4 clusters in one "Federation" unit before starting the next > one. Nutanix has very large groups of nodes. I've heard that there is 1000 > node Nutanix clusters out there. I have no references yet. > > Both have copious performance graphs and data you can view through the > portal. Both can support multi-tenancy with caveats. (in a virtual DR > environment, where the customer owns the Vcenter + Veeam, you don't really > have multi-tenancy). Nutanix appears to expose more data via SNMP and take > the REST API to the ultimate extremes (you can do absolutely anything with > it, purportedly) > > For a pure cost play, you'll probably find the converged architecture is > significantly less expensive. From an administrative point of view, you'll > probably save the most people time with a Simplivity point of view. People > who run it claim to have saved many, many hours, because it's all > integrated. You don't have to know the store specialities, do the storage > setup separate from the machines, do the machine setup and lom integration > etc. It's vastly simplified by integrating it all into one pane. > > You can easily scale compute nodes in both Simplivity and Nutanix, very > cheaply. You can scale storage nodes in Nutanix by mixing in a > storage-dense node type (multi-node types are available). In Simplivity you > are constrained for storage by the FPGA. Every storage node must have one > and they run about $100k+ list. (performance/cost trade-off) > > With Simplivity, clusters must all be the same node type. With Nutanix, > you can mix and match. > > I'll throw in a little plug for Nimble if you are thinking about Veeam for > virtual backup. The snapshot mechanisms mesh together nicely! (also the > performance is good, and the price might be on par or less than a Netapp > with as good or better performance) > If performance and ease of management are the primary concern, Simplivity > is definitely something to look at. There are some interesting case studies > and reference cases of people going from 10-30 racks of machines down to 3 > (for example) and actually saving large amounts of money in colo space. If > you're talking about a small environment you probably won't see the > ancillary savings from consolidation from Simplivity. > > Hope that helps. I'm in the trenches now, too. :) > > > > On 12/17/2016 7:18 AM, Joseph Kern wrote: > > Is there anyone running Nutanix (or any "hypeconverged" architecture) at a > large scale on this list? > > I have a few questions: > > 1. Nutanix performance compared to Dell/HP + Netapp (do I need to > over-purchase Nutanix to get similar performance results for the same > hardware)? > 2. Is there a way to just scale storage (I have a feeling you need to buy > more compute as well) > 3. Common pitfalls in implementation or operations and maintnance? > 4. Does this current generation of "hyperconverged" architecture seem as > immature as I think it is? > 5. What type of support and turnaround time does Nutanix offer? > > > -- > Joseph A Kern > [email protected] > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing > [email protected]https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > > -- Joseph A Kern [email protected]
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