This post was authored by Nimal Kunnath, Technical Marketing Engineer, NCM and Cloud Native Applications
Since the announcement of the strategic partnership of Nutanix and RedHat in 2021, the joint Engineering efforts have come a long way in delivering value to our customers. RHEL 9 has been supported on Nutanix since day 0. A Nutanix Prism collection has been added to the Red Hat Ansible Automation hub, providing the capability to automate Nutanix infrastructure. To further the integration, Red Hat’s full stack automated deployment of the OpenShift Container Platform, commonly known as Installer Provisioned Infrastructure method, is now available for the Nutanix Cloud Platform with the OpenShift 4.11 release. Devops and infrastructure teams can be truly delighted with the combination of the best PaaS on the best IaaS.
In this blog, we will be looking at these updates in greater detail as well as understand how Nutanix provides the ideal platform for your Red Hat workloads.
With businesses being on various stages of their digital transformation journey, one consequence has been the massive proliferation of modern applications. This has subsequently been driving major shifts in infrastructure architecture. Rapid application development cycles and the need for quicker time to market have made agile on-demand infrastructure necessary. Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which natively integrates compute, storage, virtualization and networking has been designed to handle such rapidly-changing resource demands. The web-scale architecture can linearly scale out compute and storage independently with corresponding increases in performance and capacity.
Compute Resilience Increases Availability
An integral component that powers Nutanix’s hybrid cloud solution is the native hypervisor, AHV. As of Q3 FY’22, AHV adoption rate has steadily increased, in spite of having the flexibility to support other hypervisors, like vSphere and Hyper-V. AHV’s goal has always been invisible virtualization, offering simplicity of operation and management while delivering an enterprise ready feature set.
Features such as Live Migration and High Availability, which are enabled by default, are expected from standard hypervisors today, but AHV provides additional benefits for containerized applications. If a host enters into a disconnected state, the default configuration in OpenShift and Kubernetes is five minutes before the pods get evicted and restarted on a healthy node. With AHV, the timeout is 40 seconds, after which HA kicks in to restart the VM - this means your application is online before Kubernetes even detects the offline node. Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling is another feature that actively monitors for any compute and storage contention and migrates the VMs to different hosts as fit. The ability to set affinity rules takes it a step further ensuring that OpenShift control plane nodes, for example, reside in different HCI nodes to accommodate physical host failures.
Ideal platform to run business critical workloads
AHV’s deep storage integration has been critical to drive performance efficiencies. AHV Turbo introduces a multi queue approach which services VM storage I/O requests by bypassing QEMU used in core KVM. As the workload increases, the storage queues expand automatically to match the VM’s vCPU count, enabling even greater performance. Nutanix’s data locality design combined with next generation flash technology such as NVMe truly provides an enterprise grade platform capable of running business critical applications.
This really benefits database workloads on your RHEL machines that require millisecond level latency at scale. Even more, Nutanix AOS 6.5 offers policy-based VM-level snapshots with the ability to replicate them across clusters, effectively hiding the underlying storage infrastructure.
Built-in Networking and Security Features Against Cyber Threats
When developing Nutanix products, security integration has been a cornerstone at every step of the design and development process. The Zero trust Flow network security natively built into AHV networking enables application and operations teams to easily manage application security postures without the need for specialized networking expertise or network design changes. Each OpenShift node in the cluster benefits from a stateful firewall inspecting and policing traffic in front of it. Only the ports mandated for inter-machine connectivity have to be opened, and impressively the policy updates automatically as the VM’s move across nodes. Further, Flow Virtual Networking brings virtual private cloud (VPC) that connects RHEL VM’s across multiple datacenters and clouds.
This delivers immense value to network administrators who may wish to make an application available on multiple sites or have the luxury of migrating the application to a different cloud itself without worrying about overlapping IP addresses. Abstracting the network from the hardware is yet another step towards AHV’s vision of invisible infrastructure.
Automation Across the Entire Stack
For many organizations, the pandemic has meant an acceleration in digital transformation initiatives. At the core of this change is the adoption of IT automation processes that will save costs and increase efficiencies. The Nutanix Ansible collection available from the Ansible Automation Hub leverages the Nutanix APIs to automatically provision and manage the configuration of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. For instance, DevOps teams will gain a lot of value in being able to use the foundation module available in the collection that can image nodes and create a new cluster from scratch.
In combination with modules for security rules and VPC’s, you have a platform that’s ready to support enterprise workloads. Taking it a step further, OpenShift cluster deployments on Nutanix can be fully automated as well, either with the recently announced IPI installation method or via Ansible playbooks.
A Partnership Built for Success
The Nutanix and Red Hat partnership also includes native support for AHV VMs with Red Hat Satellite Server 6.9 and newer, with RHEL 8.2 and newer. Additionally, supported is the VDC subscription option, which enables the deployment of an unlimited number of RHEL virtual machines and offers large customers a superior value-for-money subscription option.
The cherry on top is the shared support experience. Customers can open a ticket by contacting either company, and the award-winning support teams will get to work in the background, routing cases as needed to provide quicker reaction times.
For more information on AHV and how Nutanix can support you in achieving your cloud goals
Read more on the partnership details
Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift IPI on Nutanix: Red Hat OpenShift IPI on Nutanix Cloud Platform