Storage Containers
A storage container is a subset of available storage within a storage pool (see Creating a Storage Container). Storage containers are created within a storage pool to hold virtual disks (vDisks) used by virtual machines.
Compression
You can enable compression on a storage container. Compression can save physical storage space and improve I/O bandwidth and memory usage—which may have a positive impact on overall system performance.
Inline compression will compress sequential streams of data or large I/O sizes (>64K) when written to the Extent Store (SSD + HDD).
Offline compression will initially write the data as normal (in an un-compressed state) and then leverage the Curator framework to compress the data cluster wide.
Below diagram explains how inline compression interacts with the DSF write I/O path:
Deduplication
Deduplication reduces space usage by consolidating duplicate data blocks on Nutanix storage. You can enable either cache deduplication only or both cache and capacity deduplication on a storage container.
In addition, Controller VMs in clusters with deduplication enabled need to be configured with more RAM:
Cache deduplication: 24 GB RAM
Capacity deduplication: 32 GB RAM
For more information on storage components please refer to following links