Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

We are evaluating a Nutanix solution vs a normal 2012R2 HyperV with VNX SAN cluster. As we are a Microsoft shop, we are going with HyperV to reduce licenses. We have an HO and a DR site for Disaster Recovery. Our normal HyperV design involves having a HyperV cluster in each site with HyperV REPLICA to replicate data to the DR site. We have calculated this to give us an RPO of 30 seconds (HyperV Replica can even go to 5sec RPO) and an RTO of 15mins. Does Nutanix have any replication methodology that can give us a similar RPO? It looks like the RTO can be reached, but the RPO is at least 5mins and can't go below. Note that we have to use a HyperV engine and not VMWare. If this cannot be done with Nutanix replication, will Nutanix support a HyperV REPLICA between the 2 sites?

Hi, On a new install (nx6020) ; during a Storage vMotion, the ESXi CPU increases up to +80% of the total physical CPU ...The Storage vMotion is very long ... A vMotion is ok, no problem, very fast. Any idea ? Info : - Cluster version v4.1.2.1 - RAM CVMs : 32GB I think that there is not enough RAM on CVMs ?... 32GB its a best practices. thks guys ! Sig'

If we only have 2 VMs (1 CVM, another VM running heavy file uploading web application) per Nutanix KVM node, how can we fine tune / optimize storage bandwidth and IO for that web server?

I have running vms in a consistency group within an asynch DR Protection domain. The snapshots are replicating locally and to a remote sign fine. When I manually migrate the Protection Domain to the remote site the vms are coming online fine at the target site, but they are not automatically powering on? I have to right click on them and manually power them on. Is this normal or should the migrate feature power them on, assuming they were online at the original location? Regards, Erik

Also see this post: Accepted-hypervisor-ISOs-for-install-through-foundation Should help you if you are trying to use a recent ESXi 5.5 U2 update.

Next Community,Nutanix has developed a Reference Architecture for designing and deploying Avaya Aura on Nutanix. Aura is a complex Unified Communications and Customer Experience set of applications and a lot of work went into determining the right resources to size Aura on Nutanix. Please use this as a forum to ask any Nutanix and Avaya Aura questions you may have. You can find all of this material here in the Nutanix Aura Reference Architecture: http://go.nutanix.com/virtualizing-avaya-aura-reference-architecture.htmlI also wrote some blog posts about it here: http://bbbburns.com/blog/2015/02/nutanix-and-the-2015-avaya-technology-forum/ http://bbbburns.com/blog/2015/03/avaya-aura-on-nutanix-in-progress/ http://bbbburns.com/blog/2015/03/survivable-uc-avaya-aura-and-nutanix-data-protection/ I'm looking forward to answering any questions you have!

We have a single 3 node 1350 with starter licensing running VMware vSphere. Is it possible to configure replication to another non-NDFS datastore with any available built in tools or processes? What would be the best method that does not incur additional costs. In this sort of instance, would vSphere replication make sense backup to another datastore?

New Nutanix install - vSphere 5.5.0 While transfering a 200GB file on a Virtual Host from the C: Drive to the E: drive I'm not getting anything faster than 50mb/s and sometimes down to 25mb/s. Anyone else seeing this type of behavior? Or have a solution to resolve slow speeds?

Chris Brown walks you through setting up Hyper-V and getting you ready to deploy VMs on Nutanix. Let us know what you think.

Next Community, I wanted to share the Nutanix Best Practices Guide for deploying Microsoft Lync on Nutanix. Many thanks to  and Jason Sloan@Jason_D_Sloan for authoring this document. Best Practices Guide with example deployments here: http://go.nutanix.com/bpg-microsoft-lync.html You can also view Derek's personal blog on the subject: http://www.derekseaman.com/2015/01/sizing-microsoft-lync-server-2013-nutanix.html Please feel free to use this community space to ask questions about virtualizing Microsoft Lync on Nutanix.

Its well known that Nutanix is Hypervisor agnostic supporting ESXi, Hyper-V and KVM, but what most people either don’t know, or haven’t considered, is the fact the Nutanix Operating System (NOS) version is not dependant on the hypervisor version. What does this mean? You can run the latest and greatest NOS 4.1.x releases on ESXi 5.0 , ESXi 6.0 or anything in between. In fact, you could run older versions of NOS such as 3.x with vSphere 6.0 as well (although I see no reason you would do this.) Read more here This is a repost from the blog CloudXC by Josh Odgers

I saw a tweet today (shown below) that reminded me of 27th August, 2012. This was the day that VMware published this article, which demonstrates how VMware vSphere (5.1 at that point) could achieve 1 million IOPS in a single VM. Things have undoubtedly gotten better in vSphere 5.5, and even more so with vSphere 6.0, which was recently released. Even though the test setup at the time (3 years ago) required two dedicated all flash arrays for this one VM, it demonstrated clearly that the hypervisor is not a bottleneck to storage. It also clearly demonstrated that even using VMFS and going through multiple layers to the storage and back, isn’t a bottleneck to high performance. vSphere itself adds so little overhead that it’s a great platform for running any workload. This is important, because 3 years on from this test we have all sorts of things running on top of vSphere in the ever increasing capabilities of the platform. Even high performance storage controllers and not just the varie

If you're interested in running Oracle on the Nutanix platform then you should check out my latest blog article titled Oracle Licensing and Support on Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform - http://longwhiteclouds.com/2014/05/11/oracle-licensing-and-support-on-nutanix-virtual-computing-platform/. We are in the process of publishing a Tech Note on Oracle for Nutanix and also a Best Practice Guide. These should be available on our web site in the next few weeks.

Just wondering if anyone has tried the NOS upgrade interface and had good success or issues. I am looking to do it this weekend, but I don't see any documentation on it. Thanks!

Hello, Is there an official stance on upgrading to/using ESXi 5.5U2 as install media? I see that U1 is specified explicitly on the supported Hypervisor list, is there a target date for U2 certification?

In addition to the video I recorded regarding SQL Server Provisioning with VAAI I've written an article tonight including the scripts I used to clone the VM's, tune the network, and the RunOnce script that ties it all together. I hope this is helpful. http://longwhiteclouds.com/2015/01/27/nutanix-sql-server-db-vaai-clone-performance/

I'e just published a video demonstrating provisioning multiple SQL VM's in just minutes using VAAI Clones on the Nutanix platform. The SQL DB VM's are 435GB in size, but due to VAAI the new clones don't use any additional stroage capacity initially.Nutanix Provisioning SQL Server VM's with VAAI Clones  

We were one of the first guinea pigs to host Exchange 2010 on Nutanix. our cluster consists of a 3451 and a 6220. We have 1 exchange server tied to each of the 3451 nodes, 4 in total. Each server is configured with 4 2 TB databases. 2 active, 2 passive. We noticed recently as we migrated a majority of our users to the new environment that we are getting alarms that we are hitting a threshold of disk space per host. Not sure what we're missing here.

Hi, I have a curios doubt. I read about cloud connect and summarized that it is mainly for backing up the data! And when I connect to a public cloud AWS, a CVM will automatically be created on that platform right! So can I seamlessly offload some of the production workload onto the cloud as well or is it exclusively for backup and restore ? Best, Narayan

Hi , Does Nutanix has it's own backup software to take scheduled backup for production VM's created on ESXI hosts ? or I need to use third party backup solution like Veem or netbackup? if available , does it require base license or enterprise license please note the from prism in licensing part I saw the field Dataprotection and deduplication and others with status off,is this mean that these functions are not supported with the current license or just need to turn on? Regards

Hey there We have a Windows Azure Pack environment deployed on a Nutanix Hyper-V based infrastructure. The infrastructure is build with high availability in mind: Redundant Virtual Machine Manager configuration Redundant SQL Server configuration (using SQL Server AlwaysOn)But we are currently facing an issue setting up a redundant VMM Library Share. Microsoft does not allow using a redundant VMM installation as the Library Server. Instead they recommend to setup a Scale-Out File Server infrastructure as the Library Server and then add your Library Share to it. However, to my current understanding, it is not possible to setup a Cluster Shared Volume on Nutanix Hyper-V - which is a requirement for a Scale-Out File Server. What are the design recommendations from Nutanix in this matter?

Dear, Does any one know when deploying oracle rac in Nutanix Box whether it is following vmware best practice or any special deployment? Regards, Kelvin

Storage DRS is a feature of vSphere 5.0 onwards which aims to reduce the complexity of managing storage capacity and performance for virtual machines running on traditional shared storage. SDRS helps simplify management of Datastores (LUNs / NFS Mounts) by analyzing the available datastores capacity and placing new virtual machines in datastores with the required available capacity. This is called "Initial Placement". SDRS also allows administrators to create rules ("Affinity" & "Anti-Affinity") to ensure specific what VMs should be kept together or apart for performance / capacity reasons and finally, monitor I/O metrics and relocate VMs to different datastores where contention or capacity constraints exist. As it is recommended to have one Large NFS Datastore in a Nutanix environment, the issue of initial placement (which SDRS helps resolve) is natively eliminated as all Virtual machines, regardless of performance or capacity requirements can and should be placed into one NFS Dat

Network I/O control is a feature available since vSphere 4.1 with the Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS) which uses Network resource pools determine the bandwidth that different network traffic types are given. When network I/O control is enabled, distributed switch traffic is divided into Customer Network Resource pools and/or the following predefined network resource pools: Fault Tolerance traffic, iSCSI traffic, vMotion traffic, management traffic, vSphere Replication (VR) traffic, NFS traffic, and virtual machine traffic. From vSphere 5.0 onwards, you can also create custom network resource pools for virtual machine traffic. You can control the bandwidth each network resource pool is given by setting the physical adapter shares and host limit for each network resource pool. The physical adapter shares assigned to a network resource pool determine what share of the total available bandwidth will be guaranteed to the traffic associated with that network resource pool in the event o

The following tables show the recommended configuration of VMware Storage I/O Control (SIOC).