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Real cost of AHV

J
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Hi fellas,

Does anyone have a clear answer of what is the real cost of AHV?  I’m told that AHV is free but is this referring to only Nutanix Community Edition? 

What about AOS? when purchasing a Nutanix node/block/cluster, these come pre-installed but the cluster essentially has no ‘smarts’ without the CVM which is AOS.

Referencing this Licensing Quick Reference Guide, it looks like AHV is included with AOS but AOS’ licensing metric is charged per node.  Am I reading this correctly?

Is it possible to run AHV without AOS?

 

Thanks,

JS

Best answer by DenisF

When they told you that its free, they (probably) meant that is already bundled with your hardware purchase.

We purchase Dell XC with Acropolis Pro and run VMware enterprise plus on them, if we convert to AHV, that just saves a ton of cash on vmware licensing, since Acropolis is already included with the hardware. (You can run up to twelve hosts cluster with the “free” acropolis starter license)

It's not free in the sense that it costs no money, but that its already “there” and you can’t get a nutanix server without it, so might as well use it and save some cash.

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11 replies

P
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  • Primzy
  • Vanguard
  • 588 replies
  • December 1, 2021

You can’t have AOS without AHV: https://hyperhci.com/2019/07/14/what-is-difference-between-nutanix-acropolis-aos-vs-acropolis-ahv/  yes basically you pay for how many nodes you order.

J
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  • j_seet
  • Author
  • Trailblazer
  • 39 replies
  • December 1, 2021

Thanks Primzy, 

So is it possible to run AHV without AOS? Where is the free hypervisor? CE?

P
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  • Primzy
  • Vanguard
  • 588 replies
  • December 1, 2021

In theory yes it is possible to have AHV without AOS, but AOS(is your OS in lamen’s terms). So it would make entire setup usless. If you want to try Nutanix for free yes CE is one option if you just want quick test they offer free demo aswell on commercial version.

P
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  • Primzy
  • Vanguard
  • 588 replies
  • December 1, 2021

If you want to test Nutanix real quick: https://www.nutanix.com/try

J
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  • j_seet
  • Author
  • Trailblazer
  • 39 replies
  • December 1, 2021

Know of any examples of AHV being run without AOS?  What im finding is that while AHV is being flouted as a free hypervisor, AOS is where the real smarts are.

P
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  • Primzy
  • Vanguard
  • 588 replies
  • December 1, 2021

AOS (formerly NOS) is the Acropolis Operating System and is the base operating system that runs on each CVM.

About hypervisor, Nutanix support AHV (Acropolis HyperVisor), which is the Nutanix free hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere ESXi and Citrix XenServer.

 

I don’t think AHV without AOS would do anything for you. I haven’t heard of such setup yet.

P
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  • Primzy
  • Vanguard
  • 588 replies
  • December 1, 2021

Imagine AHV as driver that virtualizes and manages all disks and represents them to AOS.

J
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  • j_seet
  • Author
  • Trailblazer
  • 39 replies
  • December 1, 2021

I must say that the marketing team has done a brilliant job of selling AHV as a free hypervisor 😆

To provide some context for my question, we are taking a serious look at moving our NX clusters over from ESXi to AHV and was looking into cost savings and feature comparisons of AHV vs ESXi.

Thanks for the responses Primzy. 

P
1 person likes this
  • P
    Primzy
D
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  • DenisF
  • Trailblazer
  • 20 replies
  • Answer
  • December 5, 2021

When they told you that its free, they (probably) meant that is already bundled with your hardware purchase.

We purchase Dell XC with Acropolis Pro and run VMware enterprise plus on them, if we convert to AHV, that just saves a ton of cash on vmware licensing, since Acropolis is already included with the hardware. (You can run up to twelve hosts cluster with the “free” acropolis starter license)

It's not free in the sense that it costs no money, but that its already “there” and you can’t get a nutanix server without it, so might as well use it and save some cash.

aluciani
1 person likes this
  • aluciani
    aluciani
J
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  • j_seet
  • Author
  • Trailblazer
  • 39 replies
  • December 5, 2021

Thanks DenisF. 

So if AOS is the smarts behind Nutanix for all the self healing, compression, dedupe, resiliency, HA etc... can it be run on any hypervisor? Or only AHV?

D
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  • DenisF
  • Trailblazer
  • 20 replies
  • December 5, 2021

Yeah AOS is the brains behind the operation, realistically the hypervisor just passes storage to the CVM.

AFAIK they currently support AHV, ESXi and Hyper-V, i think XEN was also added recently.

(all of which are “less free” compared to AOS starter, due to their innate licensing costs)

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