Topics started by joshodgers

14 Topics

joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
published in Community Blog

Drive failure Comparison – Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSANBlog

In the first post in this series I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware. We saw approximately 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. Next we compared Deduplication & Compression technologies where we learned Nutanix has outright capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance advantages over vSAN. Then we looked at Erasure Coding where we learned the Nutanix implementation (called EC-X) is both dynamic & flexible by balancing performance and capacity efficiencies in real time. Next we switched it up and discussed how both solutions can scale capacity & we learned while vSAN has numerous constraints which make scaling less attractive, Nutanix allows customers to scale storage capacity by adding individual drives, HCI node/s or storage only nodes without manual intervention. But all these advantages Nutanix has over vSAN don’t mean a thing unless the platform is also highly resilient to failures.

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3 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
published in Community Blog

Deduplication & Compression Comparison – Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN (Part 2)Blog

In part 1 of Deduplication & Compression Comparison – Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN, we talked about data reduction/efficiency technologies which apply further storage capacity efficiencies to the usable capacity. In part 2, we’ll look deeper at how, when and where the data reduction takes place. The following table shows the storage tiers the data reduction technologies are supported for both products: vSAN data reduction technologies are NOT applied in the high performance “cache” tier whereas they are with Nutanix where in-line compression for writes is on by default and Deduplication is supported. With vSAN, Deduplication and Compression are only applied once the data is cold and de-staged to the capacity tier. Going back to the reference I made earlier that VMware has consistently been saying that they do not support data reduction on hybrid intentionally for performance reasons. It begs the question then why they do not apply these valuable technologies to their “all-flash” cac

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
4 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
published in Community Blog

Usable Capacity Comparison – Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSANBlog

When considering Hyper-converged (HCI) products, often vendors, partners, value-added resellers & customers compare multiple solutions which of course makes perfect sense. During these comparisons, marketing material, in many cases “Tick-Box” style slides being compared and worse still being taken on face value which can lead to incorrect assumptions for critical architectural/sizing considerations such as capacity, resiliency and performance. Let me give you a simple example: A customer chooses/needs 16 nodes to meet their requirements and they choose the most popular form factor being a 4 node per 2 rack unit (4N2U) for the density, power efficiency and high performance. The nodes are populated with 6 x 1.92TB drives (All-Flash) as the cost of flash was justified for their use case/s. So we’re left with 16 hosts * 6 drives = 96 total drives 96 x 1.92TB drives with a formatted capacity of ~ 1.78TB = 170.88TB Then the customer compares vSAN and Nutanix which both use replication as

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
4 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
published in Community Blog

Scaling Storage Capacity – Nutanix vs VMware vSANBlog

In the first post in this series, I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware. We saw approximately 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. Next, we compared Deduplication & Compression technologies where we learned Nutanix has outright capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance advantages over vSAN. Then we looked at Erasure Coding where we learned the Nutanix implementation (called EC-X) is both dynamic & flexible by balancing performance and capacity efficiencies in real-time. vSAN, on the other hand, has a rudimentary “All or nothing” approach which can lead to higher front end impact and does not dynamically apply Erasure Coding to the most suitable data. Now let’s learn how both platforms can scale storage capacity: Here we see from a typical “tick-box” comparison that both platforms can add individual drives or additional nodes to scale capacity. As you’ve probably gathered from my previous f

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
4 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
published in Community Blog

Deduplication & Compression Comparison – Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN (Part 1)Blog

In a recent post, I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware and we saw approx 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. The next logical step is to compare data reduction/efficiency technologies that apply further storage capacity efficiencies to the usable capacity. In the previous post, I declared “a wash” between the two products for the sake of simplifying the usable capacity comparison. However, the reality is it’s not a wash as the Nutanix platform has the ability to deliver more usable capacity from the same HW. Combine that with a superior storage layer in the form of the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (ADSF) which compliments data reduction technologies, vSAN is bringing a spoon to a gunfight. In this post, we’ll look at Deduplication and Compression. Data reduction technologies such as Compression, Deduplication are proven technologies that provide varying levels of value to customers depending on their datase

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
4 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
published in Community Blog

Write I/O Path (FTT1/RF2) Comparison – Nutanix vs VMware vSANBlog

In this series, we’ve learned Nutanix provides more usable Capacity along with greater capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance when using Deduplication & Compression as well as Erasure Coding. We’ve also learned Nutanix provides far easier and superior storage scalability and greatly reduces the impact from Drive failures. We then switched gears and covered heterogeneous cluster support and learned how critical this is to an HCI platform’s ability to scale and deliver a strong ROI without rip and replace or the creation of silos. In this part of the blog series, we cover each product’s I/O Path for write operations with mirroring (a.k.a FTT1 for vSAN and RF2 for Nutanix). I will be publishing a separate detailed comparison between deploying software-defined storage “In-Kernel” vs “Controller VM”, this post will focus on how the traffic traverses and utilises the cluster. Let’s assume a brand new 4 node cluster for both vSAN and Nutanix ADSF and a single VM with

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
4 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
published in Community Blog

Heterogeneous Cluster Support – Nutanix vs VMware vSANBlog

In this series, we’ve learned Nutanix provides more usable Capacity along with greater capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance when using Deduplication & Compression as well as Erasure Coding. We’ve also learned Nutanix provides far easier and superior storage scalability and has greatly reduce impact from Drive failures. In this part, we cover heterogeneous cluster support as this is critical to an HCI platform's ability to scale and ensure ever changing customer requirements are being met/exceeded. Hardware capacity/performance continues to advance at a great pace if customers are forced to use uniform (homogeneous) clusters it will likely result in a higher TCO and slower ROI. That’s bad enough but it also means customers will not get to take advantage of the performance and density advantages of newer hardware without creating silos which lead to more inefficiency. After all we don’t want to be in the same position where we need to “rip and replace” hardwar

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
4 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
published in Community Blog

Erasure Coding Comparison – Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSANBlog

In a recent post, I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware. We saw approximately 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. Next up we compared Deduplication & Compression technologies where we learned Nutanix has outright capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance advantages over vSAN. Now we’ll look into Erasure Coding which is another valuable and proven technology that can drive further capacity and potentially performance efficiencies, complimentary to Deduplication and Compression. As I’ve highlighted in the previous articles, “Tick-Box” style slides commonly lead to incorrect assumptions for critical architectural/sizing considerations such as capacity, resiliency and performance. This problem is also applicable to Erasure Coding, Let me give you a simple example: The above table shows Erasure Coding / RAID 5&6 are supported by Nutanix and VMware vSAN. With this information, customers/partners

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
4 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
posted in AHV Virtualization

VMware vNetworking NIC Teaming & Failover Recommendation

The following shows the available Load Balacing options currently available in vSphere 5.5 along with the recommended configuration for Nutanix environments for both Virtual Distributed Switches (VDS) and Virtual Standard Switches (VSS). NIC Teaming & Failover Recommendation

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5 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
posted in AHV Virtualization

Best practices for VMware vSphere HA

The following tables show the recommended configuration of VMware High Availability. Admission Control The below table shows the percentage values required for N+1 through N+4 availability for vSphere clusters of up to 32 (The Current maximum cluster size for vSphere 5.5). The green highlighted values represent recommended values based on the level of availability. In Summary the recommendations are: Cluster of =N+1 redundancy Cluster of >8 & =N+2 redundancy Cluster of >16 & =N+3 redundancy Cluster of >24 & =N+4 redundancy Host Isolation Response and Advanced Settings

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3 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
posted in AHV Virtualization

VMware Storage DRS (SDRS)

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

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
9 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
posted in AHV Virtualization

VMware Network I/O Control (NIOC)

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

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
9 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
posted in AHV Virtualization

Best Practices for VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

The following tables show the recommended configuration of VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). DRS (General) DRS Rules DRS Distributed Power Management (DPM)

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
9 years ago
joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
joshodgersNutanix Employee
posted in AHV Virtualization

VMware Storage I/O Control (SIOC)

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

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joshodgers
Nutanix Employee
9 years ago

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