Hi,
We are thinking of building a separate VmWare Horizon view cluster and make the Nutanix-cluster used just for server loads.
We have a few scenarios of creating this. And one is to buy 4 new vmware hosts and connect them to the existing nutanix cluster with iSCSI, this is just because we have enough storage already in the existing cluster.
My question is, will it be a bottleneck to use iSCSI? We will run about 260 Win7/Win10 task-workers VDI clients.
Regards
Tobias
Solved
Use iSCSI for a VDI environment
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Best answer by Jon
you can get Nutanix nodes with very light storage configurations, but still run Nutanix to do CPU / memory. That way, they will add some SSD and storage controller capacity to the cluster, and everything will work smoothly, especially migration, as you could add the hosts to the Nutanix cluster, make them their own VMware cluster, and just compute vMotion them over to the new hosts. Easy as that.
I dont work in Sales, but if you'd like to play around with some configuration ideas, drop me an email at jon at nutanix dot com and I'd be happy to put our heads together on the technical bits.
RE VAAI
What I'm talking about is VAAI for block storage, which all VM's use in one fashion or another when you run a VM on a VMFS volume. Specifically a VAAI primative called ATS, we do not support (yet) on ABS. That has to do with array assisted LUN locking in VMFS. Before ATS was introduced, LUN locking was a huge problem in VDI and server virtualization.
Also, if you run VM's on an ABS volume, we lose all ability to control those VM's at a per VM level, so you will see the VM's "drop out of" prism reporting.
Lastly, a single ABS volume uses one oplog volume, whereas each VM virtual disk uses one oplog volume. This has to do with how write caches work within Nutanix. This means that you're going to go from a good amount of write cache per VM, to drastically less write cache shared across many VM's on an ABS volume.
Net Net, while ABS technically could do the job, it's really meant for different use cases on bare metal servers, or scale out storage on high end database workloads (VM or physical)
View originalI dont work in Sales, but if you'd like to play around with some configuration ideas, drop me an email at jon at nutanix dot com and I'd be happy to put our heads together on the technical bits.
RE VAAI
What I'm talking about is VAAI for block storage, which all VM's use in one fashion or another when you run a VM on a VMFS volume. Specifically a VAAI primative called ATS, we do not support (yet) on ABS. That has to do with array assisted LUN locking in VMFS. Before ATS was introduced, LUN locking was a huge problem in VDI and server virtualization.
Also, if you run VM's on an ABS volume, we lose all ability to control those VM's at a per VM level, so you will see the VM's "drop out of" prism reporting.
Lastly, a single ABS volume uses one oplog volume, whereas each VM virtual disk uses one oplog volume. This has to do with how write caches work within Nutanix. This means that you're going to go from a good amount of write cache per VM, to drastically less write cache shared across many VM's on an ABS volume.
Net Net, while ABS technically could do the job, it's really meant for different use cases on bare metal servers, or scale out storage on high end database workloads (VM or physical)
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