Why Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor – Part 7 – Agility (Time to value)

Deploying other hypervisors and management solutions typically requires considerable design effort and expertise in order to ensure consistent performance and to help minimize risk of downtime while enabling as much agility as possible. Acropolis management requires almost no design at all as the In-built-in management is optimized and highly available out-of-the-box. This enables much faster deployment of AHV than any other hypervisor and associated management components.

Regardless of the starting size on an AHV-based environment, all management, Analysis, Data Protection and BC/DR components are automatically deployed and suitably sized. Regardless of the AHV cluster, no management design effort is required. This results in a very fast (typically <1hr for a single block deployment) time to value.

AHV also provides numerous features which ensure customers can deploy solutions in a timely manner:

  • In-Built Management & Analytics

The fact that all tools required for cluster management are deployed automatically with the cluster means time to value is not dependant on design/deployment/validation of these tools. There isn’t even a need to install a client to manage AHV, it is simply accessed via a Web Browser.

  • Out of the box hardened configuration with In-Built Security/Compliance Auditing

Being hardened by default removes the risk of security flaws being introduced during implementation phase while the automated auditing ensures in the event security settings are modified during business as usual operations that the setting/s are returned to the required security profile.

  • Intelligent cloning

The Distributed Storage Fabric combined with AHV to allow near instant clones of a Virtual Machine. This feature works regardless of the power state of the VM, so it’s not restricted to VMs which are powered off as with other hypervisors.

For a demo of this capability see: Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor acli cloning operations

Note: Cloning can be performed via Prism or acli (Acropolis CLI)

Summary:

  1. Minimal design/implementation effort for AHV management is required
  2. Where Multi-cluster central management is required, only a single VM is required (Prism Central) which is deployed as a virtual appliance
  3. No additional appliances/components to install for Analytics, Data Protection, Replication or Management High Availability
  4. No Subject Matter Experts required for an optimal Acropolis platform deployment

Back to the Index

Why Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor – Part 1 – Introduction

Before I go into the details of why Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation of hypervisor, I wanted to quickly cover what the Xtreme Computing Platform is made up of and clarify the product names which will be discussed in this series.

In the below picture we can see Prism which is a HTML 5 based user interface sits on top of Acropolis which is a Distributed Storage and Application Mobility across multi-hypervisors and public clouds.

At the bottom we can see the currently support hardware platforms from Supermicro and Dell (OEM) but recently Nutanix has announced an OEM with Lenovo which expands customer choice further.

Please do not confuse Acropolis with Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) as these are two different components, Acropolis is the platform which can run vSphere, Hyper-V and/or the Acropolis Hypervisor which will be referred to in this series as AHV.
nutanixxcp2

I want to be clear before I get into the list of why AHV is the next generation hypervisor that Nutanix is a hypervisor and cloud agnostic platform designed to give customers flexibility & choice.

The goal of this series is not trying to convince customers who are happy with their current environment/s to change hypervisors.

The goal is simple, to educate current and prospective customers (as well as the broader market) about some of the advantages / values of AHV which is one of the hypervisors (Hyper-V, ESXi and AHV) supported on the Nutanix XCP.

Here are my list of reasons as to why the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform based on AHV is the next generation hypervisor/management platform and why you should consider the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform (with Acropolis Hypervisor a.k.a AHV) as the standard platform for your datacenter.

Why Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor

Part 2 – Simplicity
Part 3 – Scalability
Part 4 – Security
Part 5 – Resiliency
Part 6 – Performance
Part 7 – Agility (Time to Value)
Part 8 – Analytics (Performance & Capacity Management)
Part 9 – Functionality (Coming Soon)
Part 10 – Cost

NOTE:  For a high level summary of this series, please see the accompanying post by Steve Kaplan, VP of Client Strategy at Nutanix (@ROIdude)