Tag Archives: agnostic

What’s .NEXT 2016 – ESXi Management from PRISM

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Nutanix has always been designed to be hypervisor agnostic, and being the first and only HCI platform on the market to support VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM/AHV means we do not want to tie the management interface to any one platform.

In my opinion this is a huge advantage for many reasons including:

  1. Being able to provide a consistent management interface across hypervisors
  2. Not being dependant on 3rd party management components/interfaces
  3. Building our platforms management layer (PRISM) in a fully distributed and highly available manner.

However while Nutanix AHV solution is entirely managed by PRISM, customers who run ESXi are still experiencing pain due to having to use the vSphere Web Client for some tasks.

This is why it was importaint for Nutanix to provide the ability to perform ESXi VM Operations from Prism (as shown below) while providing the ability to centrally manage all Nutanix clusters running ESXi or AHV to minimise the dependancy on the the vSphere Web Client.

ManageESXifromPRISM

At this stage the new ESXi management capabilities of PRISM does not remove the requirement for vCenter so this is still a single point of failure for vSphere customers.

Enhanced functionality to further reduce the dependancy on the vSphere Web Client are also expected in a future release, but for now, many of the day to day VM operations will make life easier for vSphere customers.

Related .NEXT 2016 Posts

Not just Hypervisor Agnostic, Hypervisor Version Agnostic!

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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.)

Why is this important?

This past week I was discussing with some government customers how they can perform upgrades of NOS using our 1-Click upgrade, and I was asked a similar question on several occasions:

“What version of ESXi do we need?”

The reason the customers asked this question is because for large environments, changing/upgrading the hypervisor can be a significant project requiring Design/project management and implementation labor which could cost huge amounts of money when the only goal is to increase storage performance or functionality.

NOS can be upgraded independent of the Hypervisor (and without performing a single vMotion or putting hosts into maintenance mode). This ensures that customers who cannot or do not wish to upgrade ESXi for any reason, continue to benefit from the ever increasing performance and feature set of NOS.

While hyper-converged solutions like Nutanix combine the compute/hypervisor layer and the storage layer delivering numerous benefits over traditional 3-tier architecture, it’s a significant advantage to be able to independently upgrade the compute or storage layer.

This is something Nutanix delivers which is just one of the many ways we make our solution “Uncompromisingly Simple”.

Oh, did I mention NOS also provides support for 1-Click Hypervisor and Firmware upgrades ? 🙂

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