Tag Archives: AHV

What’s .NEXT 2017 – AHV Turbo Mode

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Back in 2015 I wrote a series titled “Why Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor” which covered off many reasons why AHV was and would become a force to be reckoned with.

In short, AHV is the only purpose built hypervisor for hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and it has continued to evolve in terms of functionality and maturity while becoming a popular choice for customers.

How popular you ask? Nutanix officially reported 23% adoption as a percentage of nodes sold in our recent third quarter fiscal year 2017 financial highlights.

Over the last couple of years I have personally worked with numerous customers who have adopted AHV especially when it comes to business critical applications such as MS SQL, MS Exchange.

One such example is Shinsegae who is a major retailer running 50,000 MS Exchange mailboxes on Nutanix using AHV as the hypervisor. Shinsegae also runs MS SQL workloads on the same platform which has now become the standard platform for all workloads.

This is just one example of AHV proven in the field and at scale to have the functionality, resiliency and performance to support business critical workloads.

But at Nutanix we’re always striving to deliver more value to our customers, and one area where there is a lot of confusion and misinformation is around the efficiency of the storage I/O path for Nutanix.

The Nutanix Controller VM (CVM) runs on top of multiple hypervisors and delivers excellent performance, but there is always room for improvement. With our extensive experience with in-kernel and virtual machine based storage solutions, we quickly learned that the biggest bottleneck is the hypervisor itself.

Next2017TraditionalHypervisorBottleneck

With technology such as NVMe becoming mainstream and 3D XPoint not far behind, we looked for a way to give customers the best value from these premium storage technologies.

That’s where AHV Turbo mode comes into play.

Next2017AHVTurboMode

AHV Turbo mode is a highly optimised I/O path (shortened and widened) between the User VM (UVM) and Nutanix stargate (I/O engine).

These optimisation have been achieved by moving the I/O path in-kernel.

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Just kidding! In-kernel being better for performance is just a myth, Nutanix has achieved major performance improvements by doing the heavy lifting of the I/O data path in User Space, which is the opposite of the much hyped “In-kernel”.

The below diagram show the UVM’s I/O path now goes via Frodo (a.k.a Turbo Mode) which runs in User Space (not In-kernel) and onto stargate within the Controller VM).

Next2017FrodoDatapath2

Another benefit of AHV and Turbo mode is that it eliminates the requirement for administrators to configure multiple PVSCSI adapters and spread virtual disks across those controllers. When adding virtual disks to an AHV virtual machine, disks automatically benefit from Nutanix SCSI and block multi-queue ensuring enhanced I/O performance for both reads and writes.

The multi-queue I/O flow is handled by multiple frodo threads (Turbo mode) threads and passed onto stargate.

Next2017FrodoUpdated

As the above diagram shows, Nutanix with Turbo mode eliminates the bottlenecks associated with legacy hypervisors, one such example is VMFS datastores which required VAAI Atomic Test and Set (ATS) to minimise the impact of locking when the numbers of VMs per datastore increased (e.g. >25). With AHV and Turbo mode, every vdisk has always had it’s own queue (not one per datastore or container) but frodo enhances this by adding a per-vcpu queue at the virtual controller level.

How much performance improvement you ask? Well I ran a quick test which showed amazing performance improvements even on a more than four year old IVB NX3450 which only has 2 x SATA SSDs per node and with the memory read cache disabled (i.e.: No reads from RAM).

A quick summary of the findings were:

  1. 25% lower CPU usage for the similar sequential write performance (2929MBps vs 2964MBps)
  2. 27.5% higher sequential read performance (9512MBps vs 7207MBps)
  3. A 62.52% increase in random read IOPS (510121 vs 261265)
  4. A 33.75% increase in random write IOPS (336326 vs 239193)

So with Turbo Mode, Nutanix is using less CPU and RAM to drive higher IOPS & throughput and doing so in user space.

Intel published “Code Sample: Hello World with Storage Performance Development Kit and NVMe Driver” which states “When comparing the SPDK userspace NVMe driver to an approach using the Linux Kernel, the overhead latency is up to 10x lower”.

This is just one of many examples which shows userspace is clearly not the bottleneck that some people/vendors have tried to claim with the “in-kernel” is faster nonsense I have previously written about.

With Turbo mode, AHV is the highest performance (throughput / IOPS) and lowest latency hypervisor supported by Nutanix!

But wait there’s more! Not only is AHV now the highest performing hypervisor, it’s also used by our largest customer who has more than 1750 nodes running 100% AHV!

Next20171650Nodes

Dare2Compare Part 7 : HPE provides superior performance to Nutanix

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In part 4, we covered off a series of failure scenarios and how the HPE/SVT product responds and the same scenarios and how Nutanix responds which clearly proved HPEs claim of having superior resiliency than Nutanix to be false and I would argue even highlighted how much more resilient the Nutanix platform is.

Now in part 7, I will address two false claims (below) that Nutanix has lower performance to HPE SVT and that Nutanix doesn’t post performance results.

Tweet #1 – HPE Simplivity 380 provides superior performance than Nutanix

Problem number 1 with HPE’s claim: Their URL is dead… so we cannot review what scenario/s they are claiming HPE/SVT is higher performing.

HPEBrokenURL

Before we discuss Nutanix performance, HPE have repeatably made further claims that Nutanix does not post performance results and have further complained there are no 3rd party published performance testing results.

One recent example of these claim is shown below which states: “I know you don’t publish performance results”

Nutanix does in fact publish performance data, which is validated by:

  • 3rd parties partners/vendors such as Microsoft and LoginVSI
  • Independant 3rd parties such as Enterprise Storage Group (ESG) and;
  • Internally created material

The following is a few examples of published performance data.

  1. Nutanix Citrix XenDesktop Validated by LoginVSI

In fairness to HPE, this is a recent example so let’s take a look at Nutanix track record with LoginVSI.

LoginVSIBenchmarks

Here we can see six examples dating back to Jan 2013 where Nutanix has made performance results with LoginVSI available.

2. Nutanix Reference Architecture: Citrix Validated Solution for Nutanix

This was a jointly developed solution between Citrix and Nutanix and was the first of it’s kind globally and was made available in 2014.

3. Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) – Storage

Nutanix has for many years been working with business critical applications such as MS Exchange and has published two ESRP solutions.

The first is for 24,000 Users on Hyper-V and the second is for 30k Users on AHV.

NutanixESRPScreenshot

Interestingly, while HPE/SVT have a reference architecture for MS Exchange, they do not have an ESRP for the platform and this is because they cannot provide a supportable configuration due to lack of multi-protocol support.

Nutanix on the other hand has Microsoft supportable configurations for ESXi, Hyper-V and AHV.

4. ESG Performance Analysis: Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure

This report is an example of a 3rd party who has validated performance data for VDI, MS SQL and MS Exchange.

As we can clearly see with the above examples, Nutanix does and has for a long time provided publicly available performance data from many sources including independant 3rd parties.

Moving onto the topic of Nutanix vs HPE/SVT performance, I feel it’s importaint to first review my thoughts on this topic in detail in an article I wrote back in 2015 titled: Peak performance vs real world performance.

In short, I can get any two products and make one look better than the other by simply designing tests which highlight strengths or weaknesses of either product. This is why many vendors have a clause in the EULA preventing publishing of performance data without written permission.

One of the most importaint factors when it comes to performance is sizing. An incorrectly sized environment will likely not perform within acceptable levels, and this goes for any product on the market.

For next generation platforms like Nutanix, customers are protected from under-sizing because of the platforms ability to scale by adding additional nodes. In 2016 I wrote the post titled “Scale out performance testing with Nutanix Storage Only Nodes” which shows how adding additional storage only nodes to a Nutanix cluster increased IOPS by approx 2x while lowering read and write latency.

What is more impressive than the excellent performance improvements is this was done without any changes to the configuration of the cluster or virtual machines.

The same test performed on HPE/SVT and other SDS/HCI products cannot double the IOPS or decrease read/write latency as the SVT platform is not a distributed storage fabric.

Here in lies a major advantage to Nutanix. In the event Nutanix performance was no longer sufficient, or another platform was higher performance, say per node, then Nutanix can (if/when required) scale performance without rip/replace or reconfiguration to meet almost any performance requirement. The performance per node is not a limiting factor for Nutanix like it is with HPE/SVT and other platforms.

What about performance for customers who are maximising the ROI from existing physical servers using Acropolis Block Services. The benefits just keep coming. A server connected using ABS will improve its IOPS, latency and throughput when additional nodes are added to the Nutanix cluster automatically as the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (ADSF) increases the number of paths dynamically so all Controller VMs in the cluster service ABS traffic as shown in the tweet below.

As such, regardless of if workloads are virtual or physical, when using Nutanix, performance can always be improved non-disruptively and without compromising the resiliency of the cluster by simply adding nodes (which BTW is a one click operation).

Summary:

  1. Nutanix has been publishing performance results through independant 3rd parties and partners for many years.
  2. Nutanix has validated solutions from Microsoft, LoginVSI and Citrix to name a few.
  3. Nutanix performance can scale well beyond HPE/SVT for both virtual and physical workloads
  4. Nutanix provides validated performance data across multiple hypervisors
  5. HPE/SVT have provided no evidence, scenarios or references to SVT being a higher performance platform.

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Dare2Compare Part 5 : Nutanix can’t claim single screen management w/o extra fees or GUIs

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If you’ve not read Parts 1,2,3 and 4, we have already proven several claims by HPE Simplivity regarding Nutanix to be false, as well as explored the misleading way in which HPE SVT promote data efficiency.

The fun continues and in Part 5 we will discuss HPE’s claim that Nutanix does not have a “single screen management” (by which I assume they mean Single Pane of Glass) without extra fees or GUIs.

Unfortunately the URL was not working in the HPE tweet, I responded and made HPE aware of this so I could review specifically what they are claiming, but the link at the time of writing is still not working.

It’s funny HPE SVT mention this because Nutanix is the only HCI product which has a built in, distributed, scalable and multi hypervisor management solution.

The fact Nutanix has its own interface is a huge advantage especially because Nutanix is not dependant on any 3rd parties (e.g.: VMware vCenter) to install/configure and manage our platform. This reduces cost,complexity,risk,operational tasks and the list goes on.

Nutanix “PRISM Element” HTML 5 GUI is built into every Nutanix solution regardless of hypervisor or underlying hardware. The below screenshot shows the built in management capabilities to upgrade the Nutanix Acropolis (AOS) storage layer, the built in, scale out file server, the hypervisor (ESXi, Hyper-V or AHV) as well as upgrade Firmware, our Container support and our built in cluster imaging tool, Foundation.

PrismUogradeSoftware

This means regardless of hypervisor, many of the critical tasks can be performed straight within PRISM and does not require the long in the tooth VMware Update Manager (VUM) which is long overdue for an overhaul. In fact, Nutanix supports four (4) hypervisors using our management tool (PRISM) whereas HPE SVT only has GA support for ESXi.

For customers using Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), 100% of the management can be performed within PRISM Element and central management of multiple clusters is performed through PRISM Central.

AHV comes with all Nutanix solutions at no extra cost regardless of hardware choice (including HPE Proliant). This means customers enjoy the benefits of the next generation hypervisor, designed and built for HCI and Enterprise Cloud.

Unlike HPE SVT for example, Nutanix does not have a limit of 8 nodes per datacenter or 32 per “federation”, PRISM element can support a cluster of any size (currently no support limits) and PRISM central manages all the clusters.

Nutanix management is not tied to or more importantly dependant on VMware vCenter or any other hypervisor management tool, which adds to the resiliency and simplicity of the Nutanix platform. PRISM automatically scales in both performance and resiliency as a cluster expands to ensure consistent performance for system administrators. This avoids the complexity of designing/installing and maintaining a highly available vCenter solution which also uses additional compute and storage resources.

Summary:

  1. Nutanix PRISM Element GUI is built in and comes included with every Nutanix deployment
  2. Nutanix PRISM is not limited by the number of nodes it can manage
  3. PRISM Central is used to manage multiple Nutanix clusters centrally if required but is not mandatory.
  4. Nutanix provides at no cost the next generation hypervisor (AHV) which has 100% of all management performed within PRISM GUIs.
  5. AHV eliminates the requirement for Hypervisor licensing (e.g.: VMware vSphere) which actually reduces overall costs, this is unique to Nutanix.
  6. PRISM supports 4 hypervisors (ESXi , Hyper-V, AHV and XenServer) which delivers a consistent management interface for multi-hypervisor environments which are becoming more and more common.

Many of the above points are unique to Nutanix and have been designed and built to be a truly webscale platform, not a ROBO/SMB or <32 node solution. Nutanix can start small and continue to scale to any size, with the PRISM Element management stack automatically scaling to suit as nodes are added.

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