Tag Archives: hypervisor

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

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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)

NOS & Hypervisor Upgrade Resiliency in PRISM

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I have had several prospective and existing customers say how much they like the One Click upgrade PRISM provides for NOS, Hypervisor’s, Firmware and NCC. These customers typically also ask questions about what happens if they perform a One Click upgrade and the cluster is for any reason degraded such as from a drive, node, block failure.

Before starting a One Click upgrade, NOS always performs Pre-Upgrade checks to ensure the cluster is healthy. In the event the cluster is not fully resilient the upgrade process will be aborted as shown below:

AcropolisUpgrade

 

In the above case, the cause of the cluster being “under-replicated” (meaning the configured Resiliency Factor of 2 or 3 was not in compliance) was due to the fact NOS had just be upgraded on the cluster and one of the nodes had not yet come back online when the One Click Upgrade for the Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) was started.

Other situations where the cluster may be under replication is following a HDD, SSD, Node or Block failure. In all these cases, the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) will restore resiliency assuming sufficient rebuilt capacity is available in the Storage Pool. This is why Nutanix always recommends clusters be designed with at least N+1 available capacity to ensure rebuild capacity exists and the cluster can automatically self heal.

As a general rule it is recommended to wait for approx 10 mins between NOS and Hypervisor upgrades to avoid these kind of issues, or you can simply check the Home screen of PRISM and ensure the Heath status is Good as shown below:

HealthGood

and that the Data Resiliency Status is “OK” as shown below.DataResiliencyOk

Both the Health and Data Resiliency status are Hypervisor agnostic and appear on the Home screen of all Nutanix deployments.

If both the Health Status and Data Resiliency are good then you can go ahead and start the upgrade and it should complete successfully.

Summary:

PRISM will not start an upgrade of NOS or the Hypervisor if the cluster is degraded, so you can rest assured that even if you attempt an upgrade by accident when the cluster is degraded, NOS will protect you.

Related Posts:

1. Scaling Hyper-converged solutions – Compute only.

2. Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) I/O Failover & Load Balancing

3. Advanced Storage Performance Monitoring with Nutanix

4. Nutanix – Improving Resiliency of Large Clusters with Erasure Coding (EC-X)

5. Nutanix – Erasure Coding (EC-X) Deep Dive

6. Acropolis: VM High Availability (HA)

7. Acropolis: Scalability

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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