The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about emerging technologies and products in the storage, data management and information security industries. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab's expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by Nutanix.
Server Virtualization Challenges
Server virtualization is driving widespread and fundamental change. IT organizations struggle to meet exponentially increasing demand for network and storage resources in support of virtualized deployments. Network administrators struggle with hardware and tools that were not designed for virtual technology and find it challenging to map VLANs and other networking segmentation to a virtual infrastructure. Storage administrators cite the ever increasing storage requirements for an exploding virtual environment and challenges with managing growth to meet demand. ESG
research discovered that better integration among server, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies is the key development required for the continued adoption of virtualization.1
Figure 1. Infrastructure Requirements for Virtualization
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2010. 1 Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization , November 2010.
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From a server infrastructure perspective, which of the following developments do you believe need to take place in order to enable more widespread server
virtualization usage in your organization? (Percent of respondents, N=350, multiple
ESG Lab Review
Nutanix Complete Cluster
Date: August 2011 Author: Ginny Roth, Lab Engineer and Analyst
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Abstract: This ESG Lab review documents hands-on testing of the Nutanix Complete Cluster, highlighting its ease of use and support for enterprise class data management in virtual environments.
Clearly, networking and storage needs and integration are creating headaches for IT organizations as they look to provide cost effective solutions for virtual environments. Sizing the bandwidth required to support a virtual server environment is often an issue with 24% of networking professionals citing it as a primary concern with their organization’s virtual usage. Additionally, storage administrators viewed capital costs of new storage infrastructure (36%) and scalability problems (25%) as top concerns in supporting virtualization.2
In response to these concerns, integrated computing platforms have garnered attention. These solutions promise to alleviate networking and storage challenges associated with virtualization by combining these services into one platform, eliminating the loosely coupled integration designs that exist today. While only 10% of organizations surveyed by ESG have already deployed integrated computing platforms, two-thirds expressed some level of interest in the technology, suggesting a new trend in the design and deployment of dynamic virtual environments.3
The Solution: Nutanix Complete Cluster
Nutanix introduces a new integrated, scale-out computing platform that delivers server, hypervisor, and storage components together in one system. It provides a building block, called Nutanix Comple
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te Block, which brings compute and storage together. Complete Cluster is a seamless cluster of these blocks that enables organizations to scale out incrementally from a single block to as many as they need, but still manage a single, unified system. Four server nodes are included in each 2U block and are built to host and store virtual machines with a standard hypervisor running on each node. A Nutanix Controller Virtual Machine on each host manages storage for virtual machines on the host. Controller VMs work together to manage storage across the cluster as a seamless pool. Standard VMware features like vMotion, are supported by Nutanix Complete Cluster.
Each server in the cluster contains a mix of SSD (PCIe and SATA) and SATA hard drives that can be pooled as a single storage resource. Virtual disks (vDisks) can be created from available storage and then presented as a global iSCSI target to any virtual machine providing vMotion capability without the need for a SAN.
Figure 2. Nutanix Complete Cluster
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2 Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.
3 Source: ESG Research Brief, Integrated Computing Trends, March 2011.太阳
影子定位技术 Nutanix delivers the following features in a simple to deploy, integrated appliance:
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∙Command Center, a web-based management console that provides enterprise class features for managing both compute and storage in a simple to use interface.
∙Cluster capabilities and data replication to provide high availability for disk and node failover.
∙Heat-Optimized Tiering with configurable metrics to age and migrate data to lower storage tiers for optimal disk IO performance.
∙Support for snapshots to create point-in-time copies of data for quick recovery.
∙Clone technology to provide rapid provisioning of virtual machines for multiple use cases such as virtual desktop deployment and production server copies for development environments.
∙Support for VMware enterprise features such as vMotion, Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS), high availability failover, and server migration.
ESG Lab validated the Complete Cluster solut ion’s ease of use and its support for virtual environments during two days of hands-on testing at Nutanix’s headquarters in San Jose, California.
Ease of Use and Enterprise Class Data Management
Nutanix’s Complete Cluster solution is built from Nutanix Com plete Blocks, which are Intel-based appliances, each containing four nodes. Each of these nodes contains a combination of PCIe-SSD (Fusion-io), SATA SSD, and hard disk drives. The appliance tested by ESG Lab contained five SATA hard drives, one PCIe SSD drive, and one SATA SSD drive for each node. Initially, the appliance configuration contained three nodes in the cluster, with a fourth on standby to add later to test scalability. As shown in Figure 3, testing was conducted in an environment that consisted of one Nutanix appliance and a client laptop to connect to the appliance for management tasks.
Figure 3. ESG Lab Test Bed
ESG Lab Tested
ESG Lab used a web browser to connect to the Command Center and examined the features available for the cluster. As shown in Figure 4, the dashboard presents a comprehensive picture of the Complete Cluster. Hosts are listed under both the storage and compute sections. With this configuration, ESG Lab was able to examine both the storage and virtual server resources associated with a host. In addition, multiple management tasks are available including creating and editing storage pools and containers for logical storage allocation.
Figure 4. Nutanix Command Center
ESG Lab tested the ability to create a vDisk for use in a Linux virtual server installation. A vDisk is a subset of available storage within a container that is exported to VMs in the cluster. Figure 5 shows the parameters ESG Lab used to successfully create a vDisk for use by a new virtual machine. Using a vCenter management console, ESG Lab created a new virtual image for an Unbuntu Linux installation using the newly created vDisk.
Figure 5. Create vDisk for Linux Virtual Machine
Next, ESG Lab tested the clone functionality of the Complete Cluster. Cloning allows writable copies of virtual servers to be created to quickly provision new server resources when needed. One Windows 7 and one Ubuntu Linux virtual image were used to test cloning functionality. ESG Lab opened an SSH session to a vSphere management assistant (VMA) used to execute CLI commands for the cluster. Using the CLI command, ESG Lab was able to create 20 clones of the Windows 7 server and five clones of the Ubuntu Linux server. The cloning process included creating writable snapshots of the gold image, provisioning new clone VMs in ESXi, and connecting each clone VM to a vDisk snapshot. In the end, the user gets a fully functional virtual machine with a vDisk attached to it. ESG Lab confirmed that the entire copy process for both images lasted approximately 20 minutes. As Figure 6 shows, ESG Lab used the vCenter console to validate that all 25 clones were created.
Figure 6. Create Windows and Linux Clones
ESG Lab next examined adding a node to the cluster. During the cloning process, ESG Lab created a new node in vCenter to be added to the cluster. After the clone test finished, ESG Lab stopped all running virtual server and cluster services to add the new node. Using the CLI on the VMA, ESG Lab used the command “host add svm-ip=172.16.8.87” to add the host to the cluster. Figure 7 shows the new node successfully added to the cluster.
ESG Lab then used the Command Center GUI to verify creation of the new host and added its SSD and SATA drives to the existing storage pool.
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