So with the latest enhancements to Nutanix which have arrived so far and what’s coming in the next release with Asterix, Nutanix has stepped up their game to go beyond regular HCI which they have already done for a while now. So the purpose of this post is just to give an overview of what kind of Storage functionality you can actually do with Nutanix.
Starting with the introduction of volume groups they can present a virtual disk as a iscsi share directly to a virtual machine which would also benefit from the distributed storage system underneath. Nutanix also introduced File Service which was a highly-redudant, scaleable file server solution, which would present itself using SMB 2.1 protocol using an addiotional service VM but still manageable from PRISM
And also Nutanix since they support multiple hypervisors can present itself using SMB or NFS protocol directly to the hypervisor (VMware or Hyper-V) but also they can use their own hypervisor where management is bundled in directly.
So far the only issue with Volume Groups was that it didn’t support physical machines, until they now announced Acroplis Block Service, which is an further developed Volume Group which now allows us to present out storage directly to physical servers from within PRISM using iSCSI, which also leverages the distributed storage fabric and all the other features as well.
Nutanix also has other options for instance we can do asyncronous or syncronous replication from one Nutanix cluster to another, we can also integrate with either AWS or Azure to do DR or Backup.
Also this week Nutanix also introduced a feature which is a hypervisor agnostic change block tracking feature which is directly available from within the REST API, which would allow partners to get incremental data from the storage layer (Nutanix) instead of the Hypervisor (Hyper-V 2012 R2 which does not have any CBT function) or VMware ESXi which has had some issues with it over the last months. Also it will allow Nutanix to make it easier to support other Hypervisors and still allow backup vendors to more easily integrate to do backup.
So with all these different options available it might be difficult to get the full picture, luckily I’m great with Visio, so therefore I decided to add this drawning which might help full the gapes on some of the storage features included in Nutanix
