Hyperconverged Home Lab Part 4.x

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frogtech

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Nutanix CE has converged storage in right?

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msvirtualguy

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Nutanix CE has converged storage in right?
Community Edition is a prepackaged Nutanix Solution. The architecture from Production is not that far off, still uses our CVM, and our Acropolis Hypervisor, however, we wanted to get this into the hands of a lot of folks that do not have enterprise grade hardware so instead of PCI-E passthrough we do LUN passthrough which is where you're limited in performance. There are also a few features that would not work with CE like our Foundation process which is the automation stack for cluster installation and scale out...but 95% of the features/functionality of Prod Nutanix + AHV are there. Also, this is community supported so you don't get Production support..etc.
 

frogtech

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What prevents the company from just offering the production platform for free similar to scaleIO? I am not saying the products are similar. And I know EMC is more than just that single piece of software.

Just curious as most users here are using liquidated enterprise gear and new stuff too obviously and employer equipment. I would think most of your sales are from being contracted to do deployments, provide certified hardware, and offer SLAs.

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msvirtualguy

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What prevents the company from just offering the production platform for free similar to scaleIO?
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Actually, when you look in totality most folks don't have enterprise gear, but they have virtual environments to run nested workloads, which you can do with CE, they have NUCs and Desktops and Laptops...etc. It's about getting it into the hands without having to "manage" an HCL
 

NISMO1968

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Oct 19, 2013
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I don't really understand why every single NTNX employee has to be arrogant and so disrespectful to everybody who's not buying into his company stuff. Is this sort of a "corporate culture"? Whatever...

1) This is dis-focus at best. Problem: You don't have resources to get into kernel for all big four hypervisors? Good news at least you don't argue you should be doing that :) Solution: Pick up one major hypervisor and make your stuff shine on it. If you run out of money cutting checks to R&D your management can fire some pseudo-technical marketing people FUD-ing everybody around how great your stuff is. Microsoft has S2D now, Azure Stack is on the way with Dell, HPE & others, your relationship with VMware isn't in a great shape... Get KVM and kick shit out of it! Simple :)

2) What you have is a joke compared to what InfoSight does. From what you say about what you THINK Nimble is doing it's clear you never run it into production and never talked to anybody who did it either... TL;DR: They don't report just storage related metrics! They provide telemetry for everything.

3) Well... Two things. First of all your company is already a punching bag when it comes to how much vCPUs you need for CVMs. I can understand: polling, slow Java back-end, VM on the I/O path etc. So you have some great chance to actually reduce amount of CPU you steal from your customers' production and make your customers happy. Why don't you want to do that? Second, you don't need extra hardware only if your IOPS are small, you can't really serve low-latency NVMe IOPS with inline dedupe having only Xeons. See, you aren't Pure, you can't use CPUs for your own needs only, there are poor little customers running their VMs nearby :)

4) That's the only place where I won't argue: you did a great job. Up to a point when you realize it's all closed source...

Thanks for your offering, I don't really need NTNX bible b/c part of my job is actually evaluating different hardware & software options to see how well they can integrate into what real big customers already have. TL;DR: I have to hack in into what you sell way deeper than a typical customer usually does.

Best of luck to you and your company! Whatever you do now NoSAN disruption back in 2012 was a great story to start telling :)

I love when folks make these claims, comedy at it's best. Let's tackle these shall we.

1. We chose not to "integrate" like VMware in kernel module for the very simple reason of choice and no lock-in. We are the only HCI Platform to allow all 4 major hypervisors, plus Docker, plus Block Services to Bare Metal plus File Services etc. You get the point. Choice is king. No lock-in is king. Gone are the days of the incumbants taking control of your lives. Now you have freedom. BTW, enjoy updating the Hypervisor to update the storage stack then possibly converting your filesystem with live data to take advantage of the next group of features that we've already had. It's fun being the leader.

2. We have Pulse for proactive support, Prism includes rich Analytics and Trending Analysis out of the box along with I/O metrics..etc. We do not look at just storage, btw, like Nimble we are looking and analyzing on the entire platform, Host, VM, Storage, Disk, etc. BTW, we also have machine learning and our own X-Fit algorithm that's patented for Insight into workloads and Capacity MGMT and soon a ton of other features.

3. Why do I need hardware dedupe? There is no advantage here when Intel XEON CPU architecture can accelerate these workloads very easily which we do with each CVM, GLOBALLY across the Cluster in true Distributed fashion. Let's talk Data Reduction shall we? Inline and Post Process Compression using two different algorithms, inline and post process adaptive Dedupe, and our own ECX-Algorithm which we were first to the table with outside of Goolge. We also don't undersize and overpromise like the vendors mentioned. Every sizing exercise I do is with the customer so they can see our Sizing tool and methodology as a true advantage. I've won deals against the others mentioned by the very fact that we right size and we work together with the customer to make sure that happens. I don't just go out and say here's your BoM with 8TB's oh and btw you get 10:1 reduction without me looking at your data so the 80TB's you needed can be handled with this 8TB. I've seen it time and time again, overpromise, underdeliver. As far as i'm concerned I hope the competition continues down that path.

4. Now, let's talk differences ie via Platform:

Nothing touches Prism period for a MGMT interface. I challenge anyway. You can stick with the Plug in architecture with the Web Client..have fun with that. Prism includes one-click simplicity, non-disruptive upgrades to the entire stack AOS, AFS, ACS, Hypervisor, All firmware and we do this globally to multiple clusters and you can choose to stagger or group them. Prism includes rich analytics, log collection and bundling, and SPoG if you choose AHV as the hypervisor. We have an integrated SSP and will be showing more of this new INTEGRATED (NOT BOLT ON) features and functionality at .NEXT in a couple of weeks. There is a lot more which I think will show everyone where we are heading and it will be exciting to be there to be a part of it.

Security. Security is not an afterthought with our Platform. It's fully integrated and we have our own STIG where our DoD customers (and we have many) have provided insight into this. We ship the box fully compliant to the STIG which is based on DoD standards and we have an automation framework that unsecure changes to settings etc by reverting those changes and reporting back to you. When you factor in AHV, that security is extended to our Hypervisor and included.

AHV does not equal KVM period. At the Core is still QEMU and Libvirt, however we have many advancements in MGMT and Storage Awareness that KVM does not have, DRS, etc.

This is why it's a platform. And I only addressed a small subset. I suggest you take a gander at the Nutanix Bible. nutanixbible.com to get a detailed view of our architecture and why it's truly Enterprise Grade and why we call it the Enterprise Cloud Platform.

BTW, we love HPE's marketing attacks against us. Proves that were the ones to beat..i'm proud of that. Funny though, Josh Odgers is addressing all those as well as our customers on the social networks of FUD etc. In case you want to see resiliency, here's a demo:

 
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NISMO1968

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It's not free! You can't use it in production and you can't use what they give away even for evaluation.

I'm not with NTNX but two things:

1) NTNX claims their CE isn't anyhow related to the production software they run on their hardware so you can't really compare their IOPS vs ones say VMware vSAN will give you.

2) EMC is multi product company, they can give away something w/out scaring themselves off sales are going to evaporate. NTNX can't do that.

What prevents the company from just offering the production platform for free similar to scaleIO? I am not saying the products are similar. And I know EMC is more than just that single piece of software.

Just curious as most users here are using liquidated enterprise gear and new stuff too obviously and employer equipment. I would think most of your sales are from being contracted to do deployments, provide certified hardware, and offer SLAs.

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NISMO1968

[ ... ]
Oct 19, 2013
87
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San Antonio, TX
www.vmware.com
It's so-called "security thru the obscurity". You cut off the balls, and people can't evaluate your stuff against SDS competitors on the same platform :)

Community Edition is a prepackaged Nutanix Solution. The architecture from Production is not that far off, still uses our CVM, and our Acropolis Hypervisor, however, we wanted to get this into the hands of a lot of folks that do not have enterprise grade hardware so instead of PCI-E passthrough we do LUN passthrough which is where you're limited in performance. There are also a few features that would not work with CE like our Foundation process which is the automation stack for cluster installation and scale out...but 95% of the features/functionality of Prod Nutanix + AHV are there. Also, this is community supported so you don't get Production support..etc.
 

msvirtualguy

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You're calling me arrogant? I think you should look within when someone goes to every post and spreads FUD and crap. That's arrogant. Expecting production performance and support for a Community Product thats there to provide an evaluation is arrogant.

I'm not going to respond to your blatent BS...go troll and spread FUD elsewhere..you haven't a clue. This post will get back on track now.

That's it, i'm done now.
 
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superfula

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You're calling me arrogant? I think you should look within when someone goes to every post and spreads FUD and crap. That's arrogant. Expecting production performance and support for a Community Product thats there to provide an evaluation is arrogant.

I'm not going to respond to your blatent BS...go troll and spread FUD elsewhere..you haven't a clue. This post will get back on track now.

That's it, i'm done now.
Yup.

I don't like using the ignore function but there's a first for everything. Nonsense, gone.

Thanks for sharing your hyperconverged setup. It's good to see what everyone is using at home.
 
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PigLover

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@msvirtualguy - I think your posts have been helpful and informative, focused on your own experiences with your labs and workstation. Although you have not hidden your affiliation and clear preference of Nutanix, you haven't been on here hawking it otherwise boasting about it. Nothing at all arrogant. Solid contributor to the forum and I've enjoyed your posts.

If anything the guy is trolling you. He jumped into your thread here and started attacking the product and you did nothing but a reasoned defense. No idea what he's trying to accomplish but its kinda amusing for him to call you "arrogant" (I think he may be in need of a mirror). Probably shouldn't even engage him. A perfect candidate for the ignore function.
 
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msvirtualguy

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Thanks @PigLover, appreciate it. I get that not all people are going to like Nutanix, and I really try not to be on here "selling" like others do in other forums but if people come out with blatent FUD, i'm going to correct it until at which point they can't seem to have a meaningful debate without insult, FUD, etc

That's the problem in our industry. While FUD has always been around, i've never seen it so prevalent as it is today and it's becoming an accepted practice and that's a shame because the people that really get hurt in all that noise, are the customers.

I feel that Community Edition can be a good choice for some but understand it's not for everyone. What certainly is lost I think in this post is Production Nutanix VS Community Edition which hopefully i'll be able to convey in upcoming posts.
 

frogtech

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Idk maybe it's just me but ad hominen remarks aside (from both parties) I don't see how he is trolling. If he was 'trolling' he would have spent a lot less time and used a lot less words to incite an inflammatory response/reaction. Just my thought. I would've enjoyed seeing the discussion gone on, tbh, lol.
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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I'm not sure if this is for @msvirtualguy or @Patrick or both but STH should cover Nutanix IMNSO. It's like StorageReview and STH are the only places to go for servers and storage reviews now. They should merge since they've got difference focuses but that's another topic.

Make it happen captain.
 

NISMO1968

[ ... ]
Oct 19, 2013
87
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San Antonio, TX
www.vmware.com
If I spread FUD and crap like you say you're welcomed to point out what's FUD and what's crap. Come up with some technical arguments please leaving self-promotion and peacock language to somebody else - I don't care: I'm an engineer after all.

You're a liar: I never said I expect support for your free versions. This is what I said:

"NTNX claims their CE isn't anyhow related to the production software they run on their hardware so you can't really compare their IOPS vs ones say VMware vSAN will give you."

That's a fact: you don't have any production software people can valuate on their own hardware.

Here's another fact: you prevent people from publishing performance numbers, and that's in your EULA. Good story with StorageReivew here:

Why We Don't Have a Nutanix NX-8150 Review | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

So where's FUD and where's crap?

You're calling me arrogant? I think you should look within when someone goes to every post and spreads FUD and crap. That's arrogant. Expecting production performance and support for a Community Product thats there to provide an evaluation is arrogant.

I'm not going to respond to your blatent BS...go troll and spread FUD elsewhere..you haven't a clue. This post will get back on track now.

That's it, i'm done now.
 

NISMO1968

[ ... ]
Oct 19, 2013
87
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8
San Antonio, TX
www.vmware.com
StorageReview tried & failed pretty recently.

Why We Don't Have a Nutanix NX-8150 Review | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

See if you're with a science just a tiny little bit: you always have to document your experiments so other scientists could reproduce them and prove (or deny?) your claims. Not allowing people doing this is so... Medieval?

P.S. VMware isn't MUCH different with their vSAN: you have to get their holy permission to leak out any metrics connected to particular customer/installation. Guess why there aren't so many of them published, and ones done are from the throwaway accounts.

I'm not sure if this is for @msvirtualguy or @Patrick or both but STH should cover Nutanix IMNSO. It's like StorageReview and STH are the only places to go for servers and storage reviews now. They should merge since they've got difference focuses but that's another topic.

Make it happen captain.
 
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frogtech

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The guy's offering a pretty fresh and unbiased perspective it seems from someone who has test driven a fair amount of the market tech. Maybe it's a little off topic for the thread but a build log can only sustain itself for so long. So I think it's nice to see some legit discussion between the 2.

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