Hyperconverged Home Lab Part 4.x

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Connorise

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Mar 2, 2017
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Hey, buddy, your home lab is looking awesome.

I am really appreciating that you sharing all these step-by-step upgrades. Also, just want to mention that Nutanix Community Edition is a great possibility to play around virtualization software (obviously with-out any payment). So, I want to mention one more free version from StarWind software, AFAIK they recently removed all restrictions thereby you can create an unlimited amount of HA storage on multiple nodes. You could choose them as the platform for next home lab build.
 
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jfoor

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Feb 4, 2017
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Doesn't StarWind have to be installed on top of Win Server? Or do they have a standalone product?
 

msvirtualguy

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Jan 23, 2013
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Guys please take Starwind conversation to another post. This is not a storage box in software, HCI is our foundation, there's much more capability and features above that in our stack as this is a full platform, much different than Starwind or any other HCI solution.
 

capn_pineapple

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Aug 28, 2013
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Really enjoying the writeup, good to see someone else enjoying nutanix.

edit: thanks for the OP formatting change!
 
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Logan

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Feb 22, 2017
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@Logan with the single fans I have in these it's pretty loud, it was a bit quieter when I had dual fans in my old ones, definitely not quiet.
Thanks. If I go with Xeon-D, I'll probably have to go with something larger for quietness, but these sure are attractive.
 

NISMO1968

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Oct 19, 2013
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The only "big" thing NTNX is adding to KVM is a very basic HTML5 GUI called "Prism". There's no deeply integrated Software-Defined Storage stack (think of VMware VSAN), there's no pro-active support (think of Nimble InfoSight), there's no hardware dedupe acceleration like SimpliVity has... What actually make you think of you having done anything "much different" from everybody else? Just curious :)

P.S. I absolutely love this one!

Dare2Compare Part 4 : HPE provides superior resiliency than Nutanix?

Guys please take Starwind conversation to another post. This is not a storage box in software, HCI is our foundation, there's much more capability and features above that in our stack as this is a full platform, much different than Starwind or any other HCI solution.
 
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Netwerkz101

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Dec 27, 2015
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Wow ... so similar looking to the VMworld Lab Give-a-way a few years back.

I definitely like that Triplite Rack Enclosure.

I'm going to re-try Nutanix at some point.

My company looked like they were going to go with it but last minute opted not to for reasons
unknown to me.

If i can get some licenses, I want to try a PoC with XenDesktop.
CE is performance limited though, correct?
 

NISMO1968

[ ... ]
Oct 19, 2013
87
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San Antonio, TX
www.vmware.com
Front-running-cabling... Err :)

It shouldn't! I can't compare against paid version because I don't have any NTNX gear in my lab, but generic KVM is very similar in # of VMs it can run. TBH, I normally run CE nested (...and this is my suggestion to start from, actually...), R730s have so much power these days!





Wow ... so similar looking to the VMworld Lab Give-a-way a few years back.

I definitely like that Triplite Rack Enclosure.

I'm going to re-try Nutanix at some point.

My company looked like they were going to go with it but last minute opted not to for reasons
unknown to me.

If i can get some licenses, I want to try a PoC with XenDesktop.
CE is performance limited though, correct?
 

msvirtualguy

Active Member
Jan 23, 2013
494
244
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msvirtualguy.com
The only "big" thing NTNX is adding to KVM is a very basic HTML5 GUI called "Prism". There's no deeply integrated Software-Defined Storage stack (think of VMware VSAN), there's no pro-active support (think of Nimble InfoSight), there's no hardware dedupe acceleration like SimpliVity has... What actually make you think of you having done anything "much different" from everybody else? Just curious :)

P.S. I absolutely love this one!

Dare2Compare Part 4 : HPE provides superior resiliency than Nutanix?
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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msvirtualguy

Active Member
Jan 23, 2013
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If i can get some licenses, I want to try a PoC with XenDesktop.
CE is performance limited though, correct?
For a true PoC we can provide you gear. BTW, Citrix is probably our strongest Alliance Partner. You have the ultimate choice when it comes to XenDesktop, can run it on any of the four Hypervisors, pending requirements (like GPU) etc. We have a ton of customers choosing AHV for this use case as it's fully certified by Citrix and there is integration into provisioning..etc..plus no vTax
 

msvirtualguy

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Jan 23, 2013
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BTW, i'm going to point this out again, Community Edition is NOT Nutanix Production and was never intended to be. It's there for people to check out what Nutanix is like, etc, though it's very very good for a homelab.