Nutanix Community edition questions

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Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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So I was looking at Nutanix today but similar to T_Minus I am quite unhappy with the Nutanix webpage.
I find it extremely difficult to get information on the Community edition without registering/applying for it.
Moving this over from Hyperconverged Home Lab Part 4.x

I am looking for some answers that I hope somebody can give me (or point me to a good page without the need for registration)

1. What are the limitations of the CE vs the various paid versions ?
2. What are the limitations of the CE versus VMUG based ESX deployment? VMUG provides advanced licenses for ESX, so what would I be missing if I used Nutanix CE instead - looking at HA/DRS for example
3. Can the CE cope with NVME drives? Can I use them for hot and cold storage?
4. Does Nutanix support Mellanox NICs (ConnectX-3 in IB or ETH mode)
5. Is there a way to migrate from an ESX Cluster to a CE hosted ESX cluster? (I only found Nutanix ESX to AHV/ Third Party to AHV, but I'd like to start with my current esx on top of nutanix which should work If i understood it correctly)

Thanks :)
 

NISMO1968

[ ... ]
Oct 19, 2013
87
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San Antonio, TX
www.vmware.com
1) Support. You don't get anything except community support (extremely weak BTW) with their CE.
2) You don't get any time bombs with CE, VMUG subscription is limited here. BTW, you understand you don't get any CE for ESXi, don't you?
3) Yes, but Cassandra is extremely slow, so before we'll see NTNX 2.0 on a MariaDB you won't see anything above 10% from your new shiny flash...
4) Yup. As long as KVM is happy with them NTNX KVM fork-out is OK-ish.
5) We use some VM converters do that off-line. There's no on-line migration tools I know about.

Best of luck!
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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Re 2 - no I didnt, thanks.
3 - ouch. So basically not really;)
5 - ok, thanks.
I dont think Nutanix makes sense for me at this point then, not really looking to migrate to KVM at this point (at least not without having a significant benefit).
 

msvirtualguy

Active Member
Jan 23, 2013
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msvirtualguy.com
Sorry @Rand_ was in Phoenix all week traning, just got in last night, on Next Gen Nutanix (which is gonna blow your minds, btw). Anyway as @NISMO1968 pointed out CE is a Community supported release. It's NOT production Nutanix and we never claim it to be. It was created so that folks interested can get some stick time with the Platform and to try out the vast feature set. Will it blow you away in performance, no. Is it good enough for home labs, absolutely. I don't know a lot of folks that run OLTP, AI, etc in their home labs but you'll be surprised at what you can achieve with what we provided so far in LUN Passthrough as opposed to PCI-E passthrough (which is changing, BTW)

The groundwork is laid out for PCI-E devices and we will be moving that in soon for tiering..etc...so you'll get some of the advantages like a Prod Nutanix solution. Right now, the NVMe devices are seen properly but thrown in the SSD tier. My lab hosts each have 1 Intel 750 800GB and 2 x 800GB S3710s and the Intel 750 is setup as another SSD device. The foundation is in place though and AHV sees the device properly as an NVMe device.

What @NISMO1968 isn't telling you is how we simplify AHV so you don't need a ton of KVM knowledge etc. It's all integrated into Prism (our MGMT Interface which is also scale out). Very simple. You can see in this video below:


Again..we never claimed this was for "production" environments and would get "production" support, hence the name CE= Community Edition, but for home labs..it's excellent.
 
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Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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Thanks :)
The problem with KVM is not the management but the migration effort I'd be having.
Maybe I'll stand up a second environment to play around a bit.
Do you support GPU passthrough? Iirc thats one area where KVM is ahead of ESX
To be specific: Looking to pass through a Nvidia consumer graphics card to a single box:)
 
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Net-Runner

Member
Feb 25, 2016
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Nutanix CE is not something for production because of many reasons already pointed here. There are multiple free alternatives like pure KVM for example or Proxmox. Xen server is great but quite complicated for self-supporting since even the popular issues are not documented good enough. Might sound odd but the Free Hyper-V Server 2016 Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016 is also a way to go (and probably the fastest and easiest one despite having a lot of drawbacks like Windows OS itself). HA/FT is doable with any of these solutions using a dedicated SAN or NAS or some free virtual SAN software like Starwind Software Defined Storage for the HCI • StarWind Virtual SAN ® Free or EMC Unity VSA Dell EMC UnityVSA Download | Dell EMC.
 

NISMO1968

[ ... ]
Oct 19, 2013
87
13
8
San Antonio, TX
www.vmware.com
I feel like I should be telling that LOL.

What do you mean by "we simplify"? OK, I don't do CLI and use HTML5 GUI in a very Windows 3.51 style, but if I need something real big or even small (in my case it was VM snapshots because your backup for KVM is non-existanst basically), I still need bash, root and bunch of scripts around QEMU. It worked! In case of KVM I have a whole community behind me, but with your closed-source fork-out what do you expect me to do? Apply for nonexistent by design CE support? Wait for you to provide an update? What's the proper path for added functionality & customization & monitoring & reporting & automation, smth made *NIX big?

Sorry @Rand_ was in Phoenix all week traning, just got in last night, on Next Gen Nutanix (which is gonna blow your minds, btw). Anyway as @NISMO1968 pointed out CE is a Community supported release. It's NOT production Nutanix and we never claim it to be. It was created so that folks interested can get some stick time with the Platform and to try out the vast feature set. Will it blow you away in performance, no. Is it good enough for home labs, absolutely. I don't know a lot of folks that run OLTP, AI, etc in their home labs but you'll be surprised at what you can achieve with what we provided so far in LUN Passthrough as opposed to PCI-E passthrough (which is changing, BTW)

The groundwork is laid out for PCI-E devices and we will be moving that in soon for tiering..etc...so you'll get some of the advantages like a Prod Nutanix solution. Right now, the NVMe devices are seen properly but thrown in the SSD tier. My lab hosts each have 1 Intel 750 800GB and 2 x 800GB S3710s and the Intel 750 is setup as another SSD device. The foundation is in place though and AHV sees the device properly as an NVMe device.

What @NISMO1968 isn't telling you is how we simplify AHV so you don't need a ton of KVM knowledge etc. It's all integrated into Prism (our MGMT Interface which is also scale out). Very simple. You can see in this video below:


Again..we never claimed this was for "production" environments and would get "production" support, hence the name CE= Community Edition, but for home labs..it's excellent.
 

msvirtualguy

Active Member
Jan 23, 2013
494
244
43
msvirtualguy.com
LOL...get back to me when you want to learn something instead of posting FUD.

All agent based backups work as well as Commvault for non-agent based backups so not sure what you're implying.

You act like you wanted to use CE for production, so what you're really complaining about in this post and others is that you want a free product to run production workloads?
 
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NISMO1968

[ ... ]
Oct 19, 2013
87
13
8
San Antonio, TX
www.vmware.com
Agent-based VM backups? You serious?!? We aren't in 2009 anymore! :)

We switched CommVault -> Veeam years ago and to accept customer and his workload we'd rather prefer Veeam over anything else. I wasn't aware CommVault can backup you guys agent-less but ether way we aren't going back to C/V.

Nope. We basically want a close-to-production scenario to run long long valuation. We're MSP.

P.S. Look... I'm a patient man but everything comes to it's end. If you make some statements - make sure you bring some arguments as well. "LOL". "FUD". You behave like a kid.

LOL...get back to me when you want to learn something instead of posting FUD.

All agent based backups work as well as Commvault for non-agent based backups so not sure what you're implying.

You act like you wanted to use CE for production, so what you're really complaining about in this post and others is that you want a free product to run production workloads?
 
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