The hardware inside of a cluster includes storage, processors, internal memory and network interfaces. All of this hardware is used by the software to run VMs with as much workload distribution as possible. This kind of approach generates two of the biggest advantages for Nutanix as a platform – scalability and redundancy.
Since Nutanix can use multiple nodes for each cluster, there is no problem with scaling the entire infrastructure for it to grow alongside the company itself – all you have to do is add more servers and hardware to the cluster. At the same time, this kind of distributed approach makes it that much harder to lose data if one of the nodes suffers a hardware failure – this kind of event would not affect the entire cluster’s availability whatsoever.
While it is true that Nutanix started off as a company that sold its own hardware appliances to be used as nodes for a cluster, this is no longer the case – now Nutanix is purely a software company that certified a variety of hardware from some of the biggest names on the market, such as Lenovo, Huawei, Dell, Cisco, Fujitsu, and so on. The ability to combine hardware from different manufacturers for one cluster also exists, which is a massive advantage for both new and existing Nutanix users.
The fact that Nutanix now only has to worry about the software side of the customer support is also a massive advantage since there is no pressure to keep up with the current hardware giants on the market in terms of both standards and support. This kind of certification process allows Nutanix to provide software-related support, while the hardware provider is taking care of the hardware-related customer support, creating some sort of “the best of both worlds” situation.
As for the Nutanix platform itself, it operates with a rather traditional hypervisor called Acropolis Hypervisor (also developed by Nutanix). The way that Nutanix approaches virtualization and data management make it rather hard to see the boundaries between on-premise hardware, public clouds and even private cloud environments. The main reason for that is Nutanix allows you to build its cluster in any of these three environments – with the ability to combine several environment types for one cluster.
Speaking of cloud services, Nutanix offers its own cloud computing capabilities and storage with data centres in both London and Frankfurt – and with an easy way to expand your current Nutanix cluster with more first-party cloud nodes. Nutanix also certified the AWS hardware for its services, creating the ability to use Acropolis Hypervisor to run Nutanix on the bare metal servers of AWS.
Other cloud service providers can also be integrated into this kind of infrastructure, be it Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure – although, the process here is a bit more complicated than in the previous examples. All of the Nutanix operations with nodes from Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure would not have the ability to work with the Acropolis Hypervisor, since both of these companies use their own hypervisors for these kinds of operations. This makes processes such as VM migration that much longer due to the need to convert VMs to a specific format before migrating everything.
The ability to use both on-premise and cloud storage is what makes Nutanix so interesting since right now hybrid deployments are considered the most convenient ones in terms of price and capabilities. The majority of companies can just create their own physical data centre or rent one’s capacity for the majority of basic operations, and keep some of the cloud capabilities in the cluster for more unconventional situations. Retail companies being busier around winter holidays is one of many examples of when the additional storage and computing capability is only needed on a seasonal basis.
Like with any other infrastructure or database, Nutanix needs to be covered by a backup and recovery solution of sorts, for many different reasons. Luckily enough, the market has solutions such as Bacula Enterprise. The backup and recovery solution that Bacula offers has a unique system of modules that allows it to be compatible with an overwhelming mass of systems, database types and technologies.
Bacula’s Nutanix AHV backup module is one such example, offering data protection and many other features for your Nutanix data. Some of the features that Bacula offers with its Nutanix backup module are agentless deployment, fast block level image backup, support for many different VM types, snapshot-based backup and restoration processes, the ability to restore complete VM images, and more.
Bacula’s versatility in terms of VM types is basically unparalleled, offering integration not only with Nutanix but also with Proxmox, KVM, Xen, RHV, VMware and Hyper-V. Each VM integration module has its own features, offers agentless integration with the VM itself, and performs at an astonishing speed.
