Nutanix hyper-converged solutions were quite an expensive solution so far, for small businesses. That's why many SMBs and very small SMBs turned to other solutions (VSAN, Starwind or Stormagic) which allow 2-Nodes + witness configurations. Things are changing as Nutanix announced Xpress a few weeks back. Nutanix Brings Interesting Offer for SMBs with Nutanix Xpress, with $25,000 as a base price. This price is the lowest specs – per Appliance (with 3 nodes).
This price includes everything. Hardware and Virtualization Software (hypervisor and management). Note that Nutanix Prism (management platform) has twol versions of software (Starter, Pro) and also Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (KVM based) has three versions – Starter, Pro, Ultimate.
True, this pricing reflects the really low-end specs which have only 64Gb per node, but it's upgradeable up to 512 Gb of RAM per node. Each node has hybrid storage with SSD + SATA drives allowing to leverage the Nutanix distributed file system. The SSD's sizes are from 480 GB, 800 GB, 960 GB, 1.2 TB, 1.6 TB, to 1.9 TB. Two HDDs size varies from 2Tb to 6Tb of SATA storage. Nutanix Xpress Appliance can have 3 or 4 nodes, per appliance.
The platform offers a choice of Broadwell CPUs and supports both 1Gb and 10Gb connectivity. The full specs of Nutanix Xpress:
Nutanix Software
Nutanix executes VMs close to the server to reduce latency and write paths. Hot data uses different storage tiers starting from memory, then PCIe flash cards, SATA Flash and then only SATA spinning drives for cold data. In addition, you can specify yourself after which period the data are being considered as cold. They use a controller VM on each host, which has the local disks attached via pass-through for direct access directly to the disks.
The file system uses metadata which is stored on a controller VM, which sits on each host. The controller VM communicates with other controller VMs through the distributed storage. This controller VM provides a direct access to the local storage (via VMdirectPath), to the hypervisor. iSCSI or NFS are the protocols used. The software platform includes deduplication and compression.
Nutanix ha also full sets of SAN features includes striping, replication, auto-tiering, error detection, failover and automatic recovery (auto-healing). Also, two kinds of compression has been added recently.
They use KVM-based hypervisor managed by Prism – a main central HTML5 based UI, But other hypervisors like vSphere and Hyper-V are also supported, but with additional cost.
Virtualization features:
- VM Operations
- Intelligent VM Placement
- Virtual Network Configuration
- Host Profiles
- VM HA
Nutanix has released version 4.5.2 of their software, previously named Nutanix Operating System (NOS) and now called Acropolis Base Software. The new release of Nutanix Acropolis Base Software 4.5.2 has added:
- Nutanix Cluster Check – Acropolis base software 4.5.2 includes Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) 2.1.5, which includes improved existing checks and functionality.
- 1-Click Upgrade for BIOS and BMC Firmware – As of Acropolis base software version 4.5.2, the 1-Click upgrade for BIOS and BMC firmware feature is available for Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) and ESXi hypervisor host environments running on NX-xxxx G4 (Haswell) platforms only.
I have reported previously on the 4.5 release which has added:
- Self-Service File Restore (Tech Preview) – provides the ability to restore individual files from a previously created snapshot without requiring administrator permissons. User can do it.
- VM Flash Mode – auto-tiering capability. Nutanix systems automatically place data in either the flash or HDD storage tier and move data between the tiers depending on how “hot” the data is.
- Erasure Coding (GA) – a custom, distributed erasure coding solution (called EC-X). Keep the same level of data and cluster resiliency while reducing the storage footprint by as much as 70%
The difference between Xpress and Xtreme.
Image courtesy of https://www.storagepricing.org/
And the bundles examples for the Xpress SMB platform.
Sources:
- StoragePricing.org
- Nutanix Xpress (check the PDF hardware and software specs)
- Nutanix Blog
