Nutanix

Nutanix products provide hyperconverged platforms that include VM hosting and a distributed storage fabric. The platform presents storage in two tiers — Local HDD storage and server-attached flash (hot storage).

Nutanix environments may include:

  • One or more Nutanix appliances

    An appliance contains up to four server nodes.

  • Nutanix nodes

    Servers that expose compute and storage resources. Each node provides local HDD and hot storage. Nodes combine to form a unified cluster that pools resources.

  • Controller VMs

    Each node includes a Controller VM that manages the node’s resources within the cluster pool. To minimize storage latency, the Controller VM keeps the most frequently accessed data in the hot storage.

Turbonomic supports management of Nutanix fabrics, where the supply chain treats a Nutanix Storage Pool as a disk array. Turbonomic recognizes Nutanix storage tiers when calculating placement of VMs and VStorage. In addition, Turbonomic can recommend actions to scale flash capacity up or down by adding more hosts to the cluster, or more flash drives to the hosts.

To specify a Nutanix target, provide the Cluster External IP address. This is a logical IP address that always connects to one of the active Controller VMs in the cluster. In this way, you can specify a Nutanix target without having to specify an explicit Controller VM.

Note:

The Controller VM must remain pinned to its host machine — You must not move the Controller VM to a different host. If the Nutanix cluster uses the Nutanix Acropolis OS to manage VMs, Turbonomic automatically pins the Controller VMs. However, if you use vCenter Server or Hyper-V to manage VMs on the hosts, you must configure a group to pin the Controller VMs. For more information, see Pinning Nutanix Controller VMs.

Prerequisites

  • Nutanix Community Edition

  • A service account with cluster administrator rights on the Nutanix clusters for action execution. For entity discovery, a minimum of READ access is required

Finding the cluster external IP address

To configure a Nutanix target, provide the Cluster External IP address for the given Nutanix cluster.

The Cluster External IP address is a logical IP that resolves to the cluster's Prism Element Leader. If the Prism Element Leader fails, then the Cluster External IP address will resolve to the newly elected Prism Element Leader.

To find this IP address, open the Web Console (the Prism Element) on the cluster and navigate to the Cluster Details view. In this view you can see the Cluster External IP address. If there is no IP address specified, you can specify the address at this time. For more information, see the Nutanix documentation.

Operating modes

A Nutanix node is a server that hosts VMs — In this sense the node functions as a hypervisor. A cluster of nodes can host VMs using the following Hypervisor technologies:

  • Nutanix Acropolis

    The native Nutanix host platform, which combines software-defined storage with built-in virtualization.

  • VMware ESXi

  • Microsoft Hyper-V

Controller VM pinning

Each Nutanix node hosts a Controller VM that runs the Nutanix software and manages I/O for the hypervisor and all VMs running on the host. Each Controller VM must remain on its host node —The Controller VM must be pinned to that host, and must not be moved to any other host.

For more information about how to pin the Controller VM, see Pinning Nutanix Controller VMs.

Adding Nutanix targets

Note:

This topic describes features that are available in the new design of the user interface. This new design is enabled by default. If you switched to the legacy design, click New Feature Toggle button in the navigation bar of the user interface and then turn on the toggle to re-enable the new design. For more information, see New Design for the User Interface.

Note:

This describes how to add a Nutanix cluster to Turbonomic as a target. If Nutanix is not managing hosts running Acropolis as the hypervisor, you will have to add the vCenter or Hyper-V hypervisors as targets after you have added the Nutanix cluster as a target. For more information, see Hypervisor Targets.

  1. Click Settings > Target Configuration.

  2. On the Target configuration page, click Add Target.

  3. On the Select target page, click Nutanix.

  4. In the side panel, review the connection requirements and then click Connect Target.

  5. Configure the following settings:

    • Cluster external IP address

      Specify the Cluster External IP address for the Nutanix cluster.

    • Username

      Specify the username of the account Turbonomic uses to connect to the target.

    • Password

      Specify the password of the account Turbonomic uses to connect to the target.

    • Port number

      Specify the listening port of the cluster. By default, the port is 9440.

    • Connect using HTTPS

      If you select this option, Turbonomic connects to the target servers using HTTPS. Make sure that the required certificate is configured for use on the host.

      This option is selected by default.

Entity mapping

After validating your targets, Turbonomic updates the supply chain with the entities that it discovered. The following table describes the entity mapping between the target and Turbonomic.

Nutanix

Turbonomic

Virtual Disk

Volume

Container

Storage

Storage Pool

Disk Array

Nutanix Cluster

Storage Controller

Monitored resources

Turbonomic monitors the following resources:

  • Volume

    • Storage Amount

      Storage Amount is the measurement of storage capacity that is in use.

    • Latency

      Latency is the measurement of storage latency.

    • Storage Access (IOPS)

      Storage Access, also known as IOPS, is the per-second measurement of read and write access operations on a storage entity.

      Note:

      When it generates actions, Turbonomic does not consider IOPS throttling that it discovers on storage entities. Analysis uses the IOPS it discovers on Logical Pool or Disk Array entities.

  • Storage

    • Storage Amount

      Storage Amount is the measurement of storage capacity that is in use.

    • Storage Provisioned

      Storage provisioned is the utilization of the entity's capacity, including overprovisioning.

    • Storage Access (IOPS)

      Storage Access, also known as IOPS, is the per-second measurement of read and write access operations on a storage entity.

      Note:

      When it generates actions, Turbonomic does not consider IOPS throttling that it discovers on storage entities. Analysis uses the IOPS it discovers on Logical Pool or Disk Array entities.

    • Latency

      Latency is the measurement of storage latency.

  • Disk Array

    • Storage Amount

      Storage Amount is the measurement of storage capacity that is in use.

    • Storage Provisioned

      Storage provisioned is the utilization of the entity's capacity, including overprovisioning.

    • Storage Access (IOPS)

      Storage Access, also known as IOPS, is the per-second measurement of read and write access operations on a storage entity.

    • Latency

      Latency is the measurement of storage latency.

  • Storage Controller

    Note:

    Not all targets of the same type provide all possible commodities. For example, some storage controllers do not expose CPU activity. When a metric is not collected, its chart in the user interface will not display data.

    • CPU

      CPU is the measurement of CPU that is reserved or in use.

    • Storage Amount

      Storage Amount is the measurement of storage capacity that is in use.

      The storage allocated to a storage controller is the total of all the physical space available to aggregates managed by that storage controller.

Actions

Turbonomic supports the following actions:

  • Virtual Machine (Nutanix VM)

    • Move

      VMotion to hosts can be automated, but storage moves on Nutanix can only be executed outside Turbonomic.

    • Resize

      Resize actions require the VM to power down, and power back on again.

  • Datastore (Storage)

    • Provision

    • Resize Up/Down

    • Suspend

    • Move

      This action can only be executed outside Turbonomic.

  • Storage Controller

    • Provision

      This action can only be executed outside Turbonomic.