Nutanix Benefit 6: Hypervisor Choice

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Nutanix has a well-deserved reputation for giving customers freedom of choice. While there are many examples of this, we will focus this blog on how the Nutanix Cloud Platform architecture gives customers a choice of hypervisor options because the distributed AOS storage stack runs independently of the compute hypervisor.

We understand that selecting a hypervisor to run your workloads on is not like picking out what shirt to wear in the morning. There is no one-size fits all. Your workloads and applications may have unique requirements, and you may have a mix of these workloads with competing or overlapping requirements. The flexibility to run Nutanix HCI with VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, and Nutanix’s own AHV hypervisor is important for these environments.

It’s also true that the distributed storage stack and virtual compute layers have different innovation drivers.  For many vSphere 6.7 customers, for example, the compute virtualization layer is extremely mature and there is little incentive to move to newer, more expensive releases. For these customers, the ability to upgrade the Nutanix storage stack without upgrading the hypervisor is another example of choice and control.

In this post we discuss running a single hypervisor, and multiple hypervisors, a few examples of when hypervisor options are valuable, along with what migration options are available.

Multi-Hypervisor Support

The Nutanix control plane remains consistent regardless of the underlying hypervisor that you are running. This means the same management experience for clusters, replication, operations, and other Nutanix products is the same. Even in environments where multiple hypervisors are deployed, they can be managed from a single instance allowing for easy visibility and reporting. At a storage level, the data constructs and replication functions are identical no matter the hypervisor in use.

Fig 1. Running AHV and ESXi with a single management view

Being able to switch the underlying hypervisor allows customers to manage their risk and cost associated within the hypervisor layer of their environment. This can be done by running different hypervisors in different environments or a complete migration. While it’s most common to see just a single hypervisor running within most data centers there are a number of examples where running a second hypervisor makes perfect sense. A few examples of this would be when a specific application requires a certain hypervisor, on clusters running in the public cloud, and when building a disaster recovery location. While there are more and more apps that support AHV, there may be some that are critical to your business and it only supports a specific hypervisor. In these situations you may need to use one  hypervisor for that workload while switching other workloads to another hypervisor.

Let’s dig into the example of running a different hypervisor at a disaster recovery location. There is a large portion of our install base that uses ESXi as their hypervisor. In order to reduce costs and simplify operations, a number of these customers utilize AHV as the hypervisor in their DR locations. By using this approach they avoid paying the ESXi hypervisor licensing and management costs for the DR clusters. This is possible because the Nutanix built-in replication works between ESXi and AHV clusters. This allows for failover to the AHV-based location and then failback to the primary ESXi-based location when ready.

Simple and Elegant Migrations

Whether you’re new to Nutanix or have already deployed clusters using ESXi as the hypervisor, the available options to migrate to AHV are as flexible and simple as the solution itself. Nutanix Move is a migration utility that makes moving from ESXi, Hyper-V, or AWS to AHV based clusters simple. Move is also a valuable tool for migrating from ESXi on non-Nutanix to ESXi on Nutanix when relying on vMotion only is not the right option.

The Nutanix Move product allows groups to be defined by selecting a VM or groups of VMs from the source environment to the destination AHV cluster. It will then keep the replica copy of the target within close data sync so that when you choose to execute the move, the VM(s) are shut down, final changes are replicated, and the VMs are started on the destination. This approach provides an easy migration method that can be planned and executed with minimal downtime for cutover.

Another method is to utilize an in-place cluster conversion. This method allows for a Nutanix HCI cluster already deployed with ESXi as the hypervisor to be converted to AHV without the need to migrate VMs to another cluster. This is managed by the Nutanix control plane that shuts down a host and the VMs running on it. A process on the CVM then automatically converts the host to AHV, converts the VMs into AHV format, and then brings the host and VMs back online. This is done in a host-by-host rolling fashion until the entire cluster is converted.

Simplified AHV Upgrades

With Nutanix, upgrades are easy. We bring the ease of a consumer product experience to enterprise infrastructure. We started with seamless, zero-downtime, one-click upgrades for core AOS storage and management. As Nutanix expanded beyond storage into areas such as virtualization, the need for an all-purpose upgrade tool was born.

This drove the creation of Life Cycle Manager (LCM), a service capable of delivering simplified upgrades across products. LCM now manages upgrades for multiple Nutanix products and distills them down to a few easy clicks, all while removing the risk and additional time associated with legacy upgrade experiences. LCM maintains an updated inventory of products and versions deployed along with upgrade compatibility. You’re presented with available upgrades such as AHV, AOS, or Prism Central, and LCM handles dependencies and paths for you. Work that was historically performed by administrators or outsourced to a partner. LCM can save reading hundreds of pages of product documentation, KB articles, and blogs that used to be required prior to upgrade.

With Nutanix and LCM, organizations can now confidently upgrade their virtualization layer without anxiety and can do so without waiting until forced to do so by product end-of-life. The alternative will once again be inflicted on VMware customers upgrading to vSAN 8. In order to benefit from new vSAN features, the hypervisor must also be upgraded to vSphere 8, doubling the research, stress, and risk on admin teams. Based on past experience, the vast majority of organizations will avoid this double upgrade path until the last possible moment, when there is no other choice but to upgrade to remain in support. These upgrades are costly in terms of employee hours spent or in cost of hiring a partner to perform the process in hopes of reducing risk.

You can avoid this anxious journey by migrating to Nutanix HCI for storage. You can keep ESXi as the hypervisor and you’ll still enjoy simplified planning with LCM and the ability to realize storage upgrades without needing to upgrade the hypervisor. If you choose Nutanix AHV you’ll find that worrying about hypervisor upgrades is a thing of the past.

Why does this matter?

Whether you’re deploying in one site, multiple sites, or a hybrid cloud architecture, Nutanix provides the flexibility to run the right hypervisor in the locations that fit your needs. No matter your starting point, Nutanix has the tools to get you to your desired state with flexible and easy-to-use migration methods to move your workloads stress free.

It’s also important for vSphere customers who want full NVMe performance, snapshots, and replication for modern HCI – all features supported by AOS 6.5 today – but are less than excited about being forced to upgrade the underlying compute hypervisor version. It’s another example of Nutanix giving customers choice and flexibility to reduce risk, time, and costs.

Freedom of choice is a key reason why Nutanix is successful. With full hypervisor flexibility, you can invest responsibly knowing you retain control over the degrees of freedom you are most likely to exercise – choice of vendor, choice of version, and choice of location. It’s high value in uncertain times.

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