Rapid Application Development
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, here at Nutanix we were in the midst of developing an application to allow customers to try out our products and services quickly, through just a web browser and an internet connection. This became even more critical once the world effectively shut down and in-person meetings were canceled. We needed to go digital rapidly and allow customers to interact with us in a way that was valuable to them. We needed to scale quickly, and as many people do, we leveraged the public cloud to help us get there.
Leveraging the power of Intel® Virtualization Technology, or Intel VT-x, we were able to take advantage of secure, nested virtualization in the public cloud, which allowed us to virtualize our AHV hypervisor and then run VMs within that hypervisor to provide demo data and applications. This became what is known today as Nutanix Test Drive.
What is Nutanix Test Drive?
If you’ve heard of the term product-led growth, then you know that this is where product usage drives customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. At Nutanix we knew that many of our customers are IT practitioners who usually want to learn about a product by getting hands-on, not having to read white papers or go through a sales rep first.
Test Drive was created to showcase the capabilities of Nutanix products and solutions to our customers and prospects with as little friction as possible. Nutanix Engineering was able to virtualize the AHV hypervisor for testing purposes and developed an internal platform that allowed for API-driven deployments of virtual Nutanix clusters.
The Nutanix Technical Marketing Engineering (TME) team developed an application that does a number of things:
- Maintained pools of ready-to-use Nutanix Test Drive clusters via an orchestrator
- Managed the user assignment to these clusters, leveraging VPCs to isolate clusters from one another
- Authenticated the users to these clusters with built-in demo data
- Provided guided tour and chat functionality
Migrating to On-Prem
We originally leveraged public cloud services to implement Test Drive, in order to make it accessible to external users as fast as possible. These services include an engine to provision the virtual Nutanix clusters via a backend service, user login and authentication, user and cluster management, and of course, the clusters themselves.
As the service took off, with the number of Test Drive clusters that were being spun up, we quickly realized that we needed to repatriate workloads on-premises. This would give us more control over performance and predictability and decrease our operating expenses. Additionally, we knew that the Nutanix Cloud Platform was made for this type of application! We could use an on-premises environment to host the bulk of the workload, the clusters themselves. The same Intel VT-x enabled easy migration across environments, despite different generations of Intel Xeon processors.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform is API-driven and provides software-defined, scale-out storage and networking with services such as Flow Virtual Networking. With Nutanix VPCs we get secure multi-tenancy as well as easy provisioning from our existing cloud orchestration tools. We could easily host the ready-to-use Nutanix Test Drive clusters and maintain user isolation. As we still leveraged the public cloud for some of our core services, we required a static 1-to-1 NAT setup to connect the user through a proxy hosted in the public cloud to the actual cluster running in the on-premises datacenter.
The network connection between on-prem and the cloud relies on standard IPSEC VPN connections and BGP for route advertisement. This is an incredibly flexible and standards-based connection that means we have the ability to bridge new connections from and to anywhere, with any cloud provider or physical gateway.
Business Outcomes
A single 14-node Nutanix cluster, powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, can host up to 120 Test Drive environments consisting of 5 VMs each. That means 120 customers or prospects can log in at any time to try out Nutanix! If more environments are required, we can burst into the public cloud, making this a true hybrid cloud setup.
With a majority of our predictable workloads running on-prem, we were able to realize cost savings on our cloud spend. Meanwhile, we retain the ability to spin up extra resources in the cloud for events, scheduled bootcamps, and maintenance. This balance allows us to provision workloads in a cloud-smart fashion. Rapid service development and burst use cases can target the cloud for speed of deployment. Workloads that cross the technology development divide to become adopted longer-term are deployed with on-prem cost optimization in mind.
Leveraging the Power of Intel
Since we are utilizing nested virtualization, we needed a hardware platform that could drive high performance and capacity across compute, memory, and storage. We also wanted to maximize the density of Test Drive virtual clusters per physical node. For this density, we identified the CPU as the constraining factor, and found that the Intel® Xeon® Gold processors provided strong performance and core ratio for the heavy compute requirements.
In our existing production environment, we are using 14 nodes of NX-8170-G7 to host the Test Drive clusters. Each node consists of dual-socket Intel Xeon Gold 6248R processors (48 cores per node) @ 3GHz, 1.5TB memory, and 14.5TB of SSD storage.
We’ve recently expanded this to add 11 new nodes into the environment, leveraging the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor. The bill of materials for the new nodes is shown below.
For more information on how the Nutanix Cloud platform manages the storage, please refer to the Distributed Storage Fabric section in the Nutanix Bible.
| Product Code | Description | QTY Per Node | Total QTY |
|---|---|---|---|
| NX-3155GN-G8 | NX-3155GN-G8 | 1 | 11 |
| C-CPU-6348 | Intel Xeon Gold 6348 processor (2.6 GHz/ 28-core/ 235W,) | 2 | 22 |
| C-MEM-64GB-3200 | 64GB Memory Module (3200MHz DDR4 RDIMM) | 32 | 352 |
| C-SSD-1.92TB-A 1.92 TB SSD | 1.92TB SSD | 4 | 44 |
| C-NIC-25G2B1 | Intel 25/10GbE, 2-port, NIC (Intel XXV710-DA2) | 2 | 22 |
Building Your Own Private Cloud
With Intel Select Solutions for Nutanix HCI, you can find optimized configurations for Nutanix, which reduces the time to evaluate and purchase the necessary hardware components for your own private cloud, powered by Nutanix and Intel.
To learn more about the Nutanix software, take a free Nutanix Test Drive at https://www.nutanix.com/testdrive.
To learn more about Flow Virtual Networking, please check out the product page at https://www.nutanix.com/products/flow/networking.