Nutanix_Bible

The Nutanix Bible

1. Intro

2. Book of Nutanix

 Architecture

 Converged Platform

 Cluster Components

 Data Structure

 I/O Path Overview

 Networking and I/O

 CVM Autopathing

 Disk Balancing

 Software-Defined Controller Architecture

 Storage Tiering and Prioritization

 Storage Layers and Monitoring

 APIs & Interfaces - new!

 Administration

 Important Pages

 Cluster Commands

 How It Works

 Array Offloads – VAAI

 Administration

 Important Pages

 Command Reference

 Metrics & Thresholds

 Troubleshooting

4. Book of Hyper-V

 Architecture

 How It Works

 Metrics & Thresholds

 Troubleshooting

Welcome to The Nutanix Bible! I work the with Nutanix platform on a daily basis –

trying to find issues, push its limits as well as administer it for my production

benchmarking lab. This page is being produced to serve as an living document outlining

tips and tricks used every day by myself and a variety of engineers at Nutanix. This will

also include summary items discussed as part of the Advanced Nutanix series. NOTE:

This is not an official reference so tread at your own risk!

Book of Nutanix

Architecture

Converged Platform

The Nutanix solution is a converged storage + compute solution which leverages local

the Nutanix units running VMware vSphere, the SCSI controller, which manages the

SSD and HDD devices, is directly passed to the CVM leveraging VM-Direct Path (Intel

VT-d). In the case of Hyper-V the storage devices are passed through to the CVM. Below

is an example of what a typical node logically looks like:

Together, a group of Nutanix

Nodes forms a distributed platform called the Nutanix Distributed Filesystem

(NDFS). NDFS appears to the hypervisor like any centralized storage array, however all

of the I/Os are handled locally to provide the highest performance. More detail on how

these nodes form a distributed system can be found below. Below is an example of how

these Nutanix nodes form NDFS:

 Key Role: Distributed metadata store

 Description: Medusa stores and manages all of the cluster metadata in a

Zeus

 Key Role: Cluster configuration manager

 Description: Zeus stores all of the cluster configuration including hosts, IPs, state,