Nutanix Acropolis

Nutanix Acropolis is the hyper convergent infrastructure solution aimed on virtualization and cloud environments. This solution is proposed by performance and economic benefits of web scale architecture Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform which is a combination two product families: Nutanix Acropolis and Nutanix Prism.

2020: Expansion of the list of opportunities of disaster recovery

On July 8, 2020 it became known that Nutanix, the company in the field of corporate cloud computing, provided a number of additional opportunities of the hyper convergent platform (HCI) and a hypervisor of AHV for protection of crucial applications and business continuity. They turn on expanded automation for application recovery and data, multisaytovy disaster recovery, synchronous replication for loadings in the environment of AHV. Read more here.

2018

Blockchain project based on Acropolis and Lenovo ThinkAgile HX7820 Appliance

The companies Lenovo Nutanix provided also on December 14, 2018 to To tank the implemented project of the platform first-ever jointly for Identifications System the Personal based on blockchain- technologies, integrated several bank registers. It is expected that the presented solution allows financial institutions to create distributed computing based on data centers with infrastructure from Lenovo-Nutanix and without problems to scale resources at any time in the future. In more detail here.

Acropolis. Description

For July, 2018 Nutanix Acropolis can be separated into three principal components:

• Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF)
• App Mobility Fabric (AMF)
• Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)

Distributed Storage Fabric

DSF provides the data warehouse of industrial level of reliability and availability, using software with architecture of high parallelism. Nutanix eliminates the need for traditional solutions SAN and NAS, offering functionality focused on VM software-defined services data storage. In particular, DSF provides functionality of snapshots, clones, creations of disaster-proof infrastructures, deduplication, a compression and erasure coding.

DSF works, using network of the cluster interconnect connecting Controller VM (CVM) and creating Nutanix cluster so each node of a cluster has data access on SSD, HDD and to cloud resources. The hypervisor and DSF interact with use of the standard NFS, iSCSI and SMB3 protocols.

App Mobility Fabric

AMF allows applications to move between hypervisors. When VM can move between hypervisors (for example, between VMware of ESXi and AHV), the administrator can hold production and dev/test-Wednesday in parallel, on different hypervisors and to move loading between them as required. AMF is implemented as the distributed scalable service which works in CVM on each node of a cluster Nutanix.

Acropolis Hypervisor

AHV is the hypervisor, safe, ready to industrial use, which is based on KVM. AHV is controlled with the help of the Prism interface, functionally rich REST API and also the interactive command line of aCLI (Acropolis CLI). These tools allow to eliminate the complexity of administration which is already traditionally associated with products open source and allow to deploy in the company the ready-made solution on Nutanix easily, quickly and without need to pay runtime royalty fees, as in other hypervisors.

• AHV supports use of VLAN for CVM (Controller VM), hosts of AHV and the user VM.
  • For the user VM, it is possible to create and manage networks on virtual NIC (virtual Network Interface Controller) through Prism GUI, Acropolis CLI (aCLI) or through REST API. Each virtual network which is created by Acropolis is tied to some one VLAN. Though the virtual network is configured in certain VLAN, it is possible to configure virtual NIC both in "access", and in "trunked" the mode.

• In addition to creation and management of VLAN, AHV supports the IP address management mechanism (IPAM).
  • IPAM allows AHV to appoint for VM of the address IP automatically, using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Each virtual network and VLAN associated with it can be configured on use of a certain subnet of IP, settings of the domain and pools of the IP addresses. Acropolis uses VXLAN and the rules OpenFlow in OVS for interception of requests of DHCP from the user VM, allowing to use them the configured addresses from the set pools and setup of network.

Architecture of Acropolis

Following the principles of web scale design, Acropolis services are implemented in CVM and are available on all nodes of a cluster of architecture shared-nothing. Transactions of administration work via the "master subordinate" mechanism where CVM of a cluster are selected among themselves by "masters", and then replace it in case of failure on new elections. On the separate AHV node of its CVM has access to disks via the PCI passthrough mechanism as it is shown in the drawing below:^[1]

The announcement of Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV

The Veeam Software company announced on July 18, 2018 Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV — the solution for ensuring availability of the applications and data placed on Nutanix AHV hypervisor. Using the presented solution, users of Nutanix AHV will have the same opportunities of backup and fast data recovery which are available to users of Veeam working with vSphere and Hyper-V. Read more here.

Notes