Database Reference
In-Depth Information
architecture of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform.
The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is built for virtualization and cloud
environments, with the idea of brining the benefits and economics of web-scale
architectures from companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon to the masses.
The Nutanix solution includes storage and server compute (CPU and Memory) in a
platform building block. Each building block is 2 RU and based on standard x86 server
technology. The platform architecture is designed to deliver a unified, scale-out, shared-
nothing cluster with no single point of failure (SPOF). Hyperconverged platforms don't
require SAN or NAS storage, or fibre channel networks, but can sit along side existing
environments.
A general aspect of hyperconverged platforms and Nutanix in particular is a reduction
in the number of components that need to be managed and a reduction in the overall
solution complexity. The reduction in complexity and increased simplicity translates
into ease of deployment and operations, such as when dynamically increasing a cluster's
size, and ease of designing and architecting successful solutions, even for business-
critical applications such as SQL Server.
For designing a SQL Server environment, a Nutanix platform is arguably simpler
because there are no LUNs, no RAID, no FC switches, no zoning, no masking, no
registered state change notifications (RSCN), and no storage multipathing required. All
management is VM and VMDK centric. An advantage of being VM and VMDK centric
is that storage IO from a VMDK is seen as what it is: sequential is sequential and
random is random. This allows the platform to optimize for that IO pattern without the
impact of the IO Blender Effect.
This doesn't mean you have to throw away the assets you've already got and that still
have a book value. You can use a hyperconverged platform to offload some capacity
and performance from your existing systems. This can improve your overall
performance and reduce management complexity.
With Nutanix, you have one pool of storage across a distributed file system cluster
called the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS), which includes SSDs for high
performance and low latency and HDDs for cheap capacity. The different types of
storage devices in the storage pool are automatically tiered using an intelligent
information life cycle management (ILM) engine to ensure the most frequently used data
is available in memory or in flash cache. This assumes you have sufficient capacity in
your high-performance tier for the most active working set of your VMs. If you are
deploying SQL Server on Nutanix, the sections of this chapter you need to follow
closely are “SQL Server Database and Guest OS Design” and “Virtual Machine Storage
Design,” in addition to “
The Five Key Principles of Database Storage Design
,” which
appears at the start of this chapter.
Nutanix has a small number of model options available to try and make it easy to choose
