Subj : Re: VMWare Fusion and Workstation now FREE
To   : jinkusu
From : poindexter FORTRAN
Date : Mon Nov 25 2024 08:42:11

-=> jinkusu wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

 ji> alternatives.  there's another one i'm a little curious about called
 ji> nutanix.  it seems like it's growing in popularity, but have yet to
 ji> actually speak to anyone using it.

I'm running 45 sites on Nutanix with around 18-20 VMS per site - fire away
with your questions!

Nutanix is a hypervisor-agnostic hyperconverged environment - it uses
AOS, it's own hypervisor, ESXi or Hyper-V, and wraps it all around a
redundant hardware base. From what I understand, it started out as a GUI
wrapped around KVM/qemu, just like Proxmox - but it's grown
significantly since.

A Nutanix chassis consists of a backplane with typically 2-3
self-contained nodes, with redundant memory and power supplies. The idea
is that you could wire a Nutanix chassis to the network in a remote site
and manage the entire thing from one console.

We have an network team and a firewall team, so we're not using it
anywhere near where we could. They're managing external firewalls, so
we're not using that portion of Nutanix.

We replaced a Simplivity environment with ESXi, then replaced it with
Nutanix - mostly for cost reasons, but it's a pretty nice setup overall,
with great support.

High availability works the way it should - we've had DIMM failures and
the VMs move to the other nodes and it flags us via the console and
email.

It's mostly linux-like at the command line, but they have a habit of odd
service names for everything - which takes some getting used to. Chronos,
Cassandra, Zeus, Curator...

The only thing I've been disappointed is DarkSite, their patch
distribution system. Our systems aren't connected to the internet, so we
wanted to have one system manage patches across all of the clusters.
With most patch management systems, you list the OSes you want and it'll
download the patches and mark them for approval. You test with a QA
group then push the patches to production, which pushes them out to all
of the other systems.

With DarkSite, you need to manually select and download the patches to
your DS server, then they're available to the network- and manually
managing versions and software is done outside of DarkSite.

I'm used to Microsoft's SCCM and SUS, which are a lot more automatic.




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