• Asset Type

    Blog Post

  • Technologies

    Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Sizing and Capacity planning for Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

By
  • Mat Brown, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer
Streamlined, efficient solution sizing and planning is an important, but often overlooked part of infrastructure and hybrid cloud management. This blog delves into the Collector, Sizer and Capacity Runway tools to show how they make finding the optimal solution for your requirements as pain free as possible.
  • Asset Type

    Blog Post

  • Technologies

    Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Introduction

One of the critical tasks required when planning any private or hybrid cloud deployment is solution sizing. Undersize, and your applications might run slowly, or your data could run out of storage space. Oversize and you’ve unnecessarily spent time and money on hardware and software you didn’t need, not to mention needlessly making a negative contribution to your organization's environmental impact.

Historically, any sizing or capacity planning has been especially risk averse with each team involved adding their own “layer of fat” to the process to make sure they aren’t held responsible for any shortfall.

But, sizing these days isn’t merely a case of adding up compute and storage requirements (vCPUs, GB of RAM, TB of data).  Different features, availability, and security requirements all come with their own overheads.  Additionally, with hybrid cloud technologies like the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution, IT teams can also take into account temporal factors such as seasonal peaks / troughs or plan to respond to changes in business requirements with hours rather than months notice.  And, as IT organizations are increasingly asked to do more with less, granular and accurate estimations of capacity become ever more important.

The right tools for the job

Nutanix has a number of tools & features to make what can be an arduous task as simple and painless as possible.  Some of these are part of the Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) suite of technologies, some are stand alone, cost free tools.

  • Collector - Collects requirements from existing environments including on premise virtualization platforms, Public Cloud and some storage (NAS) platforms.
  • Sizer - Takes requirements from Collector, other sources or manual input and automatically sizes a Nutanix solution across all supported hardware vendors and Clouds.
  • NCM Capacity Runway & Scenario Modelling - Part of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and enabled in the Prism Central console to monitor and predict future cluster utilization using Machine Learning (ML) and  “What If” Scenario planning.
  • NCM Inefficiency Detection & Right-Sizing - A second feature enabled in Prism Central which monitors virtual machine usage and suggests possible changes that could be made to configuration to optimize both performance and resource utilization.
  • NCM Cost Governance - A FinOps tool delivered as a SaaS service that helps manage, allocate, predict and optimize costs across the 3 main public clouds and Nutanix solutions.  Mentioned here as it also includes some forecasting / trending features, but it’s not within the scope of this blog.  More details are available here.

New customers and those planning on deploying Nutanix solutions to a greenfield environment, or to replace an existing virtualisation platform, will most likely use the Sizer and Collector tools to help plan their initial Nutanix deployments. This is usually under the guidance of a Nutanix Systems Engineer or a suitably qualified partner technical resource.

Once the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution is deployed, IT teams can then use the capacity runway capabilities in Prism Central to track resource utilization and plan for future changes.

Let's take a closer look at the 3 tools described above in a little more detail:

Collector

Requirements gathering can be a complex process, and in truth, not all requirements can be gathered using a tool (e.g. security, replication, availability, preferred hardware, 3rd party software licensing etc.).  But gathering the core compute, storage and networking requirements is a process that can be done programmatically and this is where Nutanix Collector excels.

Those experienced in gathering requirements from VMware VSphere environments will no doubt notice some similarities with the classic RVTools. Similarly, you can download the Collector tool for Windows, Linux and MacOS and point it at your source environment to start gathering metrics and configurations.

Figure 1: Nutanix Collector on MacOS environment connectivity screen listing the different types of environment it can connect to. Figure 1: Nutanix Collector on MacOS environment connectivity screen listing the different types of environment it can connect to.

One key difference is that Collector doesn't just take a point in time snapshot like RVTools, it also collects CPU and storage performance metrics as well as hardware and VM configurations to provide a more complete baseline. Another difference is that Collector also gathers configuration and performance data of allocated resources, not just from VSphere but also from Nutanix Prism and other vendor solutions, such as the Hyper-V hypervisor, ONTAP CIFS Shares, Microsoft (MS) SQL database, and AWS, VMC on AWS, and Azure cloud solutions, with more platforms and workloads expected in the future (always check the documentation for details).

Figure 2: Nutanix Collector collection results screen showing high level cluster metrics. Figure 2: Nutanix Collector collection results screen showing high level cluster metrics.

Collector also comes with a powerful analysis portal at collector.nutanix.com. You can use this portal to analyze and adjust “collections”, including right sizing under and over sized VMs as well as comparing to other collections you may have taken. Essentially, the Collector portal is there to help prepare the requirements before they are loaded into Sizer.

Figure 3: A Screenshot of Summary screen Nutanix Collector portal showing existing projects and previous collections. Figure 3: A Screenshot of Summary screen Nutanix Collector portal showing existing projects and previous collections.

Sizer

 

Sizer is where requirements are turned into solutions on the hardware platform of your choice, whether you use the Nutanix NX platform, one of Nutanix’s  many hardware partners* platforms or a bare metal platform delivered by a public cloud provider.

Sizer can actually take inputs from a variety of sources such as Collector and the Nutanix Insights portal. Other vendor sources such as RVtools or Oracle AWR reports, or various kinds of manual entry for different types of workload are also supported:

Figure 4: Screenshot of Sizer workload selection in Sizer Figure 4: Screenshot of Sizer workload selection in Sizer

Basic Workload Types: VDI, server virtualisation, cluster sizing (RAW Input), file services (Nutanix Files Storage) and Prism Central.

Advanced Workload Types: Server VDA/RDSH, SQL Server, Splunk, Oracle, Nutanix Objects Storage, SAP HANA and backup.

Sizer then includes into its calculations various configuration options material to the required physical hardware requirements such as encryption, compression, deduplication, erasure coding, redundancy factor, data protection levels, replication, expected growth and more. 

Finally, Sizer takes these requirements and applies them to a hardware platform of the users choosing and applying any other filters or platform requirements in the process (e.g. hardware platform vendor, filter model form factors, minimum CPU frequency etc.).  The user can choose to either use an “Automatic” option where Sizer recommends a cost optimized solution based on the above inputs and some default assumptions, or “Manual” where the user can configure and add nodes to support the workload requirements.

Note: Sizer comes in two versions, Basic and Advanced.  Basic has a cut down set of features and only provides solutions for the Nutanix NX hardware platform.  Sizer Advanced is used by Nutanix employees and partners that have completed the appropriate training on the Nutanix Learning Academy (login required). Sizer Advanced provides a full range of features across multiple hardware platforms (HPE, DELL, Cisco, Lenovo, Fujitsu among others) and Cloud & BareMetal platforms (AWS, Azure, Equinix Metal, OVHCloud).

Once the workload information has been entered, the user will then see an automatically proposed solution: number of nodes, node configuration, expected utilization figures and details of how the solution sized has been arrived at:

Figure 5: Part of a Sizer user interface summarizing a Nutanix NX solution and the expected utilization. Figure 5: Part of a Sizer user interface summarizing a Nutanix NX solution and the expected utilization.

This solution can then either be accepted and exported for inclusion in solution documentation.  Or it can be further edited, adjusted and compared to different solutions. The option to collaborate and share a solution with a colleague is also available.

This is just a brief, high level overview of some of the capabilities and features of the Nutanix Sizer Configuration Estimator.  But hopefully it has given a taste of how it is used to streamline the solution sizing process and provide efficient, cost optimized solutions that avoid unnecessary over provisioning and waste.

NCM Capacity Runway - Unlike the other two tools, Capacity Runway runs within Prism Central and is used for managing capacity of already deployed Nutanix clusters.  As such, it uses live and historical metrics recorded from the actual workloads and machine learning to analyze usage and predict future trends.

It also features “What if” scenario planning to allow IT teams to plan capacity ahead of time for new incoming requirements (e.g. “What if we need another 20 SQL servers?” or “What If we need to support another 100 VDI users?”, or even, “what if we decommission every Windows 2003 server that the users insist we still need?” ).

Figure 6: An NCM capacity planning runway scenario estimating the time left until new capacity is required. Figure 6: An NCM capacity planning runway scenario estimating the time left until new capacity is required.

With the future requirements then added to the scenario, Capacity Runway is able to use its machine learning algorithms to predict a runway (204 days in the above example) to estimate how far in the future new hardware resources will be required so they can be ordered and bought online in plenty of time. And remember, expansion of the cluster and load balancing of data and workload is an online activity, so there is no impact to existing applications whilst the new hardware is added to the cluster.

To support the running of hybrid multi-clouds, the capacity runway is now also able to work with what-if scenarios where workloads may be moved to a different “landing zone”, and therefore able to show a user the results of shrinking workloads on different clusters, whether be in the data center or in public cloud.

Finally, NCM also features “VM Right Sizing” capabilities to help make sure that VMs are running at optimal efficiency and not over or under provisioned.  

Keeping on top of the VM right sizing recommendations and capacity planning are essential to running an efficient platform. This can also be helped by configuring NCM’s reporting features to automatically email admins and managers to make sure they have the latest information at the fingertips.  Alternatively, right sizing alerts can be used to activate Nutanix X-Play actions to automatically adjust server configurations to meet the capacity requirements without any manual intervention.

Conclusion

With effective use of our custom-built Collector, Sizer and Capacity Runway tools, customers can rest assured that their Nutanix solutions can be sized for optimal efficiency and then continue to be run efficiently. These tools have the flexibility to make for a quick and simple process if a deployment is relatively straightforward. Or can be used for in depth analysis planning for more complex environments. Used properly, this can result in a minimal use of resources and by extension a reduced environmental impact both from an energy use and an embodied emissions perspective. 

They can also provide reassurance to organizations that are concerned about future resource consumption so that they can more readily take advantage of simplified cluster expansion and cloud bursting features, helping them run a more streamlined, sustainable, hybrid cloud platform.

Resources and Documentation

Collector

Sizer

Sign up for and login for Sizer and Collector is via https://my.nutanix.com. Nutanix partners should make sure they sign up via https://www.nutanix.com/partner-signup first or may find access restricted.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

* Sizer currently supports the following qualified hardware vendors and cloud platforms: Nutanix NX, HPE, Cisco, DELL, Fujitsu, AWS, Azure, OVHCloud, Equinix Metal and more.  A list of nutanix supported hardware platforms is here: https://www.nutanix.com/products/hardware-platforms

 

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