Run VMs Anywhere with Nutanix AHV

Run VMs Anywhere with Nutanix AHV

The Nutanix AHV hypervisor is a modern and secure virtualization platform that powers VMs and containers for applications and cloud-native workloads on-premises, in ROBO environments, and in public clouds. At Nutanix, we strive to build products that make it easy to run VMs anywhere. Here we will cover some of the latest ways we enable this.

A day in the life

As an application owner, you should not have to worry about which cluster your application is running on. If the underlying infrastructure has nodes/clusters with similar resources and capabilities, the admin should not be forced to manage or decide where to run the VMs. You may need the ability to migrate VMs from older platforms to newer platforms seamlessly. Nutanix has a long history of enabling such migrations, starting with allowing VMs to run on hypervisor flexibility.

Let us paint a picture of a scenario a typical customer may have. In the scenario, you have a brand-new application that you want to deploy. Can you imagine focusing on creating the VM and bringing up the application without having to worry about any other details? What if you did not have to look at all of the clusters that you have or dig into the details around how much compute/memory is left on the cluster, which network is used on which cluster, etc.? What if the Nutanix Prism Central management console could automatically place the VM on the best possible cluster, taking into account relevant factors? Well, you can do all that with the VM Automatic Cluster Selection feature. Automatic Cluster Selection takes into account a variety of factors, such as how much load is on each cluster, policies such as host affinities, storage and image placement policies, and resource capacity on the cluster to make an intelligent decision on which cluster to place the VM.

When you have many VMs running on the cluster, there is a potential for contention around shared resources such as compute or storage. In such instances, the Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling (ADS) feature can detect storage or compute hotspots on the cluster,  and create a migration plan to remove the hotspots by migrating VMs to another host. This ensures that the VMs running on the host have optimized access to the host resources and reduces resource contention by monitoring VM CPU and memory utilization. 

There may be scenarios in which you want to migrate VMs between Nutanix clusters that are either in the same data center or across different data centers. If there are protection policies set up beforehand, migrating a virtual machine is just a matter of selecting the destination cluster and manually triggering the migration workflow. If there are no protection policies set up beforehand and you want to migrate your VMs across clusters, On-Demand Cross Cluster Live Migration (OD-CCLM) allows you to do that seamlessly.

With the support for Advanced Processor Compatibility now we can migrate the VMs to a different cluster using CCLM or OD-CCLM clusters with different CPU families, especially old hardware to new hardware. Advanced Processor Compatibility (APC) also allows the admin to create a VM with a subset of the features available in CPU.

The Cloud can be used as your DR site, which you can failover to in case of any disaster to the primary on-premises data center. As part of this, you can do a lift and shift to cloud, set up protection policies, and do a planned failover from on-premises to the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) platform on AWS/Azure. 

Now, let’s say you want to build Cloud Native Applications at scale using containers. If you also want it to be orchestrated by a Kubernetes® cluster, Nutanix offers the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP). NKP leverages declarative APIs for both cluster and application lifecycle management. With the NKP 2.12 release, NKP comes together with AHV, enabling customers to effortlessly manage traditional VM-based applications alongside containerized workloads in cloud-native environments. NKP allows you to deploy a Kubernetes cluster with just a few clicks and scale it on demand.

Conclusion

Nutanix AHV offers robust, flexible, and efficient solutions for running VMs anywhere, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Features like VM Automatic Cluster Selection, ADS, and APC, combined with seamless migration capabilities and integration with cloud services, make Nutanix an ideal choice for modern IT infrastructures.

For more information and resources on Nutanix AHV, please visit the Nutanix Portal.

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