I’m happy to see that Nutanix has officially announced their upcoming strategic direction at the .NEXT conference. Using Nutanix Acropolis, KVM, and Prism – data center administrators now have the ability to truly make infrastructure invisible.
What Is It?
To read more about the specific details take a look at Andre Leibovici’s post here, then come back. It has great pictures and lists of features, you’ll like it.
Key advantages for me as a UC administrator:
- Linux KVM as a fully featured and consumer friendly hypervisor
- Nutanix Prism and Acropolis presenting a seamless management interface for VMs regardless of the underlying hypervisor
- Management interfaces designed with Nutanix web-scale principles such as distributed-everything, shared-nothing architecture in mind
- Simple migration of existing VMs into a Nutanix XCP (Xtreme Computing Platform) environment
I see an exciting future for enterprises that want to virtualize but don’t want to get locked into a particular hypervisor. Real choice is now available to put workloads on the hypervisor that makes most sense.
Combined with the ability to scale compute and storage effortlessly, administrators can stop worrying about infrastructure and start planning for what truly matters, Unified Communication applications 😉 I might be a little biased there, but its applications that drive business productivity, not compute and storage infrastructure.
Your compute, storage, and now even your hypervisor can be seen as a commodity that’s just available to applications.
What Does It Mean For My UC?
Test and development virtual environments can be virtualized and managed without paying for hypervisor licenses.
Production environments that support Linux KVM can be migrated with a few clicks.
Your VM management infrastructure becomes more resilient and reliable with one-click upgrades possible for BIOS, Firmware, Hypervisor, and Storage Software for the entire infrastructure stack.
Less time spent managing infrastructure and more time spent working on UC.
But I Can’t Use KVM or Don’t Want To
Nutanix still supports using VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V and the same flexible storage and compute layer is still available. Infrastructure is still invisible, but in these cases VM Management will be performed through the corresponding VMware or MS tools.
Some UC vendors such as Microsoft already support multiple Hypervisors. MS Lync (Skype for Business) is supported on any Hypervisor listed in the SVVP program, for example. In the past, Avaya supported the Aura “System Platform” which was XenServer.
I expect the UC marketplace to open up and support alternative hypervisors in the future. Customer demand can drive vendor behavior, like it did with Cisco’s support for specs based virtualization of UC.
What NEXT?
Give Nutanix a try for your environment with the free Nutanix Community Edition. See if you can save on test or development VM environments at first. Think about what happens if you can truly separate your applications from the infrastructure stack. Where is the best place for those apps to run? If you already have a Nutanix Environment, then investigate standing up a cluster with Acropolis and KVM.
If you’re at .NEXT, stop by the Avaya booth and talk with Steven Given about the work already done to verify interoperability between Avaya’s Software Defined Datacenter and Nutanix Software Defined Storage.