Nutanix, provider of appliance-based servers with built-in storage has announced that it now supports running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V. With this announcement Nutanix now supports the hypervisor platforms from VMware, Microsoft and KVM.
The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is a scale-out cluster of high-performance nodes, or servers, each running a standard hypervisor and containing processors, memory and local storage (consisting of SSD Flash and high capacity SATA disk drives). Each node runs virtual machines just like a standard virtual machine host.
In addition, local storage from all nodes is virtualized into a unified pool by the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS). In effect, NDFS acts like an advanced NAS that uses local SSDs and disks from all nodes to store virtual machine data. Virtual machines running on the cluster write data to NDFS as if they were writing to shared storage.
With the announcement Nutanix also released a paper titled: "Citrix XenDesktop on Microsoft Hyper-V Reference Architecture". The Paper which contains 66 pages provides recommendations for the design, optimization and scaling of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp deployments on Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix. The paper covers the scalability of the Nutanix platform for XenDesktop and XenApp deployments. Testing was done using Login VSI.
The paper covers the following sections:
- Executive Summary
- Introduction
- Solution Overview
- Solution Design
- Solution Application
- Validation and Benchmarking
- Results
- Further Research
- Conclusion