August 01, 2016

Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure

The Hyperconverged Infrastructure Ideas

  • Distributed System - GFS, The Google File System, Map Reduce
  • RAID - Reduncancy Array of Inexpensive Disk
  • FUSE - FileSytem in User Space http://libfuse.github.io/doxygen/structfuse__operations.html
  • Gabage Collection - Java
  • Fault Tolerance - Database System: Redo/Undo Log, Journaling Filesystem
  • Virtualization - Virtual Machine/Disk abstraction

the Nutanix System

http://nutanixbible.com/

the Model

vDisk -> file handle, offset, size

A Distributed Filesystem (for Virtualization)

  • System Configuration: Zookeeper
    • Cluster Configuration: node, disk, hypervisor, etc,
    • Leader election
    • Sequence/ID generation
  • Metadata: Cassandra
    • Consistent Hashing
    • Paxos for consistency
  • Data:
    • fuse alike API, QoS
    • Journaling
    • Layered Cache

the Interface Protocol

  • NFS - VMware ESXi
  • SMB - Microsoft HyperV
  • iSCSI - Nutanix AHV (KVM)

Solutions Built on Top

  • Snapshot
  • Deduplication
  • Compression
  • Erasure-Coding(RAID)
  • DR(Disaster/Recovery)

Other Open Source Technology

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-technology-stack-at-Nutanix

  • https://gflags.github.io/gflags/
  • https://github.com/google/protobuf
  • https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/