Overview of Nutanix Distributed Storage Architecture

Nutanix is a distributed storage system that integrates storage and compute resources on physical nodes, but logically runs all storage logic in a pre‑packaged virtual machine (storage control VM) on top of a hypervisor, isolated from business VMs and providing high‑performance storage services.

Nutanix storage infrastructure (NX series hyper‑converged system) can scale without any management‑program limits, reaching thousands of nodes; storage logic is separated from the virtualization platform, achieving compute and storage fault‑domain isolation. Independent fault domains make the platform more stable and suitable for I/O‑intensive or high‑reliability applications.

The isolation mechanism between storage VM and compute VM allows Nutanix to support VMware, KVM, and Hyper‑V, unlike VMware vSAN which is tightly coupled with vSphere and only supports VMware.

Each Nutanix node contains a storage control VM (CVM) that implements all storage logic and functions; local storage is attached to the CVM via RDM or pass‑through, and storage resources are offered to business VMs via NFS or iSCSI.

Nutanix Cluster (Nutanix Complete Cluster)

The core NDFS file system (located in the storage control VM) connects storage, compute, control VMs and the hypervisor; all resources form a pool, creating vDisk (a standard iSCSI device) as a logical datastore provided to VMs.

Cluster Configuration Manager (Zeus)

Based on Zookeeper, it runs on three nodes within the cluster and stores cluster configuration management information.

Distributed Metadata Service (Medusa)

Medusa distributes cluster metadata across the entire cluster for scalability and replicates data to multiple nodes for fault tolerance.

Distributed Data Maintenance Service (Curator)

Curator is a MapReduce‑based framework for large‑scale parallel background data management operations, including:

Moving cold data to lower tiers.

Collecting deleted garbage data.

Verifying data consistency via programs.

Replicating data when a node or disk fails.

Rebalancing data when adding or removing nodes.

Migrating data when a VM moves between nodes to maximize local access.

Nutanix Storage Software Features

FlashStore is a persistent flash‑based storage; data is first written to FlashStore, then migrated to DiskStore (a large‑capacity SATA layer spanning the whole cluster) when it becomes cold. Hot data that becomes cold again is moved back to FlashStore.

Nutanix’s HOT technology integrates FlashStore and DiskStore, delivering high performance and large capacity at lower cost.

Nutanix provides enterprise‑grade features comparable to traditional SANs, including VM‑level snapshots, online compression, online deduplication, SSD optimization, MapReduce compression/deduplication, performance analytics, cluster health checks, remote data replication, hardware diagnostics, and more.

The Nutanix architecture is specifically designed for virtual machines, thus it supports all VM functions of traditional network storage architectures, including live VM migration and high availability.

Nutanix Instant vDisk Motion uses the fused local‑storage architecture to support real‑time migration. The vDisk is a fully movable logical entity (similar to Storage vMotion). This feature can quickly move a vDisk from one node to another when needed.

Nutanix’s converged backup provides instant backup and recovery for vDisk. It fully complies with VMware vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP), enabling backup and recovery of the storage control VM and offering comprehensive VM backup and recovery capabilities.

Simple Summary:

Nutanix is built on a distributed design with logical separation of storage and compute VMs, offering high reliability, independent scaling of storage and compute resources, and decoupling from the hypervisor to support multiple hypervisors.

It can scale to thousands of nodes; among ServerSAN products (e.g., vSAN, Tintri) it has strong scalability, distributed RAID ensures reliability, and performance scales linearly with node count.

Nutanix provides rich storage features such as online deduplication/compression, data replication, and storage tiering, comparable to enterprise storage but with more flexible deployment and cost advantages.

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