Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Nutanix in San Jose, California offers their software-defined Enterprise Cloud as a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution combines the Nutanix Acropolis virtualization solution, Nutanix AHV hypervisor (though Acropolis works with other hypervisors), Prism cluster manager, Nutanix Calm and Nutanix Flow server management, and is available on the Nutanix NX series of server hardware appliances, as well as third-party OEM appliances.
8 because it's currently best-in-class and is completely essential to use in contrast to not expressing your infrastructure as code. That said, new contenders are nipping at its heels, and I expect stronger tools to emerge in the coming years. Hopefully the Terraform team is able to keep pace.
I would highly recommend using Nutanix HCI for any of your infrastructure needs. I would highly suggest saving money and using the free included AHV hypervisor. The performance is incredible, and the data reduction capabilities are on par with vSAN. I would only recommend using ESXi with Nutanix AOS if AHV does not yet support some one-off configurations or if you still want to use horizon while the frame is still growing.
One-click upgrades; whether it's hypervisor, firmware, disk or other updates. This feature has drastically decreased complexity and administration time.
Data Locality. Not all hyperconverged technology is created equal. When I first purchased Nutanix they were the only vendor (and as far as I know, still are) that made sure the storage a VM used was on the same host that VM was running on. Given a normal operating state, the [storage] network is literally only used for replication data.
They got rid of traditional RAID. Nutanix uses software to determine where a VM's storage should be written and replicated to. This dramatically decreases I/O when changing the number of nodes in a cluster, be it on purpose or during a failure scenario. Ex. adding a new node: If one uses RAID arrays then enough space has to be set aside to create a new array that includes the new node, then all the information has to be copied over, and the old array destroyed. RAID arrays do not grow and shrink gracefully so Nutanix has designed a better solution.
The Nutanix management interface was built on HTML5. No more flash headaches!
The errors generated by the plan and preview commands are pretty cryptic, it can be hard for newcomers to the scripting language to understand how to address problems.
Access controls around workspaces is limited which makes it harder to secure reduce the scope of teams ability.
Analytics around user usage, applies and plans would be helpful for managemenet.
The one downside I have working with Nutanix is the sales team. They seem to try to add in extra goodies to sales quotes or push for extras that you don't really need and you have to tell them to take them out. Don't be afraid to push back on them.
Need to analyze sizing with sales team to ensure right sizing.
AOS definitely make our dev/test virtual environment management much easier than before. And the consolidation the test/dev environment from Azure and Cisco UCS, we have less need to transfer large amount of data between different hardware platforms which was very big challenge. To expand the capacity is very easy to archive as well.
I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
Nutanix AOS performance is light years ahead of HPE. We were nervous about using Nutanix AHV but it has been a vast improvement and saves on cost. Applications has been much improved and end users have commented. It has also freed up time for our Network Administrators and made their lives easier.
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
Modernizing with HCI, which creates private cloud-like data centers, is, for many organizations, the first step in their digital transformation. Companies that have kept their eye on the long game and made decisions based on a fully-developed ROI analysis have found themselves uniquely positioned to make the critical operational changes the COVID-19 situation has demanded.
IPv6 is needed for link local discovery. We do not have IPv6 configured on our network so the easiest way to get our nodes configured and discovered by foundation was to configure the IPv4 addressing within the node prior to trying to discover with foundation.
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
We've decided to go for both VxRail and Nutanix AOS to make sure we can get the best deals from both sides. I appreciate this may not be a path most companies can go down, but always good to have a bit of healthy competition between vendors to ensure you're getting the best pricing from both sides!
we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
