Hyperconvergence is the epitome of the software-defined data centre (SDCC), offering the agility, scalability and flexibility required to meet current and future business needs. Compared with their integrated system counterparts and legacy infrastructure, hyperconverged systems have a lower cost of entry as they bring a cloud-like economic model to enterprise IT that provides faster time to value for datacentre expenditures and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for the entire solution.
However, there are various software licensing costs involved depending on the vendor and if companies aren’t careful, the cost of a hyperconverged system can be comparable to that of a more traditional system. Nutanix Acropolis streamlines datacentre design by eliminating the hypervisor as a separately purchased and individually managed silo in the overall infrastructure stack, bringing management and operational simplicity as well as improved economics. Unlike competing vendors, Nutanix have developed their own custom built VM, the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), as part of their hyperconverged platform with no licensing costs, eliminating the need for a third-party hypervisor.
AHV supports core virtualisation capabilities including high availability, VM migration and optimised resource utilisation. With enhanced security, self-healing capabilities based on SaltStack and enterprise-grade VM management, AHV delivers arguably the best overall user experience at the lowest TCO and will be the first hypervisor to plug into the App Mobility Fabric. Whilst AHV is based on the open source Linux KVM, Acropolis also supports VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Customers of the Acropolis platform have the option of using AHV alone or alongside another hypervisor, allowing them to freely choose the best virtualisation technology for their organisation. The Acropolis App Mobility Fabric (AMF) enables them to move virtual machine workloads between hypervisors and different runtime environments.
Today, AHV is widely used by customers for a broad range of use cases, from mission-critical database workloads to Citrix-based desktop virtualisation solutions. By making the virtualised datacentre simple and easily manageable, Nutanix has certainly enabled a new approach to the stand-alone hypervisor model. For better understanding, this page will be of assistance!
