Today I had the opportunity to see an Nutanix deployed cluster with Hyper-V. If you have not heard about Nutanix before I urge you to go and check out their website and see how it works. Basically their solutions use local storage for massive performance and their Controller VM has direct access to the disks (a set of SSD and HDD) that also has tiering and dedup and present the storage to the Hyper-V node with a SMB 3 file share, for resiliency the data is replicated to other nodes so in case of an failure your VM´s will start up on another node with all the data.

When you buy an Nutanix solution the Windows 2012 R2 is installed on delivery and you will only configure networking and add the nodes to the Active Directory, so getting your Hyper-V enironment up and running is quite a breeze with this 2U x 4 node solution and it can scale with more 2U sets and this can also be added after you are up and running to scale with your added loads!

As you can see on the features you get both TRIM and ODX functionallity with the solution allowing you to clone or create VM´s within the box in just seconds and also reclaim storage when removing data and VM´s! As you will always use the local controller VM there is no need for SMB Multichannel.

The nutanix will work with your System Center environment and can be automated with VMM and Orchestrator.

I will do a more thorough post about the configuration and setup when I get my hands on a Nutanix-platform!