What’s in a hypervisor?

Why is this important? Well, in the modern datacenter and especially in the public cloud, the hypervisor is a feature, not a product. So, this discussion is still just as relevant today. Why are we still paying for the hypervisor?

I remember my first experience with virtualization. I was evaluating both Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere. At the time, I was working for an IT consulting company; you can visit my LinkedIn profile for more detail. I had several customers that ran wall-to-wall physical servers where each server was responsible for a single application. There was more than enough compute for any of these servers to handle more than a single function, but why would I risk a hardware or software issue affecting more than one application? That has burned me in the past!

So, there I was, sitting in the conference room, having just completed my initial testing of VMware’s ESXi 4.0. The installation was easy, the concept was simple, and the result was determined to be game-changing for our customers. A single physical server could run virtual multiple operating systems! It was a concept that was not easy at the time to explain, but when customers were able to see the benefits, they were quick to consider giving it a try. VMware’s free hypervisor was impressive without HA, Data Recovery, Fault Tolerance, vMotion, Storage vMotion, etc.

After deploying VMware ESXi 4.0 to several customers, I had a meeting where a customer expressed interest in Citrix XenServer. After hearing the customer’s position, it was time to do some testing. What caught my immediate attention was live migration at no cost. I immediately deployed my first Citrix XenServer and spun up a couple of VM’s. The process was just as simple as VMware ESXi, and I did not see any significant difference in supporting VM’s using the Citrix XenServer hypervisor. And, now, I could move VM’s between physical hosts. So began my journey with Citrix XenServer and deeper education in hypervisors.

Fast forward my career, I spun off to start a new company focusing on hosting EMR type applications. My first customers owned their infrastructure and co-located in our datacenter. Based on the software vendor’s guidance, the customer standardized on VMware vSphere. So, we deployed VMware vSphere 5.0 Essentials Plus giving us the ability to manage up to three physical servers, HA, Data Recovery, and vMotion. As the company expanded, so did our products. We offered a cloud solution for our customers, hosting all of their applications on our infrastructure. To standardize the datacenter, we decided to invest in VMware vSphere as the hypervisor platform for our Cloud offering. It appeared to be the best move forward at the time. However, as our business grew, so did our licensing costs and our ability to maintain competitive pricing. It became increasingly difficult to scale not only from an infrastructure aspect but also for budgeting.

I am confident this continues to be a relevant issue in today’s data centers, regardless if you are reselling services or servicing employees.

What hypervisor are you running?

If you deploy workloads in the public cloud, do you pay a hypervisor cost? The answer is no. Next, does AWS, Azure, or GCP all run the same hypervisor? The answer is no. Do you choose one of the major public clouds based on the hypervisor they provide? Again, no.

In most cases, the hypervisor choice does not matter. You have a checklist of requirements, and the public cloud vendor can meet those requirements or fall short. Specifications and cost determine which public cloud you choose for your workloads. 

So, why are you still paying for a hypervisor?

How does this correlate back to your on-premises datacenter, and is it possible that this same choice is available outside of the public cloud? Is there a no-cost hypervisor with the feature sets required to run your applications? The answer is yes. But let’s take a closer look.

This blog will not detail Citrix XenServer or KVM features as most customers I come across have standardized on VMware vSphere or Hyper-V, and these are considered the standard in hypervisor choice for on-premises infrastructure.

I read an article where someone positioned that VMware ESXi is available for free download. Diving deeper, the next sentence stated that a user could choose to work for 60 days with all advanced features enabled if the free versions serial number is not entered. I looked up what advanced features require a paid license for accuracy. Below are the limitations of the free VMware ESXi hypervisor, or “free” trial.

• You are not able to manage via vCenter.
• Only two physical CPU per Hypervisor is allowed.
• Only 128 vCPU per hypervisor is allowed.
• The maximum amount of vCPUs you can assign to a VM is limited to 8.
• Physical RAM limit of 12TB per hypervisor is allowed.
• No support.

Now. I’ve been around long enough to know that a primary benefit of virtualization is the ability to migrate VM’s from one physical host to another without any VM interruption. This feature requires VMware vCenter, not included in the free download of ESXi. That alone forces customers to pay for the ESXi hypervisor. However, there are other features like hot add and hot removal of VM resources, which are also important, among others. 

An alternate solution is Hyper-V. I have gone down this route and can get into some of the pitfalls of management and complexity compared to VMware vCenter, primarily if you use Hyper-V Manager rather than Microsoft SCCM. For now, we are comparing cost and features. Hyper-V includes most of the licensed features of VMware ESXi, however, without the license fee.

• VM host live-migration – Included.
• VM storage live-migration – Included.
• Storage/Network QoS – Included.
• Hot Add/Remove – Included.
• System maximum numbers remain close or the same as licensed versions of VMware vSphere. – Included.

I have heard from customers that they acknowledge Hyper-V has closed the gap and can meet their hypervisor requirements, thereby reducing cost in the datacenter. However, the cost savings do not outweigh the complexities of migrating VM workloads from their current VMware vSphere deployment and the complexities of day-to-day management. There is also a significant learning curve of Hyper-V administration at scale, resulting in additional training, professional services, and ultimately cost.

So does this mean we are back to the beginning? That VMware vSphere and its inherent costs are the only answer? Are there no viable options in the data center for a hypervisor that aligns with the public cloud model where the hypervisor is included at no additional cost and provides enterprise features? Thankfully, that answer is a resounding, no! Another option does exist.

Introducing, AHV!

As the public cloud era matured, Linux virtualization based on KVM had also evolved to a point where it was widely accepted, and heavily used. Just look at the success of AWS as their announcement in 2017 to move from open-source Xen to KVM. The fact that AWS could switch the hypervisor that runs customers’ applications demonstrates that an application needs to perform well first. AWS proved that agility, management, and cost, not the brand of the hypervisor, are essential but not as critical as performance.

Previous to AWS transitioning to KVM, Nutanix took control of the hypervisor by offering customers another choice. If we look back to 2011 when Nutanix shipped their first product, they started off supporting the market-leading virtualization platform at the time, VMware vSphere. Since then, Nutanix expanded support to other platforms to include Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor (Xen Server). But customers wanted more—requests for lower-cost options and for technical enhancements that require having more control over the virtualization platform. 

Led by Nutanix customer demand, AHV, built upon KVM, was born! The combination of mature commodity virtualization technology, performance-tuned, including enterprise-grade management, operational intelligence, security, and automation delivered with 1-click simplicity.

So, good news for system admins and virtualization teams that need virtualization technology to deliver applications and services while eliminating the complexity and expense of managing third-party hypervisors. AHV is built into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS to provide native virtualization capabilities, extending its functionality to include features like HA, live migration, and more. Unlike other alternatives, AHV management comes from within the same interface used to manage the rest of the infrastructure stack.

Let’s get real!

You may be doubting AHV, maybe because there’s no additional cost or possibly because it is born from KVM. Or, perhaps you are questioning its capabilities or performance. Although Nutanix built AHV on a foundation of open-source KVM, they also added a significant amount of innovation to make AHV a uniquely Nutanix offering.

Virtual Machine Management, Dynamic Scheduling, Affinity, Anti-affinity, Live Migration, Cross-hypervisor Migration, Automated High Availablity, GPU Support (Passthrough and vGPU), vNUMA, RDMA

Now let’s briefly discuss security. 

TL;DR:
Nutanix has adopted an all-inclusive approach to infrastructure security. The fully integrated infrastructure stack eliminates security risks associated with legacy solutions that involve many vendors with a narrow, fragmented view of security.

Security Development Life Cycle
To maintain agile and comprehensive security, Nutanix has developed its own Security Development Life Cycle, which addresses security at every step of the development process instead of applying it at the end as an afterthought. 

Security Baseline and Self-Healing
Nutanix has developed custom Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs), security tools based on well-established National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards, that administrators can apply to multiple baseline requirements for DoD and PCI-DSS. Unlike general-purpose STIGs that make blanket security recommendations, Nutanix STIGs are specific to the Acropolis platform and, therefore, more effective. Encoded in a machine-readable format, Nutanix STIGs enable automated validation, ongoing monitoring, and self-remediation, reducing the time required to verify security compliance from weeks or months to days.

Audits
The audits log in Prism provides a comprehensive list of all actions performed by administrators and users against AHV resources. Quickly locate details on when an action, such as VM creation, deletion, and updates, was taken and by whom.

Are you paying extra for a commodity item?

Do you want to continue to pay for something that is truly a commodity item? With AHV, the complexity and costs of traditional virtualization are removed, making on-premises virtualization much closer to the public cloud experience. Like the public cloud, AHV is an included, license-free, solution providing complete hypervisor and management capabilities.

Imagine—management capabilities delivered from the same interface that manages the entire Nutanix core HCI. And don’t forget the Nutanix focus on 1-click simplicity. It applies to AHV as well!

Ask yourself.

If the only way is VMware vSphere, why do the most significant cloud vendors build their home-brewed hypervisor based on KVM? Consider the impact you could have on your organization by opening up to the idea that you should not be locked in by the hypervisor, especially in today’s modern data center. As a result, you could be saving your organization money, time, and aggravation.

Are you ready for cost reduction, desire to do more in less time, or want end-to-end security?

Leave behind a legacy! Free yourself from unnecessary license costs without sacrifice.

Oh, and along the way, stop buying costly software bundles just to get a simple hypervisor, and stop paying for what you don’t use!

Upcoming Topic: Cross-hypervisor migration.

Stay tun[ed]