nutanix Archives | n0derunner

2M IOPS on a single VM with Nutanix HCI

Published: November 18, 2025 (Updated: November 20, 2025) in fio, Storage Performance, iops, nutanix, benchmark, fio by gary. Leave a Comment on 2M IOPS on a single VM with Nutanix HCI.

How to generate a lot of IOPS to a single VM.

Using Prometheus and Grafana to monitor a Nutanix Cluster.

Published: May 17, 2024 (Updated: February 5, 2025) in Telemetry, Nutanix, prometheus, python, grafana, telemetry, nutanix by gary. 1 Comment on Using Prometheus and Grafana to monitor a Nutanix Cluster..

Using a small python script we can liberate data from the “Analysis” page of prism element and send it to prometheus, where we can combine cluster metrics with other data and view them all on some nice Grafana dashboards.

Viewing Nutanix cluster metrics in prometheus/grafana

Published: July 31, 2023 (Updated: August 1, 2023) in Telemetry, Nutanix, metrics, grafana, telemetry, prometheus, nutanix by gary. Leave a Comment on Viewing Nutanix cluster metrics in prometheus/grafana.

Using Nutanix API with prometheus push-gateway. Many customers would like to view their cluster metrics alongside existing performance data using Prometheus/Grafana Currently Nutanix does not provide a native exporter for Prometheus to use as a datasource. However we can use the prometheus push-gateway and a simple script which pulls from the native APIs to get […]

Effects of CPU topology on sqlserver guests with AHV.

Published: February 28, 2023 (Updated: February 5, 2025) in Linux Virtualization, AHV, SQL Server, sqlserver, ahv, nutanix, cpu, topology by gary. Leave a Comment on Effects of CPU topology on sqlserver guests with AHV..

VM CPU Topology The topology (layout) that AHV presents virtual Sockets/CPU to the guest operating system will usually be different than the physical topology. This is expected because we typically present a subset of all cores to the guest VMs. Usually it is the total number of vCPU given to the VM that matters, not […]

Beware of tiny working-set-sizes when testing storage performance.

Published: July 1, 2022 (Updated: September 7, 2022) in Storage Performance, diskspd, nutanix, fio by gary. Leave a Comment on Beware of tiny working-set-sizes when testing storage performance..

I was recently asked to investigate why Nutanix storage was not as fast as a competing solution in a PoC environment. When I looked at the output from diskspd, the data didn’t quite make sense.

Comparing RDS and Nutanix Cluster performance with HammerDB

Published: June 14, 2022 (Updated: January 3, 2023) in Nutanix, sqlserver, rds, aws, nutanix, hammerDB by gary. Leave a Comment on Comparing RDS and Nutanix Cluster performance with HammerDB.

tl;dr In a recent experiment using Amazon RDS instance and a VM running in an on-prem Nutanix cluster, both using Skylake class processors with similar clock speeds and vCPU count. The SQLServer database on Nutanix delivered almost 2X the transaction rate as the same workload running on Amazon RDS. It turns out that migrating an […]

AOS 6.1 Improvements for Day-2 database operations.

Published: March 8, 2022 (Updated: January 3, 2023) in Nutanix, sqlserver, aos, database, nutanix by gary. Leave a Comment on AOS 6.1 Improvements for Day-2 database operations..

AOS 6.1 greatly improved database performance on Nutanix especially when the guest VM uses just a single disk for all the database files. The underlying change is known as vdisk sharding. Basically it allows the Nutanix CVM to scale up the number of threads used to service a single virtual disk under heavy load.

How to performance test Nutanix on AWS with X-ray

Published: August 18, 2020 (Updated: April 2, 2021) in X-Ray, aws, xray, nutanix by gary. Leave a Comment on How to performance test Nutanix on AWS with X-ray.

End to End Creation of a Nutanix Cluster on AWS and Running X-Ray

How to download and Install Nutanix X-ray on an AHV cluster

Published: August 10, 2020 (Updated: April 2, 2021) in X-Ray, nutanix, x-ray by gary. Leave a Comment on How to download and Install Nutanix X-ray on an AHV cluster.

Impact of Data locality on DB workloads.

Published: July 23, 2019 (Updated: October 8, 2020) in Nutanix, nutanix, postgres by gary.

Do database workloads benefit from data locality?

Install a bitnami image to Nutanix AHV cluster.

Published: June 28, 2019 (Updated: June 28, 2019) in Nutanix, ahv, benchmark, nutanix, postgres, database by gary.

One of the nice things about using public cloud is the ability to use pre-canned application virtual appliances created by companies like Bitnami. We can use these same appliance images on Nutanix AHV to easily do a Postgres database benchmark Step 1. Get the bitnami image wget https://bitnami.com/redirect/to/587231/bitnami-postgresql-11.3-0-r56-linux-debian-9-x86_64.zip Step 2. Unzip the file and convert […]

X-Ray scenario to demonstrate Nutanix ILM behavior.

Published: October 25, 2018 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in X-Ray, nutanix, x-ray by gary.

Specifically a customer wanted to see how performance changes (and how quickly) as data moves from HDD to SSD automatically as data is accessed. The access pattern is 100% random across the entire disk. In a hybrid Flash/HDD system – “cold” data (i.e. data that has not been accessed for a long time) is moved […]

HCI Performance testing made easy (Part 4)

Published: September 27, 2018 (Updated: October 4, 2018) in X-Ray, resilience, x-ray, nutanix by gary.

What happens when power is lost to all nodes of a HCI Cluster? Ever wondered what happens when all power is simultaneously lost on a HCI cluster? One of the core principles of cloud design is that components are expected to fail, but the cluster as a whole should stay “up”. We wanted to […]

The return of misaligned IO

Published: May 25, 2017 (Updated: January 3, 2023) in Storage Performance, linux, nutanix, fio by gary.

We have started seeing misaligned partitions on Linux guests runnning certain HDFS distributions. How these partitions became mis-aligned is a bit of a mystery, because the only way I know how to do this on Linux is to create a partition using old DOS format like this (using -c=dos and -u=cylinders)

Creating compressible data with fio.

Published: October 18, 2016 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in fio, nutanix, compression, benchmark, fio by gary.

Today I used fio to create some compressible data to test on my Nutanix nodes. I ended up using the following fio params to get what I wanted. buffer_compress_percentage=50 refill_buffers buffer_pattern=0xdeadbeef buffer_compress_percentage does what you’d expect and specifies how compressible the data is refill_buffers Is required to make the above compress percentage do what you’d […]

SATA on Nutanix. Some experimental data.

Published: June 16, 2015 (Updated: January 3, 2023) in Nutanix, sas, nutanix, sata, scsi by gary. Leave a Comment on SATA on Nutanix. Some experimental data..

The question of why Nutanix uses SATA drive comes up sometimes, especially from customers who have experienced very poor performance using SATA on traditional arrays. I can understand this anxiety. In my time at NetApp we exclusively used SAS or FC-AL drives in performance test work. At the time there was a huge difference in performance between […]

Designing a scaleout storage platform.

Published: June 12, 2014 (Updated: March 5, 2017) in Nutanix, nutanix, distributed-systems by gary.

I was speaking to one of our developers the other day, and he pointed me to the following paper: SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services as an example of the general philosophy behind the design of the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS). Although the paper uses examples of both a webserver and a gnutella client, […]