Nutanix vRealize Automation reference architecture

Just realised that the blog post i put together after the Nutanix vRealize Automation (vRA) formerly known as vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) reference architecture was published earlier this year was still unpublished. Received quite a few questions about it since the podcast, that can be found here, i did a few weeks back was released.

During the past years i have spend a lot of time implementing cloud based service offerings for enterprise and SMB customers for their internal or public (service provider) facing solutions.
These kind of services are often built up using a management component and an end user component setup approach.
The management component includes all the infrastructure required to deliver the platform where the end user workload runs. The end user workload is often referred to as the resource or workload component.
A common used approach while creating cloud based services is that the highest customer, often referred to as a tenant, availability demands must be applied to both the management component and resource component.
When the availability discussion is completed we have to determine the potential workload characteristics and this includes both the management and resource component but unlike the availability discussion we can not use the customer/tenant demands and apply them to the management component. These are often two very separate use cases in terms of performance and latency demands and for the public service provider space, they really don’t know what to expect since they often try to attract new unknown customers.

The VMware vRealize Automation software can be used to create the cloud based solutions and the software consists of several different components apart from the resource workload:

• Identity Management
• End user Portal Management
• Gouvernance
• Orchestration engines
• Databases
• Back end web portal/services
• Internal management services

The Nutanix vRA reference architecture that you can download here focus on the management components and follows the VMware outlined concepts of deployment types and also gives directions for Nutanix component configuration for the resource workload.

You will also find information about the following topics in the vRA on Nutanix reference architecture: How the Nutanix Platform works How the Nutanix Platform can interact with vRA. What Nutanix components are required to implement the vRA management cluster components. Suggested Nutanix setup and configuration. VMware vSphere cluster information. How much rack space and how many network switch portas are required for implementing the is required to implement the vRA management cluster components. Comparison in terms of disk space usage and deployment times when using different deployment methods and different Nutanix storage configurations.

After reading the Nutanix vRealize Automation Reference Architecture i’m convinced that you’ll end up with the same conclusion as we have meaning that vRA and the Nutanix web-scale converged infrastructure is the perfect combination and building block for an enterprise, service provider, private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Note: The different deployment types included in the Nutanix vRealize Automation Reference Architecture reference the figures for vRA 6.0.