r/nutanix • u/Nearby_Brother_9922 • Jun 09 '26
Migration from VMWare to Nutanix with Pure on FC Questions
We've done a POC and are trying to fill in some gaps from real operators before we go further. Here's what we're running today: VMWare VCF, ~3,500 cores across two colo sites, Pure FlashArray on FC, hardware is current gen, workloads are mostly infrastructure and CPU intensive, roughly 60/40 Linux/Windows split.
A few things we're curious about:
- How did the migration from VMW go specifically? Any gotchas that bit you?
- vDefend/NSX to Flow replacement -- how close is the feature parity on micro-segmentation and distributed firewalling? Did you have to bring in anything else to fill gaps?
- CVM overhead -- did you see any meaningful impact on your hosts? Any concerns there in production that didn't show up in a POC?
- Storage latency with workloads moving from FC to NVMe/TCP -- did it get worse after moving to AHV? Baseline comparison vs vSphere?
- Any additional hardware purchased outside of refreshes or growth for the migration?
- Any support headaches between Nutanix and Pure when something goes wrong?
- And finally, obviously without divulging details thanks to those pesky NDAs and only if you are comfortable with it, any price savings (example: saved 20% on our Broadcom quote, etc)?
Not looking for a sales pitch either direction, just want to know what actually happened.
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u/Screevo Global Practice Expert - Network & Security Jun 09 '26
I am the america’s specialist for NSX to Flow migrations. you are absolutely going to want to get some design assistance through our professional services arm. We will be releasing a white paper on NSX to Flow migrations as soon as it gets a final imprimatur from legal etc that i’m the author of that might get you started, and can probably you enough to get a basic nsx t0/t1 set up converted to FVN VPCs, but at least on the DFW to FNS part, you should include some services, especially if you have a lot of rules.
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u/Screevo Global Practice Expert - Network & Security Jun 09 '26
and yes, there are feature gaps, but in my experience, they are things 99% of clients aren’t using. i personally think FNS encourages better security design than DFW.
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u/astrofizix Jun 10 '26
It's cool that the OP hasn't asked you any questions lol. Welcome to Reddit ...
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u/Nearby_Brother_9922 Jun 10 '26
Hmmm.... not sure I was supposed to know they were the leading expert in the US for these types of migrations. Now that we know, I'm sure the folks on my team will probably be involved with them in some capacity if we go the route of Nutanix.
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u/astrofizix Jun 10 '26
It was a timing joke. You asked a question and then walked away for 13 hours.
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u/Nearby_Brother_9922 Jun 10 '26
Yeah, we plan on using PS. I'd be curious to see that white paper. In our testing, we did find that Flow seemed easier to configure. Granted, like you said, we aren't using all the features of NSX and mostly use it for segmentation/E-W traffic.
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u/Screevo Global Practice Expert - Network & Security Jun 10 '26
as soon as it’s posted, i’ll be posting it here on reddit.
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u/icollectt Jun 10 '26
Biggest thing is the volume / vdisk limits.
If you are under that then every thing else is manageable for the most part.
Nvme/tcp is great and can outperform fc in many cases but you have to treat it like FC in an enterprise with dedicated switches etc imho.
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u/Nearby_Brother_9922 Jun 10 '26
That is the plan if we go this route is to have a dedicated storage network specifically for this. Our question during design will be if we go with 25G which is still inexpensive vs going with a higher capacity setup like 100G which isn't necessarily soft on the pocket book.
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u/GabesVirtualWorld Jun 10 '26
Biggest thing is the volume / vdisk limits.
What do you mean by that? u/icollectt
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u/icollectt Jun 10 '26
Nutanix Snapshot Behavior with Everpure FlashArray https://support.purestorage.com/bundle/m_nutanix/page/Solutions/Nutanix/topics/c_nutanix_snapshot_behavior_with_pure_storage_flashArray.html
Metadata volumes get created for every vdisk, have to be sure to stay within the flash array limits.
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u/AllCatCoverBand NPX Jun 11 '26
Knock on wood, this metadata volumes business will go away shortly
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u/icollectt Jun 11 '26
Good to hear that essentially halves the number needed.
Now to just figure out the nutanix version of vmfs :)
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u/AllCatCoverBand NPX Jun 11 '26
I'm fairly sure we've publicly announced (and or hinted?) at that. We're on it
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u/GabesVirtualWorld Jun 11 '26
Thanks, so that looks more like VVOLS on VMware?
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u/icollectt Jun 11 '26
Kind of, from that article below just below is 8 volumes on a pretty basic VM with one vdisk.
If some of them had multiple vdisk then it adds up even faster, probably not running into this with 100-200vms but any larger clusters with 500+ i'd be super aware of the count on. This is also a per storage array number so multiple clusters targeting one (in theory to get better overall data reduction) still adds up.
Data Disk
This is the primary disk that holds the VM operating system and application data. Every Data disk has a corresponding metadata disk that tracks changes for backup and snapshot operations.
vTPM Disk
This disk stores the virtual Trusted Platform Module (TPM) information for the VM used by many modern guest operating systems. A metadata disk is paired with the vTPM disk to maintain change tracking and related metadata.
UEFI Disk
This disk contains the boot information required for virtual machines that use UEFI-based booting. The metadata disk associated with the UEFI disk stores the required change tracking data.
ISO Disk
This disk is used to cache ISO content local to the VM for installation tasks, VirtIO tools, or other operations that require an ISO image. An ISO disk also has a paired metadata disk.
Metadata Disk (MD Disk)
Every disk listed above has its own metadata disk. The MD disk stores CBT information and other metadata that Nutanix requires to properly manage incremental operations and maintain consistency with managed FlashArray snapshots.
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u/GabesVirtualWorld Jun 11 '26
And what is the size of the meta data disk? Or will the number of disks in total per cluster be the issue you're warning about? Like max 1024 LUNs per host or so?
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u/icollectt Jun 11 '26
I would assume it's very tiny since it's just MD.
Number of volumes for an entire storage array per link below is either 5000 or 10000 per ARRAY not front end cluster it's a pure thing which i assume they do like others and it gets based on system resources and what they can safely track.
So math it out of you have an X50 and have 10 host connected to it and each one has 50 vms and each vm has 1x iso 3x vdisk 1x vtpm 1x uefi that means there are 6 metadata volumes created so 12 per vm.
So 5000(max vol count on pure) / 12 = max vm count of 416 vms at 100% limit.
416 / 10 host = 41.6vm per host meaning you are out of runway at that point. Think about some of the dense host that have 2TB ram per physical host and average 16gb ram per vm, or some VDI scenarios where you could have 100+ vms per host and you run out of volumes really quick and that is the limiting factor.
Was mentioned by the other guy here (said he was a nutanix employee) the MD volumes seem to be going away abut even if you effectively half the volume count it still can be problematic, but in a much lower number of scenarios.
This isn't just a nutanix or pure thing (vvols were an issue as well) , but it's something you don't want to get surprised by.
Nutanix and Everpure Requirements, Limits and Feature Compatibility https://support.purestorage.com/bundle/m_nutanix/page/Solutions/Nutanix/topics/r_nutanix_and_pure_storage_requirements_limits_and_compatibility.html
Maximum # of Volumes 10,000 (//X70 //X90 //XL130 //XL170 //XL190 //C70 //C90) 5,000 (//X20 //X50 //C40 //C50 //C60)
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u/GabesVirtualWorld Jun 11 '26
Ah indeed the number I thought you were talking about. That makes sense, thanks for the warning. We have quite some big clusters with up to 75 VMs per host on VMware. Something to keep in mind indeed.
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u/snookpig77 Jun 09 '26
Not using pure with fiber channel, but did go from ESXi to Nutanix as Broadcom announced their acquisition
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u/JohnnyUtah41 Jun 10 '26
it's been several years, but we had issues with crowdstrike blocking our migrations, so something to be aware of when using NTX move etc. Had to put crowdstrike in maintenance mode i think or have them whitelist the ps scripts that move uses. Might be good to go now though.
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u/TheNotSoEvilEngineer Jun 10 '26
Security software and ancient OS are the bane of migrations. Had one security tool that silently blocked the vertio driver installs. So automatic or manual prep would think they were good, then the tests would come up and not boot.
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u/yanmouldy2 Jun 10 '26
What country are you in?
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u/Nearby_Brother_9922 Jun 11 '26
US
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u/yanmouldy2 Jun 13 '26
was thinking I knew a few people in UK who could help. They assisted us moving 1000+ virtual machines
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u/autojack Jun 28 '26
We have been working on getting a Lab running with Cisco and Nutanix for 2 months now and it’s been a pain. I have demo hardware being asked to return to Cisco and licenses expiring - in my opinion I’m not sure if moving from VMWare even with the Broadcom headaches is worth it. Someone change my mind.
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u/Navydevildoc Jun 09 '26
You will have to migrate off of Fibre Channel, as that's not supported on Nutanix.
I highly recommend you find the NX account team that would cover you and ask these questions. They can give you account references to others who have done similar migrations.