I’ve recently been working with one of our large customers that has been virtualizing SQL Server and Oracle on Nutanix 6060 nodes. I thought others might like to know the sorts of enterprise scale business critical workloads that are being run on Nutanix. This particular customer still has a lot of room for growth in the environment, and like all Nutanix customers gets to benefit from non-disruptive upgrades and performance enhancements with each release. They are also by no means at the limits of the capability of the platform, but this is a good example of what can be done for enterprise applications on Nutanix Web Scale Converged Infrastructure, from a real customer that has done it.

This particular customers has 84 database VM’s, with a mix of MS SQL & Oracle in the same vSphere cluster, but logically pinned with DRS host affinity rules to different nodes. The largest database VM is MS SQL 2012 and is 4.15 TB (with a 2TB instance inside of that), there biggest SQL servers VM’s are 4.15, 1.46, and 1.37TB, all SQL 2012 or SQL 2008 r2. The largest Oracle database is 560GB, which is running 11g R2. The split right now is about 50 SQL 34 Oracle, which will eventually be a 50/60 split when they are done. Given the type of organisation that this information is from I can’t share their name or industry, but I’m going to be working on bringing plenty of case studies of customers running business critical apps on Nutanix in the future, where we can share their logo and many more details about their environments (including for applications like large scale eCommerce, SAP and more database customers). So stay tuned.

For more customer reference cases check out the Nutanix Case Studies Page, also check out all of the Technical Guides that are available, including Oracle Best Practices, and Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices.

Final Word

Nothing is unlimited, everything has some practical and design limits, and should always be matched to business requirements. We continue to push the limits of what is possible, while making everything more simple and reducing risks. If you want to know what our limits are and if your particular use cases can be supported, look at our technical resources, contact your local Nutanix team and watch out for more examples as I publish them here in the future. However Nutanix is on it’s 4th generation platform, a platform that I’ve demonstrated is capable of running extreme workloads, such as Oracle RAC. A platform that is proven and customers trust to run business critical applications (as in the example above). A platform that is uncompromisingly simple to implement and operate and that changes the economic model of operating enterprise IT. Bringing you the benefits of Web Scale companies, at any scale, and for any application. For more and more applications you now have a better way of deploying them, and it doesn’t require the complexity of a SAN or traditional 3-tier architecture.

—

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.