Gaining the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure requires more than plugging it in. Using hyperconverged infrastructure effectively requires rethinking your approach to how you manage your data center.
1. Changes to your staff
Hyperconverged infrastructure means changing how your staff supports your technology. The all-in-one nature of hyperconverged infrastructure breaks down silos and changes your teams’ responsibilities. People who’ve spent their careers specializing in storage, networking, or compute technology need to be open to becoming a generalist who can support the entire system. In addition, hyperconverged infrastructure means less support work is required in general, as the systems are designed for simple scale out. Your teams can focus less on routine maintenance and more on strategic thinking about architecture and design.
2. Changes to your hypervisor management strategy
Although most hyperconverged infrastructure can support a variety of hypervisors, you may choose to switch from your existing hypervisor to the hyperconverged infrastructure’s native hypervisor. Using the native hypervisor may be cheaper and provide easier management and support of the hyperconverged platform.
3. Changes to your VM management strategy
Hyperconverged infrastructure relies on policies for managing pools of resources. You need to invest time to define policies that correctly apply across your virtual machine (VM) and then handle exceptions to the general rule. Each VM will be covered by multiple policies controlling its performance and availability, as will as providing data protection. Properly done, you don’t need to create new policies for the vast majority of new VMs as they’re brought online.
4. Changes to your capacity management strategy
With the ease of adding storage nodes to your hyperconverged infrastructure, there’s less need to purchase spare capacity in advance. You’ll rely on the hyperconverged infrastructure platform’s utilities for storage management, as all data stores use the same physical storage components.
5. Changes to your network management strategy
Using hyperconverged infrastructure pushes the storage network onto the same physical Ethernet network as management and virtual machine traffic. This can require you to add 10 GbE ports, possibly from ports freed up by legacy hardware retirement.
Plan for the Future
It’s important to recognize that these aren’t short-term changes; you’ll feel the impact of hyperconverged infrastructure for years. Before you switch over, make sure you know how the infrastructure will support you in the future as well as how you’ll support it. Understand the vendor’s roadmap to see how it intersects with your own strategic plans
Have you planned for the challenges that come along with the benefits when you switch to hyperconverged infrastructure? dcVAST’s managed Nutanix services offer you expert support to ensure you configure Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure for maximum advantage and minimal impact on your IT team. Contact us to learn how this service makes it easy for you to cope with the changes when you switch to using hyperconverged infrastructure. Discover the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure here.
