Infoblox vNIOS for Nutanix™ AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor) is a virtual appliance designed for Nutanix AHV. The supported NIOS, Nutanix, and AHV versions are as follows:

The virtual appliance enables you to deploy large, robust, manageable, and cost-effective Infoblox grids. For information about Infoblox grids, refer to the NIOS 8.5 online documentation. The NIOS virtual appliance for Nutanix functions as a hardware virtual machine guest on the Linux system. It provides integrated, secure, and easy-to-manage DNS (Domain Name System), DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), and IPAM (IP address management) services and also provides a framework for integrating all components of the modular Infoblox solution. Additionally, vNIOS also provides TFTP, HTTP, and FTP file transfer services.

In a Nutanix cluster, a node is a fundamental unit. Each node in the cluster runs a standard hypervisor such as AHV and contains processors, memory, and local storage (such as SSDs and hard disks). Nutanix nodes with AHV include a distributed VM management service that is responsible for storing VM configuration, making scheduling decisions, and exposing a management interface. You can control and manage the Nutanix nodes using a Nutanix web console called Prism. For detailed information about using Prism, see Prism Central Guide at https://portal.nutanix.com. The Prism Central Guide is also accessible from the help link in the Nutanix web console.

NIOS virtual appliances can be configured as an HA pair, a Grid Master, a Grid Master Candidate, or as a Grid member. From NIOS 8.6.x onwards, hybrid HA is supported. A hybrid HA pair can comprise a physical appliance and a virtual appliance, two physical appliances, or two virtual appliances. For more information on limitations of using HA pair combinations, see the Limitations of Using a Combination of a Physical Appliance and a Virtual Appliance for HA section in the Infoblox NIOS Documentation.

The performance of a vNIOS VM instance deployed on a Nutanix host is impacted by the huge page sizes configured on the instance and on the host, and also by the services enabled on the instance.

Although, huge page sizes configured on the host and the VM instance are independent of each other, the following behavior is observed:

• When the host is configured to allocate huge pages to the instance, performance issues are reduced as it minimizes disk fragmentation, which otherwise has a significant impact on the performance. However, if the host is over provisioned with VM instances, performance of the VM will be impacted. To avoid it, refer to the best practices recommended by the Hypervisor.

• When the host is not configured to allocate huge pages to the instance, performance issues can elevate due to increased possibility of disk fragmentation, which often leads to non-contiguous physical memory blocks being allocated to the VM. In some cases, this may also lead to memory allocation failures.

Known Limitations

The known limitations of NIOS virtual appliance for Nutanix AHV are as follows:

• Virtual DNS Cache Acceleration is not supported by the virtual appliance.

• Among all of Nutanix products, NIOS virtual appliance can be deployed only on Nutanix AHVs.

• vDiscovery of Nutanix resources is currently not supported by the virtual appliance.