Can Nutanix connect to external NFS or iSCSI storage for VMs?

Brandon Lee — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 02:37:03 +0000

As I think there will be good interest in Nutanix Community Edition, I wanted to call out a limitation that is certainly a negative for home lab in some scenarios. Can you connect Nutanix to external NFS or iSCSI storage? Nutanix is purpose-built for HCI, meaning it is geared toward software-defined storage connected locally. I have been chasing some Nutanix contacts on this question, and here is the answer:

"The first option is to connect the guest running on Nutanix AHV to external iSCSI targets from within the guest VM operating system itself. You could provision a small boot disk for your VM on Nutanix, and in your VM have external drives connected via iSCSI.

Second, with Nutanix Compute Only nodes, you can connect a Nutanix Compute Only server running AHV to a Nutanix iSCSI Volumes backend running either Nutanix HCI or Nutanix Storage Only nodes."

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=AHV-Admin-Guide-v6_7:wc-compute-only-node-configuration-c.html

However, I do believe Nutanix is working hard and heavy on a "hypervisor-only" solution that I believe will have this capability, especially since they will be going after VMware customers. There is no underlying reason they couldn't introduce this.

Check out this article that is a very interesting read from the Nutanix CEO:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366573394/VMware-Broadcom-Should-you-consider-the-Nutanix-hypervisor

Can Nutanix connect to external NFS or iSCSI storage for VMs? - Home Lab Forum

Can Nutanix connect to external NFS or iSCSI storage for VMs?