Introduction
This document presents recommended settings for installing the Nasuni Edge Appliance on a virtual machine (VM). This is excerpted from the Nasuni Edge Appliance Initial Configuration Guide.
The minimum recommended VM resources for running the Nasuni Edge Appliance are as follows:
Limit | Value |
Minimum free disk space to run the Nasuni Edge Appliance. | 370 GB (344 GiB) (includes 32 GiB operating system, 250 GB cache, and 62 GiB copy-on-write (COW) disk). |
Recommended minimum Nasuni Edge Appliance VM memory. | 16 GB. |
Nasuni Edge Appliance Virtual Machine processors (CPUs). | 8 or more recommended for optimal performance. |
The maximum cache size for the Nasuni Edge Appliance depends on the total usable capacity of the VM host. The combined cache and COW disks on each Nasuni Edge Appliance should not consume more than 75 percent of the total capacity of the VM host. Nasuni has tested cache sizes up to 36 TiB. For a larger cache size, consult Nasuni Product Management. The COW disk should be at least 25 percent of the cache disk. However, the COW disk need not be more than 256 GiB.
Each platform also has its own maximum cache size for a single cache disk. (Multiple cache disks are supported.) Visit Nutanix features, VMware features, and Hyper-V features for the most complete information.
Virtual Platform | Maximum Cache Size for a Single Cache Disk |
Nutanix AHV AOS 6.5 (LTS), AOS 6.7, and later | 36 TiB |
VMware ESXi 7.0 and above NOT using VMFS-5 or NFS | 2 TB |
VMware ESXi 7.0 and above | 36 TB |
Microsoft Hyper-V | 36 TB |
Amazon EC2 | 16 TiB for gp2, gp3, and io1 |
Microsoft Azure | 32 TiB (Azure Premium SSD) |
Note: To add cache space by configuring additional cache disks, contact Nasuni Support.
Note: You can configure pass-through disks on Nutanix, VMware, and Hyper-V.
Other Suggestions and information
For optimal performance, Nasuni recommends using SSD storage for the OS disk, Cache, and Copy on Write disks.
The time to generate an encryption key can vary widely, depending on the hardware (real or virtual) on which the Nasuni Edge Appliance is executing. Encryption keys are generated in the background, to not block use of the Nasuni Edge Appliance during generation.
With VMware, if VMs have more vCPUs than a single NUMA node contains, configure Virtual NUMA properly. Virtual NUMA requires virtual hardware version 8 or later; the Nasuni VM ships at virtual hardware version 7, but can be upgraded to match the version supported by your hypervisor. Size VMs to align with physical NUMA boundaries: if the host has 4 processors per NUMA node, your VM should have multiples of 4 vCPUs. Virtual NUMA is only enabled for VMs with more than eight vCPUs. To override this setting, add "numa.vcpu.min = X" to the VM’s VMX file.
Nasuni does not support Hyper-V Dynamic Memory.
Hyper-V supports Guest Aware NUMA, which provides the host's NUMA layout to a guest. Guest Aware NUMA is disabled if Dynamic Memory is enabled for a VM. However, Nasuni does not support Dynamic Memory, so Guest Aware NUMA is never disabled.
Reboot times are approximately 60 seconds.
If any network interfaces are not in use, set them to “Disabled” on the Network Configuration page in the Nasuni Edge Appliance UI.
For further information, also see: