After working at Nutanix for over 10 years I just expect everything to be easy. Spending most of my time with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) most of the heavy lifting is done by automation taken care of by our great engineering teams and then I am left to deal with nuances of cloud networking. Over the last week I started to look at OVHcloud. While OVHcloud is not part of NC2 it embodies the characteristics of it. OVHcloud offers a hosted Nutanix private cloud in their datacenters. You can start with 3 nodes and grow to 18 nodes in a secure, environment friendly datacenter.
What is OVHcloud?
As Europe’s leading cloud provider, we deliver public and private cloud products, shared hosting and dedicated server solutions in 140 countries worldwide. We also offer domain name registration, telephony services and internet access to our customers. Founded in 1999, OVHcloud is a French company with an international presence, based on a backbone of datacentres and points of presence spread across the globe.
My first impressions of OVH cloud is that it’s fast, simple and it takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation when dealing with cloud vendors. My OVHcloud Nutanix cluster was deployed in Canada but you can check out their website for where you can deploy yours.
Fast
As soon as you want to make the order you will get your Nutanix cluster in about an hour. The deployment takes care of a single node Prism Central (PC) that runs on top of the cluster along with deploying a gateway and the load balancer. After deployment you can get access to PC straight away without needing a VPN. I was flopping back and forth between using my work VPN and received an e-mail about connecting into OVHcloud from a different IP. I was appreciative of the extra security that OVHcloud was providing.
OVHcloud Offers the most variety of hardware that I’ve seen in the public cloud. All of the bare metal options are using flash so storage speed is not a problem. The gateway that gets deployed on the cluster comes with one Gigabit per second connectivity to the Internet which is included in the cost which is an absolutely huge factor in dealing with cloud vendors. If you need something faster there are options available as well.
Simple
Your cluster that gets deployed is really just a plain Nutanix cluster so there is no relearning or retooling to be had. You just have to add any extra subnets using their vRack technology and possibly redeploy the gateway. You can easily replace the gateway with anything that is supported by AHV so you can use a pfSense or a Palo Alto Firewall as an example. My only real gripe is I wish that it deployed X-Large PC because I’m lazy and you have to do some command line work to make sure other Nutanix software can make use of the memory. So pretty minor and more of a Nutanix detail than OVHcloud.
No Guess Work
Because it’s stock Nutanix for the most part you know what you’re getting from a performance perspective and because the networking is included there shouldn’t be any surprises of extra costs. A big problem in moving to the public cloud is ensuring your virtual machines fit into the T-shirt sizes available along with the necessary storage performance. Like NC2, OVHcloud has you covered without needing to figure out any complex sizing.
