I've read the Nutanix v VMWare article about Openedge on Nutanix but it's a couple of years old now. We recently implemented Nutanix and since then our mission critical Openedge DB (Progress 11.7.4 on RHL 7) is slowing down. Does anyone have any further experience of OE with Nutanix they can share?
Nutanix provides “hyper-converged infrastructure” and “software-defined storage” that virtualizes everything. there are other vendors who provide similar stuff. in general, it is magic that is supposed to save you money.
the primary goals of this system is to lower maintenance and administrative costs and to improve resource utilization. both of these things can be useful for some installations but generally not for databases where performance is a concern. this is especially true with respect to resource utilization, which relies on sharing the same storage for a variety of uses. database servers perform best when they have storage and compute resources that are dedicated for that purpose (i.e. they do not like to share).
a feature that is common with these types of virtualized storage systems is “thin provisioning”. what that means is that the storage system lies to the database about how much storage space has been allocated for it - so the database might think it has 50 GB of space but in reality it only has 25 GB. the storage system silently allocates more as needed. that might save you some money if the database never grows, but it isn’t good for performance.
another common feature is data deduplication. that is sort of good for storage where backups and the like go but not for where the database operational storage goes. again, that feature does not help performance.
there are many more cost-saving features in these types of systems. i think not a single one helps performance.
note that slow performance can cost you real money. if restoring from backup takes 3 or 4 times longer than necessary, that will increase your unplanned downtime costs noticeably. same for index rebuilds and other bulk maintenance operations. also normal production activities like monthly and year end closing operations or nightly batch runs.
if you have a Nutanix system handed to you by somebody, do as much as you can to dedicate fixed (and adequate) resources for the database storage and avoid sharing as much as possible. with virtualized everything, it can be really hard to find out what resources you’ve actually got.