Book of Test Drive

Test Drive on GCP

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Test Drive on GCP is one of the Test Drive environments that can be used which runs in GCP using virtual Nutanix clusters.

The idea for virtual / nested clusters originated in our Engineering organization where we leverage a great deal of nested virtualization / AHV for development and QA purposes. This allows us to greatly over-subscribe resources and test larger scales without requiring tons of excess capacity. This was originally referred to as “NullHV” internally.

Test Drive on GCP takes this concept of nested AHV and builds it on top of GCP’s nested virtualization capability (LINK). This allows us to run Nutanix software on GCP and provide massive scalability with a completely on-demand infrastructure.

The following image shows the conceptual Nutanix Test Drive “Cluster”:

Test Drive - GCP Environment Test Drive - GCP Environment

A virtual Nutanix Cluster is created by running a pair of native GCP VMs for the AHV host and the CVM. These VMs work together to simulate a single Nutanix node. Similar to a typical deployment the CVM handles storage and has locally attached SSD, where the AHV host provides the compute (CPU/MEM) to the UVMs. In cases where PC is needed, another PC VM will be spun up to manage the environment.