NKP – Nutanix Kubernetes Platform – Whats All The Noise?

NKP is a centralized, enterprise-grade management solution designed to deploy, secure, and operate Kubernetes clusters across hybrid and multicloud environments (on-prem, public cloud, and edge).

NKP enables organizations to easily overcome Kubernetes Day 2 operational barriers, such as security, observability, reliability, upgradeability, backup and restore, policy management, and governance. This saves time and resources, enabling organizations to operationalize production-ready cloud-native environments in minutes rather than weeks or months.

NKP deployment options include Nutanix, VMware, bare metal servers, and a full range of public cloud, edge and air-gapped environments with or without Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Together with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nutanix Unified Storage and Nutanix Database Service, NKP Full Stack (NKP FS) delivers a consistent cloud-native platform for containers and VMs across public, private and hybrid multiclouds.

NKP Editions

	STARTER	PRO	ULTIMATE
	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Starter The fastest, easiest way to run Kubernetes on Nutanix.	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Pro An enterprise-ready stack ready to take applications in a cluster to production.	Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Ultimate True fleet management for clusters running on-premises, in the cloud or anywhere.
What you get	The bare minimum to get started with Kubernetes on Nutanix AHV, including: Unlimited NKP clusters (NCI Pro and Ultimate) Upstream Kubernetes Cluster lifecycle management Air-gapped/dark site Nutanix CSI driver for persistent storage with Volume Groups and Files Storage Role-based access control and single-sign-on Load balancing and ingress services Rocky Linux OS only (provided by Nutanix)	Everything in Starter with platform services required for running modern applications on production, and: AI-ready (NVIDIA GPU Operator support) Bring your own operating system Runs anywhere: Nutanix, VMware, bare metal, AWS, Azure, and GCP Observability stack with dashboards, metrics, logs, and tracing Backup and restore Disaster recovery with NDK (on NCI) Service mesh NKP AI Navigator chatbot Serverless functions	Everything in Pro with the ability to operate at scale hybrid multicloud environments, including: Deploy, manage, and extend EKS and AKS cluster capabilities Kubernetes fleet management Multitenancy with support for dedicated and shared clusters Kubernetes Namespace as a Service GitOps for continuous deployment Centralized observability Cost management Application catalog NKP Insights analytics and anomaly detection Attach and manage CNCF Certified Kubernetes

  

NKP’s ecosystem includes a wide range of tooling and services critical for running Kubernetes in production. From automation and security to networking, observability, and storage, NKP covers all the bases – Readymade solutions, embedded into the ecosystem ready to use at the click of a button.

NKP Architecture

The NKP platform is formed of several key architectural components all tied together to

The management cluster serves as the central hub for NKP operations. It hosts the managers, which are controllers responsible for managing cluster and application operations.

• Cluster Managers are responsible for managing the lifecycle of clusters. The primary controller is the Cluster API controller, which supports the lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters.
• Application Managers handle environment-level integrations such as authentication, authorization, and other tasks.

Nutanix is investing a lot of time and effort into the development of the NKP offering its recognized as a leader (e.g., Forrester Wave Q3 2025), it is positioned as a primary, secure platform for modernizing infrastructure and supporting AI workloads.

Go have a play with NKP on Nutanix ‘free’ test drive website - https://www.nutanix.com/one-platform

Erasure Coding – What is it? Does It Even Work?

Nutanix Erasure Coding (EC-X) is a software-defined, post-process data reduction technology that increases usable storage capacity by replacing traditional replication (RF2/RF3) with parity-based protection. It works best on "write-cold" data (inactive for >7 days), providing significant capacity savings for backups, archives, and file servers. It requires a minimum of 4 nodes.

A typical Nutanix cluster has RF2 enabled by default, this implies 2 copies of data are kept on a Nutanix cluster (one on a local node where the guest VMs are running, and one remote) – therefore this is called RF2.

The layout below has a replication factor 2 (RF2), whose primary copies are local and whose replicas are distributed to other nodes throughout the cluster.

When Curator runs a full scan, it finds write-cold extent groups based on their age. Write-cold data is data that’s unlikely to be modified further. For all workloads other than Objects Storage, Curator considers data that hasn't been written to or overwritten in the last seven days to be write-cold and eligible for encoding. For Objects Storage, the postprocess period is reduced to three days due to the immutable nature of object storage. After the Curator process finds the eligible candidates, Chronos distributes and throttles the encoding tasks

After the system creates the strips and calculates parity, it removes the replica extent groups to save on storage. The following figure shows the environment and storage savings after AOS finishes EC-X.

That’s all the theory but does it actually work in practise on a production cluster……

Well, this week I had to turn on EC-X on a production cluster running over 100 VM workloads  that started to give warnings on low space – I don’t like seeing yellow or red on my clusters!

Below is what the storage stats were displaying in the cluster…..

As you can see from the above screen capture my 5-node cluster I have total space usage at around 64% (28.9 TiB) with RF 2 configured.

Once I had enabled EC-X and let Curator do its thing, the results after a few days speak for themself….

Total space usage is now 49.5% (22.38 TiB) and still dropping.  So far, I’ve managed to reclaim approx. 15% space and this will continue to improve over the coming days.

Thoroughly impressed with this feature from Nutanix.  I am defiantly going to keep this function in the back of my pocket for when I need to ‘magic-up’ some space on clusters that start running low on storage space.

Top 10 (and a bit) Nutanix Command

We’ve recently had a new graduate join our IT Operations department and I was going through one of our regions Nutanix installations and I was asked what are the top 10 commands they should know.  That got me thinking, so I put them wrote them down (there are more then 10) and shared them with our new grad and though I would post them here for you all also…….

ncli - Nutanix Command Line Interface for cluster-wide settings.

acli - Acropolis Command Line Interface for VM management (AHV).

ncc - Nutanix Cluster Check for health monitoring.

 

hosted – output the Nutanix hosts ID

hostips – output the host IP addresses in the cluster

host_upgrade_status – output the host upgrade status during any host hypervisor upgrade activity

nodetool -h 0 ring – output the clusters ring status and how many nodes are pin the Nutanix cluster ring

nodetool – h 0 info – output the node & host details e.g. uptime

nodetool -h 0 leadership – output the master node in the cluster

cvm_shutdown -P now – powers down the cvm your ssh’ed into

lcm_leader – output which CVM is the LCM leader

genesis restart – restart prism on a cvm

genesis status – check prism status

 

acli host.list – list all AHV nodes in the cluster

ncli cluster status – checks the cluster status

cluster status | Grep -v UP – validate if CVM processes are in the UP state

acli vm.list – list all VM’s on the cluster

acli vm.on (vm-name) – turns on a VM

acli vm.on * - turn on all VM’s in the cluster

acli vm.get (vm -name) gets information on the VM

acli vm.snapshot_list – lists all VM’s with a snapshot

 

ncli host edit id=HOST_ID enable-maintenance-mode=true – put a CVM into maintenance mode

ncli host edit id=HOST_ID enable-maintenance-mode=false – take a CVM out of maintenance mode

acli host.enter_maintenance_mode HOST_IP – put a AHV host into maintenance mode

acli host.exit_maintenance_mode HOST_IP – take a host of maintenance mode