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The XC architecture is a scalable cluster of high-performance appliances. Each appliance runs a standard hypervisor and contains processors, memory, and local storage consisting of solid-state drives (SSDs), NVMe, or a combination of both. The CVM running on each node aggregates the storage resources and makes them available to all hosts through a fault-tolerant architecture. Each appliance runs virtual machines (VMs) like a standard hypervisor host.
The following figure shows the architecture of an XC node:
XC Family devices provide a hyperconverged platform that uses Nutanix DSF to share and present local storage to all the virtual machines in the cluster. The nodes easily scale without the constraints of traditional storage.
The following figure shows the general XC cluster architecture:
DSF virtualizes the storage across all nodes and presents it to the hypervisor as one large pool of shared storage. Also, DSF uses local SSDs and disks from all nodes to store VM data. VMs running on the cluster write data to DSF as though they were writing to shared storage. DSF replicates writes synchronously to at least one other XC Family node to ensure cluster resiliency and availability. The data locality of an XC Family node can keep compute and storage close together to help provide consistent performance and data availability.
The XC Family systems give you a choice of hypervisors. The Nutanix CVMs are VMs running on AHV hosts with direct control of the drives on these hosts. The VMs come preconfigured with minimum settings so that you can start using the storage platform right away and change the settings as your needs grow.