The Nutanix CVMs are virtual machines running on vSphere. They have direct control of the SSDs and HDDs on the ESXi hosts through VMDirectPath I/O. They come preconfigured with modest settings so that customers can start using the storage platform without much startup time. However, for heavy workload applications such as databases, special attention should be paid to the CVM resources since they serve as the primary access points to the SSDs and HDDs. During internal database workload testing, the CVMs processor and memory resources were strained and limited the I/O performance. Dell EMC recommends increasing each CVM vCPU to a minimum of 12 and memory to 32GB when heavy I/O workloads are planned.

Continue to monitor the performance of CVMs periodically to fine-tune the configuration to achieve the optimal performance level. Performance monitoring describes several ways to monitor the performance of CVM and other infrastructure components.