Cisco Unified Edge with Nutanix

Boy oh boy - The last couple of weeks were quite awesome for Cisco, including the compute portfolio. Cisco introduced and released a platform called Cisco Unified Edge. If you haven't seen these announcements, let me move the rock you're living under.

Cisco Unified Edge Press Release
Jeremy Foster - Cisco Unified Edge: AI at the Edge
Official Cisco Launch Page

There are more links at the bottom. I think you get the point. This is a big launch for Cisco ... massive. A never seen before server - not rearchitected from an existing chassis, but built from a blank canvas. New form factor, new use cases to address, built with flexibility and modularity in mind, and quite honestly, I haven't seen anything like it in the industry before ... and this is only the initial release of the platform with much more engineering and development ahead.

Perhaps at a later date, I can post more about the architecture around the platform itself but for now, I'm going to focus on where this platform fits with Nutanix support.

Let's answer the first question:
Will Nutanix be supported on Cisco Unified Edge?
Answer: F*$& ya it will be and that's awesome. (And yes, other HCI options will be supported).

Don't believe me? Here's the Cisco Unified Edge solution overview link that calls out Nutanix as part of the Ecosystem integration.

The second question:
What's the plan then?
Answer: Well - I have to be careful to not break any NDAs (it's a fine line) so I'll share what I can without getting in trouble (I think). I've written this post in a manner that if someone took the time to RTFMs (all of them ...), they could come to the same general conclusion. A lot of the bits below can be found in the Cisco Unified Edge FAQ.

This is probably the "main" image of the server you've seen floating around:

There are a few things that we can configure on the platform that would relate to HCI. First there's a network slot on the bottom right (1) - this is a really cool feature that exemplifies the modularity of the platform, however, it isn't required. This means that at the edge, a customer could have up to 5 compute (or HCI) nodes. Let's modify the image to reflect as such:

Next - notice that each node above is configured with the ability to have up to three (3) E3.S NVMe drives. The reality here is that these nodes can be configured with up to four (4) E3.S NVMe drives! Now - if you read the Unified Edge FAQ you'll notice that it says each node can be configured with up to 120TB which would be 30TB drives. However, reading through Nutanix spec sheets, the largest drive supported is 15.3TB drive so unless that changes, we'll use that number, which means approximately 61TB per node and 306TB per chassis for HCI nodes.

Each of these Unified Edge nodes can be configured with a single Xeon-D 6 SoC P-core processor which include 12, 20, and 32 core options. For the memory, up to 768GB of RAM. These servers are meant to be able to drive performance at the edge.

Getting to the point: Hopefully you're starting to paint a picture of the possibilities as it relates to Nutanix - so what's available today?

Cisco Unified Edge with Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP)

There's a highly simplified video below that hopefully gives an idea of what this integration can look like to support NKP bare-metal on Cisco Unified Edge. Note that doing NKP-BM isn't necessarily considered "HCI" but is an available option from the Nutanix portfolio, meaning that some of the constraints above wouldn't apply as the underlying operating system would just be a Linux distribution (We use Ubuntu below).

A quick note - if you look at the NKP documentation, you'll notice that Ubuntu 24.04 isn't a supported operating system, this should be coming soon. Why do I point this out? Ubuntu 24.04 is required to support the Intel Xeon-D 6 SoC processor (these are the soldered on motherboard Granite Rapids-D CPUs that Unified Edge uses).

Another note to clarify is that the installation of Ceph should not be what is deployed with NKP. This install is only meant for logging. Ceph must be installed outside of NKP and a user should follow the provided guide by Nutanix for "Bring Your Own Storage."

Nutanix is working on some really interesting things that should simplify and unify this overall solution for customers in the near future - stay tuned for that.

Cisco Unified Edge with Nutanix AHV/AOS

The burning question! The thing everyone wants to know! Give me Nutanix AHV/AOS at the edge!

Well, to get more details, you'll have to do an official roadmap session with Cisco, however, what I can say that there are absolutely plans to support this and reading between the lines with the information above, should be a very compelling solution for customers. Hey - don't shoot the messenger, I blame the lawyers.

Links Overload for Cisco Unified Edge

Press Release | Blog | Launch Page | Product Page | At-A-Glance | Solution Overview | Chassis Data Sheet | Compute Node Data Sheet | External FAQ | Infographic | Spec Sheet – Chassis | Spec Sheet - Servers