FAQ

Nutanix X-Ray is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) assessment solution for testing the resiliency, performance and scalability across combinations of HCI, hypervisor and hardware platform products. This enables organizations to make informed infrastructure decisions based on how their applications will react under load for these characteristics.

Nutanix created X-Ray to simplify the process of understanding a system’s performance resiliency and scale. Not all infrastructure solutions are created equal and often only performance is evaluated as part of a proof of concept, however, the resiliency and scalability of a solution are vitally important for organizations to understand. 

X-Ray makes it simple for IT Infrastructure Architects and Administrators to execute repeatable test scenarios for the evaluation of hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. It automates the setup and execution of a virtual environment and goes beyond pure peak-performance tests, providing comprehensive scenario-based performance, resiliency and scalability tests.
X-Ray’s unique scenario-based testing simulates commonly experienced datacenter events such as cloning and snapshotting, VM migrations, node power offs and failures and more.Test output is a summary of results that correspond to a scenario’s focus area. Results can be compared to others of the same type, exported, and PDF reports produced.

Nutanix X-Ray is offered free of charge to use for the purposes of testing HCI solutions. 
The component of X-Ray which interprets and executes all test scenarios, called Curie, has been made open source on GitLab under the MIT license.

X-Ray is able to test the performance, resiliency and scalability of all commonly available HCI solutions based on AHV, ESXi and Hyper-V hypervisors.

Nutanix X-Ray is packaged into a variety of formats; VHDX, OVA and QCOW, enabling them to be run on different hypervisors, including Nutanix AHV, VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V. They can be download from the Nutanix portal here: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/XRay.

Nutanix and VMware vSAN are supported HCI solutions.Nutanix AHV, VMware ESXi, and Microsoft Hyper-V are all supported. Other platforms will likely work if they are based on VMware ESXi or Hyper-V.

X-Ray supports standard IPMI, Redfish and DRAC for remote hardware management.

Yes X-Ray can still be used, however, any scenarios requiring OOB access will not be able to be executed.

X-Ray does not set up the test cluster, but essentially automates the administrative functions required for carrying out the tests. It therefore expects a cluster to be configured and ready for VM deployments and workloads prior to commencing testing.