Nutanix Volumes (“Volumes”) is the new service name given to Acropolis Block Services (ABS). The Volumes feature exposes back-end DSF storage to external consumers which include guest OS, physical hosts, containers, and so on through iSCSI.

Volumes is a native scale-out Block Storage solution that provides direct block or LUN level access to the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) for VMs and bare metal servers using the iSCSI protocol. LUNs are presented as a volume group of one or more vDisks.

Use Cases

• iSCSI for Microsoft Exchange Server. ABS enables Microsoft Exchange Server environments to use iSCSI as the primary storage protocol.
• Shared storage for Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). ABS supports SCSI-3 persistent reservations for shared storage-based Windows clusters, commonly used with Microsoft SQL Server and clustered file servers.
• Bare-metal environments. ABS enables existing server hardware separate from a Nutanix cluster to consume the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) resources. Workloads not targeted for virtualization can also use the DSF.