Nutanix 101

A personal learning series on Nutanix HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) — covering the AHV hypervisor, Self-Service Blueprints, CI/CD integration, and backup automation with Ansible. This series reflects my own hands-on experience working with Nutanix in personal home-lab and small-scale private cloud projects.

What Is Nutanix?

Nutanix is a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platform that combines compute, storage, and networking into a single software-defined solution. Unlike traditional three-tier architectures (separate compute, storage, and networking), Nutanix collapses this complexity onto commodity x86 hardware while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability.

At the core of Nutanix sits:

• AOS (Acropolis Operating System) – the distributed operating system that manages the cluster

• AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor) – the built-in KVM-based hypervisor

• Prism – a unified management UI (Prism Element for per-cluster, Prism Central for multi-cluster)

• Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Self-Service – formerly Calm, the blueprint and application lifecycle engine

Who This Series Is For

This series is written from my personal perspective working with Nutanix. It is intended for:

• Infrastructure engineers coming from VMware who want to understand AHV

• DevOps/Platform engineers looking to automate Nutanix with Ansible or CI/CD pipelines

• Homelab enthusiasts running Nutanix Community Edition (CE)

Articles in This Series

Article	Topic
Implementing HCI with Nutanix	Planning, installing, and configuring a Nutanix HCI cluster end-to-end
Nutanix AHV Hypervisor 101	How AHV works, architecture, and feature comparison with VMware ESXi
VMware to Nutanix – Complete Feature Mapping	Full product stack mapping: compute, storage, networking, automation, DR, K8s, licensing, CLI/API, and migration tooling
Nutanix Blueprint 101	Self-Service blueprints — design, variables, Day 2 operations
Blueprint Syntax and Best Practices	DSL syntax reference, macro substitution, calm-dsl patterns, best practices
Windows VM Blueprint Automation	Writing and automating Windows Server blueprints with Cloudbase-Init, WinRM, and PowerShell tasks
Building a Windows Golden Image with HashiCorp Packer	End-to-end Packer pipeline: autounattend.xml, VirtIO, Cloudbase-Init, CIS hardening, Sysprep, and GitLab CI rebuild automation
GitLab CI/CD with Nutanix Blueprint	Triggering blueprint deployments from GitLab pipelines
Automating Nutanix Backup with Ansible	Protection domains, VM snapshots, and backup automation via the Nutanix Ansible collection
Upgrading AHV Firmware with Ansible Automation Platform	LCM API automation, pre/post health checks, and AAP workflow pipeline for firmware and AHV upgrades

Prerequisites

To follow along with the hands-on parts, you'll benefit from access to:

• Nutanix Community Edition (CE) — free for home-lab use

• Prism Central deployed on your cluster

• NCM Self-Service enabled

• Ansible 2.14+ with nutanix.ncp collection installed

• A GitLab instance (self-hosted or gitlab.com) for the CI/CD article