This is a question that comes up regularly when people discover the Nutanix environment: “but what do all these expressions and acronyms mean?”

I took a little time to compile as many of these acronyms and technical terms as possible with their associated definitions.

There are probably some missing, but this page is meant to evolve over time.

AC2 – Acropolis Compute Cloud

ACS – Acropolis Container Services

ADE – Acropolis Data Encryption

ADFS – Acropolis Distributed FileSystem

ADS – Acropolis Dynamic Scheduler

AHV – Acropolis HyperVisor

AOS – Acropolis Operating System

Block awareness – When certain conditions are met, Nutanix clusters are “block aware”, which means that redundant copies of any data required to serve I/O are placed on nodes that are not in the same block

CN-AOS – Cloud Native AOS – AOS storage engine running in Kubernetes pods

CSI – Container Storage Interface – Kubernetes storage driver

CVM – Controller Virtual Machine

DR – Disaster Recovery

FT1, FT2 – Fault Tolerance – FT1: the cluster can tolerate the loss of one node at a time (goes with RF2). FT2: it can tolerate 2 node failures at the same time (goes with RF3)

HCI – HyperConverged Infrastructure

LWS – Nutanix Light Weight Snapshots

NC2 – Nutanix Cloud Clusters

NCC – Nutanix Cluster Check

NCI – Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

NCM – Nutanix Cloud Manager

NDK – Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes

NGT – Nutanix Guest Tools

NIST – National Institute of Standards and Technology

NKP – Nutanix Kubernetes Platform

NTC – Nutanix Technology Champion

Nutanix BEAM – SaaS service for multi-cloud governance platform to manage spending, security and application flow

Nutanix CE – Nutanix Community Edition – Free version of commercial Nutanix AOS

Nutanix DataBase (former Era) – PaaS offerings to streamline and automate database operations

Nutanix Disaster Recovery (formerly Leap) – Disaster recovery built into Prism Central. The Xi Leap cloud service has been discontinued

Nutanix DVP – Nutanix Docker Volume Plugin

Nutanix Files – Nutanix file server service

Nutanix Flow – Nutanix software-defined networking (SDN)

Nutanix Foundation – Nutanix clusters orchestration and automation provisioning tool

Nutanix LCM – Life Cycle Management

Nutanix Metis – allows you to qualify your platform hardware for compatibility with Nutanix software

Nutanix Objects (formerly Buckets) – Nutanix object storage

Nutanix PC – Nutanix Prism Central (multi-cluster management)

Nutanix PE – Nutanix Prism Element (single cluster management)

Nutanix Pulse – call home feature

Nutanix Self Service (former Calm) – Nutanix Cloud Application Life-cycle Management

Nutanix SSP – Nutanix Self-Service Portal

Nutanix VirtIO – Nutanix drivers for virtual machines

Nutanix Volumes – (former name was ABS – Acropolis Block Services (iSCSI block storage presented to Guest VMs))

Nutanix X-Ray – X-Ray allows users to create custom test scenarios from X-Ray’s current test scenarios to better fit your needs

Nutanix Xplorer – scans your Microsoft SQL Server instances to automatically create recommended hardware configurations and platforms, so that you can migrate your SQL Server instances to a Nutanix Cloud Platform

OVS – Open vSwitch

RBAC – Role-Based Access Control

RF=2, RF=3 – Replication Factor – simply saying, with RF=2 cluster keeps 2 copies of data, with RF=3 cluster keeps 3 copies of data

RPO – Recovery Point Objective – Maximum acceptable data loss

RWO, RWX – ReadWriteOnce, ReadWriteMany – Kubernetes volume access modes: writable from a single node, or from several

SAML – Security Assertion Markup Language

SCMA – Security Configuration Management Automation

STIGs – Security Technical Implementation Guides

SVM – Service Virtual Machine (legacy name for CVM)

xTract – Nutanix migration tool