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 destined to live in 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

CVM – Controller Virtual Machine

FT2, FT3 – Redundancy Factor – (Fault Tolerance) – by default every Nutanix cluster has FT2, which means cluster can tolerate a loss of one node at time. With FT3, cluster can tolerate 2 nodes failures at the same time

HCI – HyperConverged Infrastructure

LWS – Nutanix Light Weight Snapshots

NC2 – Nutanix Cloud Clusters

NCC – Nutanix Cluster Check

NCM – Nutanix Cloud Manager

NGT – Nutanix Guest Tools

NIST – National Institute of Standards and Technology

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

Nutanix Buckets – Nutanix Object storage

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

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

Nutanix DVP – Nutanix Docker Volume Plugin

Nutanix Files – Nutanix file server service

Nutanix Flow – Nutanix software define networking (SDN)

Nutanix Foundation – Nutanix clusters orchestration and automation provisioning tool

Nutanix LCM – Life Cycle Management

Nutanix Leap – (former name was Nutanix Xi DR – Nutanix Enterprise Cloud)

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

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 Authentication Controls

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

SAML – Security Assertion Markup Language

SCMA – Securitu Configuration Management Automation

STIGs – Security Technical Implementation Guides

SVM – Service Virtual Machine (legacy name for CVM)

xTract – Nutanix migration tool