The count of data copies held by a storage container, chosen for each container or storage policy. Do not mix it up with cluster fault tolerance, the setting for surviving failures.
Also called RF.
Read more: Nutanix docs
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Replication factor in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- COUNT
A DAX function returning how many non-blank numbers, dates or text values a column contains. Boolean columns need COUNTA instead, and for counting the rows of a table COUNTROWS is the better choice.
- Storage container
Raw capacity on a vVols-capable array, presented through its VASA provider and shown in vCenter as a vVols datastore.
- Container
Something that groups data. Blob Storage containers sit inside a storage account and hold blobs much as folders hold files; Cosmos DB containers hold items and set the scope for partitioning and throughput.
- storage policy
Storage Policy Based Management uses these rules to describe the storage requirements of a VM. When one changes on vSAN, the change is rolled out in asynchronous batches, not all at once.
- Cluster fault tolerance
How many disks or nodes can fail together within a cluster's fault domain while it keeps running, expressed as 1N/1D, 2N/2D or 1N&1D. The choice is made at cluster creation and can only be altered in limited ways.
Related terms
- Default storage policy
Sets compression and replication factor, leaving everything else to the cluster's storage settings, and offers no encryption. Prism Central has generated it since pc.2024.1, with full support on AOS 6.8 onwards.
- Effective capacity
The storage a cluster offers once configured reservations and each container's replication factor are taken into account. Capacity planning lists it next to maximum capacity.
- Live vDisk migration
Relocating the vDisk of a running VM to a different storage container, perhaps to change data reduction or replication factor. A VM under a storage policy cannot do this.
- Nutanix storage container
Carved logically from a storage pool, it contains vDisks and controls replication factor, erasure coding, deduplication and compression. Hyper-V mounts it as an SMB share; ESXi mounts it as an NFS datastore.
- storage policy
Uses categories in Prism Central to set QoS, compression, encryption and replication factor for volume groups and VMs, taking precedence over what the container specifies.