| AHCI | Advanced Host Controller Interface. A technical standard defined by Intel that specifies the operation of Serial ATA (SATA) host controllers in a non-implementation-specific manner in its motherboard chipsets (Intel, Inc., n.d.). |
| Boot volume | Refers to the partition on a hard disk containing the operating system and its dependent files. |
| CVM | Controller Virtual Machine - The Nutanix CVM is what runs the Nutanix software and serves all the I/O operations for the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host (Poitras, 2021). |
| Deduplication | A technique used for eliminating duplicate copies of data. Deduplication is used to ensure more efficient use of available storage. |
| HA | High-Availability. Used to improve uptime for a system. Nutanix HA is achieved with the use of redundant nodes that ensure continued uptime even in the event of a node failure. |
| HCI | Hyper-converged infrastructure. Software-defined IT infrastructure that abstracts away all elements of conventional systems, such as the hypervisor, storage, and networking. The end goal is a system that is simpler to operate and maintain. |
| Hypervisor | A piece of computer software that runs virtual machines. |
| Hypervisor, Type 1 | A hypervisor that is installed directly onto a host server. A host server running a type 1 hypervisor is a dedicated virtualization host that cannot be used for any other purpose. |
| NVMe-based drives | Nonvolatile memory express. A storage access and transport protocol for flash and next-generation solid-state drives. |