Automate Building Data Centers with Nutanix Infrastructure Manager

By Ranjit Sawant, Sr. Director Product Management, Nutanix, and Ruhi Sehgal, Sr. Product Marketing Specialist, Nutanix

February 2, 2026 8:31 pm |

min

Building and managing large-scale datacenter infrastructure shouldn't feel like assembling a thousand-piece puzzle in the dark. Yet, for many enterprises, that is the reality. It takes a long time and resources to plan and bring up and expand a datacenter. As a mix of VM, container, and GenAI workloads becomes more prevalent and data sovereignty requirements push workloads across core datacenters, robo/edge sites, and public clouds, IT teams find themselves managing a complex web of workloads and infrastructure across multiple data centers, regions, and remote sites.

When infrastructure deployment requires dozens of manual steps and specialized platform knowledge, snowflake configurations inevitably emerge. These inconsistencies between sites and software infrastructure versions are unmanageable and create more than just technical debt; they can leave enterprises vulnerable to security gaps and unexpected outages. In fact, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) states that “Misconfigurations are among the most significant security threats in cloud environments today.”

Nutanix Infrastructure Manager is a new automation service designed to solve this exact problem by automating the build, management, and upgrade of infrastructure based on Nutanix Validated Designs (NVDs).

Reducing Operational Debt

In a traditional setup, building a foundational management layer is a heavy lift. It often requires host imaging, cluster creation, integration with global services, and complex network configurations (DNS, DHCP, NTP, SMTP, VLAN, and VPCs), all while maintaining a consistent Software Bill of Materials.

When these processes are handled manually or through custom automation scripts, the result is often operational drift. This drift is a silent killer of agility, forcing IT administrators to spend their time troubleshooting basic configuration mismatches. Nutanix Infrastructure Manager shifts the focus from manual puzzle piecing to prescriptive orchestration, designed to build the environment correctly the first time around and remain consistent.

Note: The software bill of materials (BOM) is based on PC and NCI 7.3 as defined in the Mid-Market Hybrid Cloud Design as of December 2025.

Automation with Nutanix Validated Designs

Nutanix Validated Designs are more than just documentation; they are standardized deployment architectures based on rigorous validation and testing against scale, performance, availability, and security service level objectives (SLOs). By enforcing these standards, Nutanix Infrastructure Manager provides an environment that is architecturally sound and meets the same SLOs.

Management Domain and App Domain Architecture

Nutanix Infrastructure Manager focuses on two foundational building blocks for deploying NVD-compliant datacenters:

1. Management Domain

The Management Domain is the brain of the operation, housing core management products like Nutanix Central, Nutanix Prism Central, Nutanix Flow, and Foundation Central. Nutanix Infrastructure Manager streamlines the creation and onboarding of these domains, automatically detecting management clusters and keeping them to NVD standards for Prism Central (PC) deployment.

2. Application Domain

The Application domain is where the user VM, Container, and AI/ML workloads are deployed. Nutanix Infrastructure Manager automates the deployment of multiple App Domain PC instances on single management clusters in either a single-node or high-availability 3-node topology.

Efficiency at Scale

Nutanix Infrastructure Manager provides several immediate benefits for the modern datacenter:

Consistency: Whether you have one datacenter or multiple, every site follows the same validated blueprint, eliminating snowflake configurations.
Rapid Time-to-Value: By automating deployment through guided workflows and APIs, you can build compliant data centers fast and free up your team to focus on top priorities.

How To Get Started

Integrating Nutanix Infrastructure Manager into your existing environment is straightforward. It is deployed as a lightweight, containerized application from the Nutanix Marketplace within Prism Central.

Enable Marketplace: Ensure Prism Central (version 7.5 or later) has Nutanix Marketplace enabled
One-Click Deployment: Deploy the Nutanix Infrastructure Manager application.
Unified Interface: A new "Nutanix Infrastructure Manager" menu item appears in the Prism Central interface
Configuration: Use the interface to set up the Management Domain, discover clusters, and begin deploying App Domain PCs

Setting up the Management Domain in Nutanix Infrastructure Manager

Nutanix Infrastructure Manager

Prerequisites for this Phase:

Prism Central 7.5 or later (x-small instance is not supported)
At least one management cluster registered to Prism Central
AHV as the supported hypervisor

Path Forward

Nutanix Infrastructure Manager abstracts the complexity of infrastructure deployment, empowering IT teams to focus on what matters the most: delivering applications and services that drive their business forward. By combining prescriptive NVD architecture with automation, Nutanix delivers on the consistency and operational efficiency that enterprises demand. This initial release is just the beginning of our journey to simplify the building of foundational, simple Nutanix infrastructure.