Disaster Recovery (DR) Enhancements in NCI 7.5

By SujaiKumar Jayarao, Director of Product Management, Nutanix

December 15, 2025 3:08 pm |

min

Data sovereignty is no longer a checkbox—it’s a mandate in certain geographies and industries. Enterprises across regulated industries like finance, healthcare and government are under pressure to ensure compliance, security and operational independence while maintaining the agility of modern cloud architectures. At the same time, customers expect freedom of choice—to select the vendors, storage platforms, public clouds and solutions that best fit their business needs without being locked into rigid architectures.

But sovereignty without resiliency is meaningless. In a world where downtime can lead to regulatory penalties and reputational damage, disaster recovery (DR) becomes the cornerstone of a sovereign cloud strategy. Nutanix’s Distributed Sovereign Cloud delivers this resiliency through next-generation DR capabilities that combine multi-site replication, massive scale and integrated security—enabling business continuity across the most demanding environments.

This blog explores the various DR features introduced in the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 7.5 release that provide customer options for strengthened resiliency across clouds.

Multi-Site Replication Across Multiple Fault Domains

Enterprises today need DR strategies that span multiple geographies, combining local high availability with regional disaster protection. Historically, Nutanix supported two-site replication topologies, which limited the flexibility of organizations that required complex, multi-site architectures. With this release, we introduce multi-site replication (up to 4 fault domains) within a single Protection Policy, allowing customers to configure multiple remote sites using a mix of Synchronous (0 RPO), Near-Sync (20s-15min RPO), Asynchronous (1hr+ RPO) and MST replication in multiple combinations. This would allow customers to build resilience with a near DR, a far DR and have DR in the Cloud for the same set of applications (hosted in VMs and VGs). For example, a customer can now set up Site A and Site B with Metro Sync for local high availability, while simultaneously replicating to Site C using Async or NearSync for regional protection and even extend to Site D for long-term retention with MST. This capability enables organizations to implement comprehensive DR strategies tailored to performance, RPO and geographic redundancy—all managed under a unified policy in the Prism Central management console. It removes a major barrier for large-scale deployments and multisite protection.

Async DR and Backup Support for Pure Storage

Another critical advancement addresses the needs of enterprises migrating to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor while continuing to rely on external storage platforms like Pure Storage. Previously, Nutanix DR was tightly coupled with Nutanix storage, creating friction for customers with significant investments in external storage. Starting with the 7.5 release, Nutanix supports Asynchronous Replication for AHV workloads using Pure Storage as the underlying storage. Managed via Prism Central, this feature offers snapshot-based replication with configurable RPOs ranging from one hour to more than twenty-four hours, with flexible intervals such as hourly, every six hours, or daily. This enhancement allows customers to modernize compute without abandoning their compatible storage investments, reducing migration friction and supporting both brownfield and greenfield deployments. It also delivers policy-driven DR with orchestrated failover, enabling hybrid cloud readiness and operational efficiency.

Enhanced VG Metro Active-Active Resiliency across 2 PCs

Nutanix has made its active-active solution for mission-critical workloads more resilient and efficient with two key enhancements. Volume Group Metro Sync now works across two separate Prism Centrals (PCs), extending control plane availability and allowing for operations like failover to be executed with greater certainty in multi-site environments. At the data layer, Multipath IO (MPIO) delivers true active-active access by maintaining multiple network paths between clients and storage. This eliminates single-path bottlenecks, enables seamless failover and distributes I/O across paths for higher bandwidth and lower latency. Together, dual Prism Central support and MPIO create a robust solution—one that combines reliable orchestration with high-performance data access.

Scale Enhancements for Enterprise DR

Scale is equally important for enterprise DR. Medium and large organizations want to run applications at a scale of 10s of 1000s of VMs. Nutanix now supports 10,000 VMs across all RPOs and increases Volume Group (VG) Sync/Metro scale from 400 to 1,000 VGs. These enhancements make Nutanix DR enterprise-ready for massive environments, enabling customers to protect thousands of applications without complexity or compromise.

Flow Security and VPC Policy Sync Across DR

Security during DR workflows is another area where Nutanix has made significant improvements. Starting with 7.5, Nutanix supports synchronization of Flow Network Security policies across DR pairs, including VLAN and VPC configurations. Up to 1,000 policies can be synced via the Entity Sync Framework, reducing manual effort and risk of human error. This capability enables a consistent security posture during DR events, provides greater control and the need for custom scripts or manual policy recreation, promoting efficient and reliable operations.

Long-Term Snapshot Retention with MST

The long-term snapshot retention and data mobility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments are increasingly critical for large enterprises. Nutanix MST addresses this need by offering a native solution for cross-cloud data protection, cyber resilience and mobility. With the 7.5 release, MST now supports one petabyte of live data per instance, 5,000 entities and up to 100 snapshots per entity, making it enterprise-ready for large-scale deployments.

Together, these innovations deliver a comprehensive DR portfolio that combines flexibility, scalability and security. Customers can design multi-site (across 4 fault domains) topologies that mix synchronous, NearSync, asynchronous and MST replication within a single policy, protect workloads at massive scale, maintain consistent security across failover events and integrate seamlessly with external storage platforms like Pure Storage. Whether modernizing a brownfield environment or building a greenfield sovereign cloud, Nutanix provides the tools to succeed without compromise.

For more information on NCI 7.5 and key features, please visit these supporting blogs:

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