Global-Scale Infrastructure as Code for Consistent Build Operate & Govern Models

Enterprises are increasingly reliant on an expanding mix of VM, container, and AI workloads, leaving IT teams struggling with operational complexity and inconsistency across datacenter, edge, and cloud environments. When infrastructure deployments rely on siloed management environments, dozens of manual steps, and specialized platform knowledge, "snowflake" configurations can emerge—a silent productivity killer that forces teams to waste hours troubleshooting configuration mismatches.

Pillars of Nutanix Hybrid Cloud

Nutanix Central, ZTF, and Infrastructure Manager are three critical pillars of the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud model. They work together to reduce operational complexity and inconsistency across datacenter, edge, and cloud environments.

1. The Nutanix Central solution, available for on-prem deployment or as SaaS, enables teams to navigate, operate and govern distributed and global Nutanix deployments spanning datacenter, edge, and cloud. It uses Projects to create logical namespaces for resource isolation, collaboration, and RBAC across departments or tenants. Categories (key-value tags) enable policy-based automation, grouping, and governance of entities like VMs, containers, clusters, and workloads for consistent operations and compliance. 

Figure 1: Greater details regarding Nutanix Central solution can be found in the Engineered Differently blog, Nutanix Delivers a Uniform Experience Across Datacenter, Edge and Cloud.

2.Nutanix ZTF brings API-driven automation to edge deployments. ZTF modernizes and simplifies edge provisioning and management, enabling you to deploy critical applications with ease.

Figure 2: Nutanix ZTF explained in greater detail, Zero-Touch Provisioning, Configuration Management and Software Updates at Massive Sca

3. Infrastructure Manager standardizes, simplifies, and automates datacenter-scale deployments. The remainder of this blog focuses on Infrastructure Manager.

What is Nutanix Infrastructure Manager?

Standing up a new datacenter often used to take months of software installation and configuration effort. With Infrastructure Manager, software installation and configuration can be accomplished in less time and with fewer people in the loop.

Infrastructure Manager shifts the focus from manual infrastructure deployment to prescriptive orchestration at scale. In contrast to environments that rely on multiple disjointed tools, Infrastructure Manager enforces standardized deployment architectures based on Nutanix Validated Designs:

• Rigorous validation: Designs are rigorously validated against scale, performance, availability, and security service level objectives (SLOs). 
• Avoid snowflakes and drift: By automating deployments based on proven standards and validated designs, Nutanix enables environments to be built correctly from the start and remain consistent over time, minimizing the risk of snowflake deployments that can lead to technical debt and security gaps.

Watch the following video, for a deeper dive into Infrastructure Manager.

Nutanix Infrastructure Manager will automate infrastructure lifecycle using Nutanix Validated Designs (NVDs).

Prescriptive Orchestration

Infrastructure Manager simplifies the complex process of standing up and managing global infrastructure by treating the data center design as a standardized, repeatable process.

Lightweight and Integrated

Infrastructure Manager runs as a lightweight application within the Prism control plane, easily accessible via the Nutanix Marketplace. You don’t need a massive, dedicated management cluster just to get deployment started. Administrators simply run pre-checks, set up a global Management Domain (the control plane), and then deploy multiple App Domains (workload clusters).

App and Management Domains

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

1. Management Domain
   The nerve center of Nutanix operations, housing core management solutions including Nutanix Central, Prism Central (PC), Nutanix Flow, and Foundation Central. Infrastructure Manager streamlines the creation and onboarding of management domains, automatically detecting management clusters and ensuring they adhere to NVD standards.
2. Application Domain
   The Application domain is where VM, Container, and AI/ML workloads are deployed. Infrastructure Manager automates the deployment of multiple App Domain PC instances on single management clusters, using either a single-node or high-availability 3-node topology. 

Decoupling the control plane from the workload plane enables management for massive environments. Each application domain can manage up to 10k VMs and 400 clusters, helping maximize resources for actual applications while supporting enterprise scale and resiliency.

Enforcing the Gold Standard 

Infrastructure Manager leverages NVDs—documented best practices that Nutanix has refined over years of testing—as executable code. When you deploy a new datacenter, Infrastructure Manager orchestrates the installation using a specific Bill of Materials (BOM) that maintains software versions and configurations consistent, compatible, and aligned with defined standards. 

Automated Lifecycle Management

Beyond Day 0 deployment, the solution is designed to evolve to support the infrastructure's ongoing lifecycle. Because the environment is built on a known, validated state, upgrades become predictable routine tasks rather than high-risk events. 

By leveraging Infrastructure Manager alongside Life Cycle Manager, Nutanix is able to automate the complex dependencies of full-stack upgrades. 

One Operating Model for All Roles

In most enterprises, infrastructure administrators, platform engineers, and workload administrators have distinct roles and face distinct problems.

As a result, the various teams typically rely on different tools to accomplish their jobs, creating risks of inconsistencies and complicating collaboration across teams. The goal of Nutanix Hybrid Cloud is to deliver a uniform set of tools and a single operating model for all roles, encompassing VMs, containers, and AI, across datacenter, edge, and cloud.

Figure 4: Nutanix Hybrid Cloud operating model for all roles. 

How Nutanix Stacks Up

The difference between the Nutanix approach and legacy solutions like VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is stark, particularly in terms of architecture and efficiency. 

The VMware by Broadcom blog, Planning a Successful VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Deployment, illustrates the complexities of planning a VCF deployment versus a proposed Nutanix deployment using Infrastructure Manager as described in the Nutanix Blog, Automate Building Data Centers with Nutanix Infrastructure Manager.

Unified vs. Fragmented

VCF management is typically handled by a suite of separate tools like vCenter for virtualization, vSAN for storage, and other products for networking, which can increase complexity. (VMware has only now started to introduce a consolidated UI with VCF 9). Nutanix provides a unified management plane in which infrastructure operations, visibility, and lifecycle management (LCM) are native and built in, simplifying upgrades across the entire stack.

Efficiency vs. Overhead

VCF requires a management domain for every instance with a minimum of four hosts for a management domain. This results in significant overhead, especially for edge deployments or small sites. Infrastructure Manager is a lightweight service that runs within the existing Prism architecture, dramatically reducing the hardware footprint required to manage the environment.

As described in Blog 1 of this series, Nutanix Prism management is distributed across every node in a cluster and consumes no additional resources. Nutanix Prism Central, which allows you to centrally manage many Nutanix clusters, requires a single VM for small deployments, or 3 VMs for larger deployments.

Scale

VCF requires customers to deploy multiple siloed management domains. The Nutanix architecture is designed for massive scale. A single Prism Central instance can manage tens of thousands of VMs, and the architecture supports scaling to hundreds of thousands of VMs without the licensing and hardware penalties associated with VCF.

Learning More

No matter where workloads live—from a heavy-duty database in a core datacenter to a containerized app in a retail store—Nutanix provides automation that consistently supports, manages, and updates them.

• Read the latest blog: Automate Building Data Centers with Nutanix Infrastructure Manager
• Explore the Nutanix NCI 7.5 announcement to understand the broader context of enterprise-grade management.
• Review the Prism Central Infrastructure Guide for detailed deployment workflows.
• Access the complete set of Nutanix Validated Designs.

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