NC2 on Google Cloud: The First 6 Months

It’s hard to believe it’s only been six months since we announced the General Availability of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Google Cloud. The momentum we’ve seen from customers and the incredible engineering collaboration between Nutanix and Google Cloud has been nothing short of brilliant.

If you managed to catch us at Nutanix .NEXT in Chicago or saw the team at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The energy around hybrid multicloud is palpable, and NC2 is right at the centre of it. But we haven’t just been resting on our laurels; we’ve been busy shipping features that make running your enterprise workloads on Google Cloud more flexible, resilient, and cost-effective.

Let’s take a look at the major feature developments and regional expansions we’ve delivered in our first six months.

Expanding Our Global Footprint

When we launched, we hit the ground running with availability in 17 Google Cloud regions. But demand waits for no one, and we are rapidly expanding. We have just rolled out two new regions, Dammam, KSA and Tokyo, Japan, and we’re currently working with Google Cloud on support for another three regions: including Hong Kong, Mumbai and Sydney, which will bring the total to 22 regions globally.

Figure 1: NC2 on Google Cloud is rapidly expanding, soon to be available across 22 regions globally.

This means that if you need to place your workloads closer to your users, you could deploy a hybrid cloud environment across the globe in a matter of hours.

The Game Changer: C3 Bare-Metal Nodes are now live

To provide a much more flexible and cost-effective entry point we are introducing support for Google Cloud C3 bare metal instances.

This isn’t just adding another server option to the catalogue; it represents a significant engineering milestone and a fundamental shift in how we deliver storage for NC2 on Google Cloud that can significantly impact the TCO math.

Unlike our Z3 and C4 offerings that rely on local NVMe SSDs, the C3 bare metal nodes are diskless. To make this work, our engineering teams worked to implement Google Cloud Hyperdisk as the primary storage tier for NC2 on C3. This decoupling of compute and storage allows us to leverage Google Cloud’s next-generation block storage architecture to support resilience and performance of AOS Storage, without physically attached local drives.

Figure 2: A high-level overview of the diskless C3 bare metal configuration leveraging Google Cloud Hyperdisk available with NCI 7.6.

With C3, you can now deploy nodes with a more granular storage configuration to more closely match your workload requirements (from 15TB up to 120TB per node). This is designed to optimize the hourly burn rate for general-purpose virtualization which can be especially helpful for VDI, or smaller DR sites.

Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) for Google Cloud Storage

Disaster recovery doesn’t have to break the bank. With the recent Prism Central 7.5.1 release, we introduced Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) capabilities for Google Cloud Storage.

Figure 3: Nutanix MST can be used to efficiently offload snapshots to low-cost Cloud Storage.

MST allows you to natively store Nutanix snapshots in Google Cloud’s low-cost, S3-compatible object storage. IT teams can use this to build highly cost-effective "pilot light" or "zero compute" DR solutions. With a zero compute solution, your data simply sits in Google Cloud Storage until an event occurs. If you ever need to recover, MST orchestrates the rehydration of data into an on-demand NC2 cluster so your VMs can power on. It’s an incredibly efficient way to add an additional recovery position to support compliance requirements without maintaining expensive, active compute nodes.

Furthermore, if the longer RTO of a zero compute approach has put you off utilising MST, the Prism Central 7.6 release is designed to improve performance, increase flexibility and add a new "Instant Restore" capability. This not only improves restore speeds and reduces the manual steps required for zero compute, you can now boot a VM whilst its volumes are still re-hydrating from object storage.

Solving the Windows Licensing Conundrum

True cloud freedom isn't just about workload mobility; it's about having genuine choice in how you procure and remain compliant with your license obligations. Thanks to some fantastic engineering collaboration between Nutanix and Google Cloud, we’ve introduced two new capabilities to simplify this:

• Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL): Microsoft supports porting some Windows Server licenses to Google Cloud under certain BYOL conditions. To help support your compliance efforts we introduced a customized node maintenance procedure. Instead of replacing nodes during scheduled maintenance, Nutanix directly invokes Google Cloud's in-place maintenance. This is designed to keep your licenses from moving to a different physical host even during scheduled maintenance.
• License-Included (PAYG) Instances: If you prefer a streamlined procurement and billing experience, you can now deploy NC2 with Windows Server License-Included bare-metal instances. Google Cloud simply bills you monthly for the Windows Server licenses allocated to these nodes, consolidating your expenses and reducing the need to manage separate license agreements.

Looking Ahead

The first six months of NC2 on Google Cloud have been heavily focused on delivering real, architectural flexibility and driving down TCO. Between the C3 diskless nodes, MST support, and our new Windows licensing models, we are providing IT architects with tools to help them build a hybrid cloud with greater flexibility and control over their costs.

And we are just getting started!

Click here for more information on NC2 on Google Cloud

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