Nutanix Cloud Clusters Walks the Runway at .NEXT

Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) New Features

MST for Azure

The Nutanix MST capability has gained significant traction with AWS customers, initially supporting the replication of Nutanix-based snapshots to the Nutanix Objects Storage and AWS S3 platforms. It has been instrumental in helping some  VMware Cloud on AWS customers migrate to NC2 for their data protection use cases.

Now, the same feature set will be available for Azure customers, with support for sending snapshots to Azure Blob Storage. MST for Azure will include support for pilot light and zero-compute deployments. Learn more by reading these blogs about pilot light and zero-compute architectures.

MST disaster recovery with pilot light or with zero-compute deployment.

MST Deployment from Prism Central

The MST service can be deployed directly from the Prism Central marketplace to provide an easy and consistent operational installation and reduce the need for command line usage. Marketplace support will be available for private Prism Central deployments as well as NC2 on AWS and NC2 on Azure.

Deploy MST from Prism Central.

Multi-site Support for MST

Multisite support will allow Nutanix customers to send a primary copy from one Nutanix cluster using async or NearSync replication to another Nutanix cluster, while also sending a second copy of the snapshot to a supported MST storage target, such as the Nutanix Objects Storage, AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage.

This enables heavily regulated environments to have multiple copies of data in different regions and supports various recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) based on their needs.

Have access to multiple copies based on your business continuity plan.

Support for Elastic SAN for NC2 on Azure

The primary storage for NC2 comes from locally attached NVMe disks, which are the first tier that the CVMs use to persist data. When provisioning the NC2 instance in the NC2 portal, you can add more storage volumes to each bare-metal node in the cluster as remote storage with volumes from Elastic SAN. This allows scaling storage to meet business needs without adding more bare-metal nodes.

Node layout in Azure when enabling Elastic SAN for more storage capacity.

When adding Elastic SAN volumes to a cluster, they are added uniformly throughout the cluster. The total amount of storage follows the same AOS limitations regarding the maximum storage that can be added, with the additional constraint that the maximum storage cannot exceed 4X the local storage capacity of the bare-metal node.

Through the NC2 portal, you can add a small amount of remote storage during the initial deployment and continue to add more later. For disaster recovery use cases with NC2, you can deploy a three-node cluster with a small amount of remote storage to cover Tier-1 workloads that need fast recovery.

If your needs change, you can scale up the storage later. At failover, you can use Prism Central playbooks or the NC2 portal to add NC2 nodes to cover any RAM usage not supplied by the three bare-metal nodes.

New i7 Bare-metal is Ready for NC2 on AWS

Nutanix is proud to join the launch of the i7 family of bare-metal instances from AWS with support for the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution. The new instance types i7 and i7ie will provide our joint customers access to fifth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Emerald Rapid) to enable new use cases and power existing workloads.

The new processors have built-in support for Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), which is designed to significantly boost the performance and efficiency of AI and machine learning applications without the need for dedicated GPUs. Nutanix added support for AMX with the AOS 7.0 and AHV 10 releases, which are already available in NC2. Customers can run Nutanix Kubernetes ⓇPlatform on NC2 to run workloads like TensorFlow and PyTorch alongside their existing workloads. In addition, customers can leverage new capabilities such as expanded local storage, optional EBS integration, and optimal database performance with the Nutanix Database Service (NDB) solution on AWS’s latest Nitro SSDs.

The i7 instances also offer potential cost savings per GB compared to i4i instances, high CPU clock speeds, and flexible storage scaling. Customers can easily migrate from older NC2 clusters (i3en/i4) to i7 instances with Nutanix’s support for heterogeneous clusters, allowing a phased, node-by-node upgrade. Watch the below video to see the migration process in action. It is expected to  be the same process for moving from i3en/i4 to i7 instances.

These new instances with NC2 on AWS will make it flexible for customers operating at scale, potentially allowing for further consolidation and cost reductions when migrating to the public cloud.

Separate Gateway for Each VPC in AWS

Flow Virtual Networking (FVN) currently supports only one gateway for all traffic exiting the AWS network. The gateway is attached to an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) on one of the bare-metal hosts in the cluster.

In the future, every FVN user VPC will have a dedicated ENI, which is the point-to-point (P2P) link listed in the diagram below. This future improvement is designed to bolster resiliency and bandwidth for workloads running on NC2. The gateways will be automatically distributed across the NC2 cluster.

When Nutanix customers configure which FVN subnets they want to advertise to the rest of the network, the ENIs will be created automatically on the bare-metal hosts throughout the cluster.

More throughput and better availability for workloads using Flow Virtual Networking.

Increased VLAN Subnets per Cluster with Native Networking in AWS

NC2’s ease and speed of deploying with native networking in AWS is a major attraction. Guest VM vNIC IP addresses are natively integrated with AWS ENI and are configured as secondary IP addresses on an ENI by the AHV networking service.

Currently, you can only have a maximum of 15 different subnets per host. With this future change, you’ll be able to create and assign large AWS CIDR ranges for AHV to manage. From the large CIDR range, you will be able to create the appropriate subnet lengths you want.

AHV will automatically program rules to ensure network routing to the AWS default gateway. Each subnet will continue to have its local gateway, and all existing capabilities like L2 Stretch and IGMP snooping will be supported.

Carve large CIDR ranges for AHV to manage to increase the number of supported subnets for native networking in AWS.

New NC2 Regions

Support for NC2 will be added to the following new regions. Please contact your local sales team specific availability in your region.

NC2 on AWS regions:

• Mexico Central – Available now
• Thailand (Bangkok) – Available now
• Taiwan (Taipei)
• New Zealand (Auckland)

NC2 on Azure:

• Canada (Quebec City)

Feature parity among hyperscalers and private datacenters allows customers to pick the best location based on their business needs. Nutanix is focused on making Day 2 operations seamless, regardless of location. Accelerate your cloud journey and stay tuned to the Nutanix corporate blog for updates on all these great features.

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