Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure 7.3: Stronger Multicluster Operations, Disaster Recovery, and Networking/Security

With the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 7.3 release, we are delivering key enhancements across management, networking, security, and resilience, equipping enterprises with greater flexibility and efficiency. This release focuses on workload mobility, disaster recovery, and multicluster operations while refining automation and security controls.

Let’s explore the advancements that make NCI 7.3 a meaningful upgrade for your environment.

Streamlined Management and Scalability  

NCI 7.3 simplifies operations with multicluster LCM upgrades, enabling administrators to centrally manage software and hardware lifecycle updates through the Prism Central management console. This single-portal approach helps deliver consistency across your deployments while reducing maintenance complexity. 

Additionally, new VM template placement policies implemented in the Nutanix AHV hypervisor improve provisioning by automating template distribution across all of your clusters, accelerating deployment workflows. This saves time when updating and provisioning templates from a central location for distributed EUC workload clusters.

Prism Central is now easier to deploy at scale, and easier to use. You can now install multiple Prism Central domains on a single cluster, optimizing resource utilization by consolidating the management cluster while scaling the workload clusters. To simplify overall management, we’ve enhanced usability by providing contextual recommendations and direct access to relevant resources, helping you and your teams save time and get the most value from existing features.

Networking and Security Enhancements

Key networking and security improvements in this release enhance workload mobility, centralized management, and our software-defined network security. 

The new AHV multicluster virtual switch simplifies network configurations across clusters, supporting seamless workload migration and automatic cluster selection. With this improvement, you gain the convenience of centralized IPAM across clusters and resilience for multicluster external subnets for VPCs.

We’ve also improved the Prism Central password manager, now including the AHV system account passwords that can be managed centrally, eliminating manual CLI updates and improving administrative control. This makes it simple to change passwords at scale, detect default passwords, and even integrate through APIs.

SR-IOV and network offload support in AHV boosts network performance for VMs, optimizing throughput, making it easier than ever to run high-performance network intensive workloads on AHV.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) enhancements introduce advertised route filtering, more advertisable prefixes, BGP communities, and AS path prepending, providing greater flexibility in routing policies and interoperability with existing infrastructure. Now it’s simple to steer traffic to the right VPC and quickly move traffic ingress during disaster scenarios.

The Flow Network Security (FNS) 5.2.0 release expands microsegmentation capabilities with entity groups, vNIC-specific policies, and global policy scopes. Security Policies can now refer to complex objects such as a specific vNIC in a VM thanks to entity groups. Additional features such as intra-tier rule customization allowing for opening specific ports inside the same security entity and shared services policies for common services like Active Directory refine traffic control, strengthening security enforcement across VLAN and VPC-based workloads.

Advanced Resilience and Disaster Recovery  

The Independent Witness feature for the AHV Metro Availability solution enhances resilience and manageability while reducing the deployment footprint thanks to the availability of an OVA for ESXi hypervisor deployments on NCI. This reduces infrastructure dependencies while maintaining failover capabilities. In addition, recovery plan updates with this release streamline disaster recovery in complex network environments. Recovery plans now allow mapping multiple source networks to a single destination, modifying network mask lengths between source and destination, and adding customised static IP mapping.

PC backup and restore for on-prem and in NC2 on Amazon Web Services (AWS) gain Point-in-Time recovery, with a configurable RPO and external object storage sources to balance storage utilization with recovery point objective, and to allow restoring from a selected point in the past.

The Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) solution expands its recovery options by allowing snapshots to be sent to Azure Blob storage for Pilot Light or Zero Compute deployments, along with easy deployment from the Marketplace. In addition, MST protection policies can now be combined with other replication types to satisfy third site requirements, such as replicating synchronously to a secondary site, and using MST for the third site.

These features strengthen data protection and are designed to help provide operational continuity during outages or security incidents.

Continuing to Drive Enterprise Cloud Innovation  

With NCI 7.3, we continue to refine enterprise cloud infrastructure, delivering a platform that enhances scalability, security, and resilience. Whether optimizing performance, strengthening security, or simplifying operations, this release provides the tools needed to help drive efficiency and innovation in modern IT environments.

©2025 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom. VMware and the VMware product names recited herein are registered or unregistered trademarks of Broadcom in the United States and/or other countries. All other brand names mentioned are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).