Inside Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure 7.6 Disaster Recovery

Introduction

Today's organizations face competing pressures: operationalizing agentic AI platforms while contending with supply chain volatility, data sovereignty, and compliance mandates. Building for the AI era means designing for performance, scale and capacity, while maximizing and protecting existing investments. In this landscape, operational governance, resiliency and protection against downtime are foundational and non-negotiable. This includes control over where data lives, how it's protected, along with consistent, unified operations across core data centers, public clouds, neoclouds, and edge deployments. 

One example of this resilient foundation in action occurred during the recent regional disruptions in the Middle East. A strategic customer relied on Nutanix Disaster Recovery (DR) with Multi Cloud Snapshot Technology (MST) to restore a substantial volume of primary workloads to a stable region. By establishing a reliable cross-region recovery path, they bypassed local instability issues and successfully restored critical applications outside the impacted region.

To help organizations navigate similar challenges, this blog highlights the DR advancements in the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 7.6 release. These innovations span flexibility, scale, and operational consistency, all working together to deliver hybrid, multi-cloud resiliency.

Flexibility and choice without compromise

DR support for Dell PowerStore: Customers want choice, simplicity and control in how they define and deploy their infrastructure. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 7.6 adds DR capabilities for Dell PowerStore, expanding on the existing Pure Storage support. This includes Synchronous Replication (0 RPO), Asynchronous Replication, and Cross-Cluster Live Migration (CCLM) for non-disruptive workload mobility. Customers can now protect mission-critical workloads across a variety of infrastructure combos - PowerStore to PowerStore, or between Nutanix HCI and PowerStore backed clusters in either direction. The result? Customers can migrate to AHV, confidently modernizing existing environments with advanced capabilities, while protecting existing storage investments.

Multi-tenant DR support for recovery points, backup and restore: Another critical innovation tackles the need for an enterprise-grade multitenant IaaS on NCI. SPs are key enablers, helping customers migrate, modernize and manage their workloads across diverse operating models. The newly announced Service Provider (SP) Central lets providers run multiple tenants on NCI while each tenant gets their own private cloud environment, combining flexibility, security, scale and a familiar Nutanix experience. NCI 7.6 extends this model to data protection with tenant-managed DR for recovery points, backup and restore operations. Each tenant can manage recovery points inside their own project, logically isolated from every other tenant on shared Nutanix infrastructure. That's the best of both worlds: SPs maintain centralized DR governance and operational control, while tenants gain a secure, isolated, self-service data protection experience.

Recovery Plan Automation for Zero Compute MST:  Enterprises need reliable data protection and long term snapshot retention across diverse cloud environments. Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) addresses this demand, offering a native solution for cost effective DR, primary storage optimization and cyber resiliency, enabling cross cloud data retention. Zero Compute is a popular deployment model for MST where the target Nutanix Cloud Cluster (NC2) spins up on demand at failover. This model delivers a highly cost-effective Nutanix DR solution cost amongst Nutanix DR solutions, by eliminating the need for standby compute at the recovery site. 

NCI 7.6 introduces enterprise grade recovery orchestration for Zero compute. A new Recovery Configuration Store, backed by an S3-compatible object store, automatically syncs recovery plans and their dependent entities. When disaster strikes, the recovery plan, categories, and overlay subnets are recreated from the Recovery configuration store, enabling on demand recovery without the ongoing cost of maintaining idle compute.

MST Deployment choice: NCI 7.6 introduces a key advancement that addresses the needs of government agencies and highly regulated environments who operate under strict sovereignty and data residency mandates. MST support for NC2 workloads in AWS GovCloud enables customers to store snapshots inside AWS GovCloud regions so workload protection and recovery stays within sovereign boundaries.

MST is also now supported with air-gapped dark-sites, enabling end-to-end deployment with no external network access at any point. The result is unified protection with consistent operations across environments, whether in datacenters, multi-clouds, edge or sovereign deployments, without refactoring or rearchitecting existing workloads.

Expanded S3 choice for MST: We have broadened MST support beyond AWS and Azure to include Google Cloud Storage (GCS). This enables customers to configure GCS buckets for snapshot replication and cross-cloud data protection. Customers can also now offload snapshots to low-cost cloud storage such as OVHcloud S3, Wasabi, and Backblaze and get the full range of MST capabilities across hybrid, multi-cloud deployments: efficient cost per TB, Instant restore, orchestrated recovery plans, and simplified management with PC.

1-node MST: For smaller protected environments, edge and ROBO sites, NCI 7.6 introduces a lightweight, cost-optimized 1-node MST with a 12-vCPU footprint, delivering the MST capabilities at a fraction of the resources. With three clear t-shirt sizes, 1-node (S), 3-node (M), and 5-node (L), customers can pick the right footprint based on workload size and cost goals.

Recovery Plan DNS and Gateway IP support: Previously, Recovery Plans mandated a gateway IP and lacked subnet-level DNS configurations, limiting flexibility for specialized network designs. NCI 7.6 introduces two major enhancements:

1. Optional gateway support for non‑IPAM subnets, allowing static IP mapping without requiring a gateway. This enables seamless migration without rearchitecting existing network designs.
2. Granular subnet level DNS assignments with support for primary and alternate DNS servers for both IPv4 and IPv6, enabling precise domain-specific resolution across segmented environments

Enterprise-grade Scale

Multiple MST instances per Prism Central (PC): Previously, MST supported only one instance per PC, capping capacity and forcing every site to share a single MST, creating noisy-neighbor and network-strain problems. Starting with NCI 7.6, multiple MST instances can be managed by a single PC. Customers can deploy one MST per edge site, managed by a central PC at the hub. So local snapshot traffic goes directly to its S3 bucket, minimizing network strain. SPs can also provide each tenant their own MST instance and let each one control the failover lifecycle with separate S3 object stores, enabling operational control and hybrid-cloud resiliency.

MST Scale: As enterprises expand and data volumes grow, managing large distributed environments without compromising performance or recovery time is table stakes. NCI 7.6 advances MST scale to 10,000 VMs, up to 1 PB of live data, and up to 100 snapshots per entity. Customers gain predictable scale boundaries and the assurance that their hybrid, multi-cloud environments are protected under a unified platform.

Operational Consistency

Resiliency at scale is only manageable if it's consistent and simple - one platform, one experience, one source of truth. NCI 7.6 further sharpens the DR operational experience across the board.

Optimized data protection experience: NCI 7.6 introduces significant enhancements to  customers’ data protection experience -

• The centralized replication view now delivers unified visibility into monitoring ongoing replication status, with customized views to filter, drill down to specific replication sessions and troubleshoot fast with color-coded status indicators.
• The Storage consumption widget now surfaces deeper, more granular data at the cluster level. Beyond capacity metrics, customers can now manage their storage for recovery points directly from the dashboard, designed to cut the time needed to spot high-usage areas and relieve storage strain. (Figure 1)

• The newly enhanced Bulk Deletion of Recovery Points now offers precise storage control through configurable options: delete all recovery points, retain only the most recent, apply age-based filters, and get clear visibility into potential storage reclamation.
• Starting with NCI 7.6, recovery points are automatically cleaned up once they reach expiration. Previously, when a VM was removed from a protection policy, either through an explicit unprotect action or deletion, its final recovery points were retained indefinitely, quietly consuming storage. This automatic clean up at expiration helps reduce manual maintenance overhead and reclaims storage space. 
• Protected Entities Distribution widget now provides comprehensive monitoring of MST deployments, including the number of entities protected via MST and RPO compliance across them. (Figure 2)
   

Transitioning to Entity-Centric DR: Continuous innovation is all about embracing simpler, more scalable, and more flexible workflows. While Nutanix's Prism Central based Entity-Centric Disaster Recovery (EC-DR) has become the modern enterprise standard for data protection, many organizations still manage their DR using legacy Protection Domains (PD) on Prism Element. With the upcoming deprecation of v2 and V3 APIs, moving to EC-DR is the recommended path forward, unlocking the latest advancements in data protection, including: 

• Streamlined operations and centralized management via Prism Central.
• Simple workflows powered by advanced orchestration and networking capabilities
• Support for large-scale deployments with cutting-edge capabilities such as cyber recovery, MST, Instant Restore and more.

NCI 7.6 makes this transition easier with the PD to EC Migration Tool. This automated guided utility maps existing PD constructs to EC-DR equivalents: Categories, Protection Policies and Recovery Plans. Your protection intent and replication schedules carry over intact, without rebuilding or rearchitecting. To see this in action, we have created a guided click-thru demo so you can see how easy migrating from Protection Domain to Entity-Centric DR is.

Unified witness architecture: The Witness VM is critical for AHV Metro Availability, arbitrating control during a site failure. NCI 7.6 consolidates the witness service into a unified API layer,  establishing the foundation for a single, consistent witness framework from the core data center to the edge.

Collectively, these capabilities deliver resiliency wherever your data lives, combining flexibility, scale, consistency, and innovation in one portfolio. Bring your own storage and cloud of choice, scale to thousands of workloads, and orchestrate cost-optimized cloud DR even in air-gapped and sovereign environments, all under one consistent management plane. We’re excited to continue delivering DR innovations, empowering enterprises to build thoughtful multi-cloud infrastructure and confidently modernize at scale.

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