Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure - 100 - Product Overview PDF

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure - 100 - Product Overview Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a distributed infrastructure platform for enterprise IT applications. NCI software, the foundation for our Nutanix Cloud Platform offering, combines compute, storage, and networking resources from a cluster...

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure - 100 - Product Overview Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a distributed infrastructure platform for enterprise IT applications. NCI software, the foundation for our Nutanix Cloud Platform offering, combines compute, storage, and networking resources from a cluster of servers into a single logical pool with integrated resiliency, security, performance, and simplified administration. In this lesson, you will learn about the value of hyperconverged infrastructure, what the NCI platform is and its components, and how NCI can solve the infrastructure challenges that customers face. IN TR ODUCTION AN D OVER VIEW Market Opportunity HCI History and Overview NCI Platform N CI COMPON EN TS  AOS Storage AHV Virtualization Prism Management Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Container Support Virtual Networking Security and Network Security Nutanix Cloud Clusters SUMMAR Y AN D R ESOUR CES Resources Assessment Feedback Lesson 1 of 14 Market Opportunity Leadership Position Since the inception of the Integrated Systems Magic Quadrant with Gartner, Nutanix has played a dominant role in this marketplace. The HCI market continues to grow, and Nutanix is the leading provider in completeness of vision, ability to execute, and revenue. Hyperconverged infrastructure has matured and continues to grow. Gartner states that, as of July 2022, hyperconverged infrastructure has reached the “Plateau of Productivity” within their Hype Cycle. This is good news for Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), as it means the very core of the software is now mainstream and adoption starts to accelerate. It also means that the criteria for assessing HCI providers viability are more clearly defined and the technology's broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off for customers. With NCI, organizations can efficiently deploy and manage data and applications across datacenter, edge, and cloud environments without the complexity or cost of traditional infrastructure. Now IT can spend less time and money on infrastructure management and give users the ability to easily manage their own workloads. Lesson 2 of 14 HCI History and Overview Leader in HCI Founded in 2009 by a team who democratized technologies that Amazon, Facebook, and Google used in their own datacenters, Nutanix pioneered the creation of hyperconverged solutions and dramatically simplified IT infrastructure, reduced costs, and improved manageability. The early idea of Nutanix was to bring web-scale engineering -- distributed systems running on commodity servers -- to the masses. A Brief History of Nutanix - Dheeraj Pandey Legacy Inf rastructure Legacy infrastructure—with separate storage, storage networks, and servers—is not well suited to meet the growing demands of enterprise applications or the fast pace of modern business. The silos created by traditional infrastructure have become a barrier to change and progress, adding complexity to every step, from ordering to deployment to management. New business initiatives require buy-in from multiple teams, and IT needs must be predicted 3-5 years in advance. As most IT teams know, this involves a substantial amount of guesswork and is almost impossible to get right. In addition, vendor lock- in and increasing licensing costs are stretching budgets to the breaking point. Enterprise IT teams today are looking for ways to deliver on-premises IT services with the speed and operational efficiency of public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Taking cues from web giants, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) combines common datacenter server hardware using locally attached storage devices (spinning disk or flash) with intelligent software to eliminate common pain points associated with legacy infrastructure.  Hyperconverged Inf rastructure Hyperconverged infrastructure combines common datacenter hardware using locally attached storage resources with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays. Hardware nodes in an HCI environment include both compute and storage together. These hardware nodes connect together into a cluster of servers. AOS (Acropolis Operating System) is part of the Nutanix Cloud Platform and abstracts clusters of nodes into pools of compute and storage that a virtualized platform (AHV, ESXi) can consume. AOS builds into the software-defined platform all of the capabilities of resiliency, availability, and scalability that higher-end enterprise solutions offers. This allows the use of commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) commodity servers to serve as the hardware foundation for most data center applications, including high performance mission critical apps. Most HCI solutions consist of two fundamental components: a data plane and a management plane. The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are responsible for data plane and management duties within the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution. NCI distributed data plane provides a platform for either VMs or container-based applications that runs across a cluster of nodes delivering enterprise storage and virtualization services. 3-Tier versus NCI in the Datacenter Moving from a traditional 3-tier architecture to a hyperconverged infrastructure can result in significant cost savings and efficiency improvements in a data center. Some key areas where savings and benefits are typically realized: Reduced Hardware Costs: HCI integrates compute, storage, and networking into a single system, reducing the need for separate, specialized hardware components Reduced Power and Cooling Costs: With fewer physical components, HCI systems typically consume less power and generate less heat, leading to lower energy costs Space Savings: Consolidation of infrastructure reduces the physical footprint in the data center, potentially saving on real estate costs Simplified Management: HCI systems leverage integrated management tools, reducing the complexity and cost associated with managing separate compute, storage, and networking resources Integrated Backup and Disaster Recovery: Include built-in data protection features, reducing the need for separate backup and disaster recovery solutions Improved Utilization: HCI improves resource utilization by dynamically allocating resources as needed, reducing the need for overprovisioning High Availability and Fault Tolerance: Includes advanced features for high availability and fault tolerance, minimizing downtime and associated costs Lesson 3 of 14 NCI Platform Nutanix delivers a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform that bridges the wide gap between traditional infrastructure and public cloud services. The solution delivers turnkey infrastructure that integrates servers, storage, and virtualization along with end-to-end systems management and operations management capabilities. This allows enterprises to deploy infrastructure in minutes and shift the focus to applications that power the business. Click on each card to see how NCI can help customers deploy a hybrid multicloud strategy. Up to 40% TCO Savings Over 3-tier Architecture Up to 60% Faster Over Refactoring  Up to 53% Savings Over Cloud Native Features and Benefits Freedom of choice is foundational to the Nutanix product line and vision. Enterprises live or die by their applications, and thus the underlying infrastructure must be robust, resilient, and powerful enough to run the full gamut of workloads, and run them well. Click on each "plus" sign in the graphic below to learn more about customer choices on NCI.       Hypervisor Choice Nutanix supports all of the leading hypervisors, including virtualization solutions from VMware, Microsoft, and the native Nutanix hypervisor, AHV. No matter which hypervisor you choose, NCI makes management and operations a breeze, with seamless one-click upgrades and automated VM management.   Platform Choice Nutanix software runs on the best hardware available from the most trusted manufacturers. Customers can choose branded Nutanix appliances or OEM appliances from Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and Cisco.   Cloud Choices Business now takes place in a hybrid and multicloud world. With this reality in mind, Nutanix designs its products and services to transcend the boundaries of on-prem and cloud. Enterprises benefit when they are free to choose the best cloud for their apps and business needs. Using Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), customers can seamlessly move between on-prem and cloud environments.   Financing Choice NCI can be deployed on several consumption-based IT models with our trusted OEM hardware partners Key features in NCI include Enterprise-grade Data Services deliver the enterprise features you leverage in your traditional SAN environment, including high performance, data reduction, data protection, storage level snapshots, resilience, and much more. The distributed software architecture enables advanced new features like rapid self-healing, simple and predictable scalability, and data locality. Consolidated Storage Services unify storage across block, file, and objects, simplifying management and control of enterprise data no matter where it is consumed or resides — across applications, storage, and geographies Data Protection and Disaster Recovery offer natively integrated data protection and continuous availability at the VM level with a range of options available to meet recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) for different applications Integrated Security delivers a true defense-in-depth model using the principle of least privilege and custom security baseline that exceeds the requirements of the U.S. Department of Defense Virtualization supports multiple industry standard hypervisor solutions, allowing customers to choose the ideal solution for their environment, whether on- prem or in the cloud, or both. It includes full support for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V in addition to the Nutanix hypervisor - AHV, which provides a comprehensive set of capabilities with the most stringent security requirements included. Virtual Networking supports application security, traffic visibility, service insertion, overlay networking, and network automation with partner solutions.  Security features include microsegmentation to secure virtual machines (VM), allowing admins to easily manage network isolation and enforce granular VM and application level network policy. Management and Analytics are streamlined through a unified control plane combining multiple aspects of HCI management into a single pane of glass that lets IT admins manage infrastructure and virtualization, access operational insights, and fix problems, all with just a few clicks. Admins can manage Nutanix environments end-to-end through NCM and Prism. Watch this short video to highlight some of the features of NCI.  How It Works | Nutanix Let's now step through each of the components of NCI, reviewing the key features and benefits in each offering. Lesson 4 of 14 AOS Storage AOS Storage by Nutanix is a software-defined storage solution designed to deliver high performance, scalability, and resilience for enterprise applications. It is a core component of Nutanix's HCI platform. AOS is the base operating system, the so-called data plane that encapsulates the run time of storage, compute, security, and network. AOS is installed as a Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) atop a hypervisor and creates and manages everything in a Nutanix cluster. AOS Storage pools the flash and hard disk drive storage across the cluster and presents it as a storage pool that can span multiple Nutanix nodes and expand with the cluster. It is also responsible for managing and storing data at a granular level. It utilizes the Nutanix Extent Store, which manages data in small units called extents,  typically 1 MB in size. This granularity allows for efficient storage utilization and optimized data placement. Built into AOS storage are many enterprise grade that can be broken down into four categories: Performance Resiliency Scalability Storage Optimization Performance Applications on AOS Storage, even the most demanding applications, can run with consistent and predictable performance due to these foundational features. DA T A L OCA L IT Y IN T E L L IG E N T T IE RIN G H IG H T H ROU G H PU T Data locality ensure high performance. When data is written by an application, one copy is stored locally to that application so that it can be retrieved without needing to access the network. This ensures the lowest possible latency and prevents the network from becoming congested. If the VM is moved from one node to another using either vMotion, live migration, or due to an HA event, the migrated VM data is analyzed and moved if necessary to ensure data locality.  DA T A L OCA L IT Y IN T E L L IG E N T T IE RIN G H IG H T H ROU G H PU T Intelligent Tiering provides automatic performance optimization on systems with multiple storage tiers (NVMe, SSD, HDD). The storage environment continually monitors data access and automatically optimizes data placement on either SSD or HDD tiers, resulting in optimal performance without the need for manual intervention. Data that is accessed frequently (hot data) is moved to the fastest tier and data that is not accessed as frequently (cold data) is moved to the HDD tier.  DA T A L OCA L IT Y IN T E L L IG E N T T IE RIN G H IG H T H ROU G H PU T The latest memory class storage technologies, like NVMe, deliver high throughput and fast response times compared to traditional SATA or SAS technology  Resiliency Data is protected and kept available with advanced distributed consistency algorithms that protect against everything from bit rot to hardware failures to entire site failures. Here are some resiliency features in AOS Storage. G RA N U L A R A N D E FFICIE N T A U T OM A T IC SE L F- H E A L IN G T U N A B L E RE DU N DA N CY SN A PSH OT S Metadata-based local snapshots with virtual machine and application-level consistency recover data instantly to meet a wide range of RPO and RTO requirements. Data protection features include local snapshots and self-service restore for minor incidents, and Async, NearSync, and Sync replication for major incidents. G RA N U L A R A N D E FFICIE N T A U T OM A T IC SE L F- H E A L IN G T U N A B L E RE DU N DA N CY SN A PSH OT S AOS Storage is designed to automatically self-heal in the event of SSD, HDD, NVMe device, or node failures. It can fully recover the management stack without requiring any user intervention or causing delays. AOS continuously monitors the health of hardware components (such as disks, nodes, network interfaces) and software services. It uses built-in health checks to detect failures promptly. When a failure is detected, AOS automatically triggers data rebuilds from surviving replicas. This ensures that the system can continue to provide data availability and integrity without manual intervention. G RA N U L A R A N D E FFICIE N T A U T OM A T IC SE L F- H E A L IN G T U N A B L E RE DU N DA N CY SN A PSH OT S AOS Storage absorbs incoming writes onto fast, low latency storage like SSDs or NVMe. Data is then written to back-end storage resources asynchronously. This process ensures data exists in at least two independent locations in the cluster. AOS uses replication factors for data redundancy and availability in the case of failures. When you enable replication factor 2, the cluster maintains two copies of data for each storage container with replication factor 2 enabled. When you enable replication factor 3, the cluster maintains three copies of the data. By default, AOS Storage provides disk awareness and node awareness. Data replicas are placed such that two copies are never on the same disk or node. AOS Storage can also provide block awareness (a block is a multi-node enclosure) and rack awareness. These options ensure that data copies are not placed on the same block or the same rack, respectively, for protection against power failures, cooling problems, etc.  Scalability Storage can be sized precisely for your needs and expanded quickly and easily as needs grow. Storage policies are applied logically on a per-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware. Here are some scalability features in AOS Storage E A SY SCA L E - OU T IN DE PE N DE N T LY SCA L E FA ST PROVISION IN G AOS Storage allows organizations to start with the infrastructure they need today, and effortlessly scale out as application and business needs evolve. The platform supports linear scalability, allowing organizations to easily add more nodes to increase storage capacity and performance. This helps in managing growing data needs without significant architectural changes.  E A SY SCA L E - OU T IN DE PE N DE N T LY SCA L E FA ST PROVISION IN G To scale compute and storage, the most common approach for nodes within a cluster is to deploy a node that has more compute than storage, or a node that has more storage than compute. When necessary, customers may want to independently scale storage or compute resources which may helps to fine tune requirements for applications with different needs and hypervisors. The Nutanix cluster uses the resources (CPUs and memory) of a compute-only (CO) node exclusively for computing purposes. A compute-only (CO) node allows you to seamlessly and efficiently expand the computing capacity (CPU and memory) of your cluster. This can be useful for workloads that may not require a lot of storage, such as VDI. A storage-only (SO) node allows you to seamlessly expand the storage capacity in your cluster. A storage-only node always runs the AHV hypervisor. Therefore, if you want to scale up only the storage capacity in your cluster, you do not need to purchase additional hypervisor licenses. By using storage-only nodes, you can significantly scale the storage capacity of a cluster independent of compute.  E A SY SCA L E - OU T IN DE PE N DE N T LY SCA L E FA ST PROVISION IN G Storage policies are easily created and attached to VMs allowing instantaneous access to dynamic storage pools as capacity is added. Storage policies let you manage the storage attributes like replication factor, encryption, compression, and QoS of entities like Virtual Machines (VMs) and Volume Groups (VGs). A single storage policy can manage the attributes of several entities that are associated with various categories.  Storage Optimizations AOS Storage incorporates a wide range of data efficiency technologies that work in concert to make the most efficient use of the available storage capacity in a Nutanix cluster. Here are some data efficiency features in AOS Storage. COM PRE SSION DE DU PL ICA T ION E RA SU RE CODIN G Compression saves physical storage space and improves I/O bandwidth and memory usage— which can have a positive impact on overall system performance. There are two types of data compression integral to AOS Storage: 1. Inline compression. Enabled by default, sequential streams of data or large I/Os are compressed as they are written to the Extent Store. 2. Post-process compression. Data is initially written in an uncompressed state. A background process periodically compresses data cluster-wide, eliminating any impact on write latency.  COM PRE SSION DE DU PL ICA T ION E RA SU RE CODIN G There are two types of deduplication – performance tier and post process map reduce. The performance tier deduplication removes the duplicate data inline with the content cache to reduce the footprint of the applications working set. The post-process deduplication reduces repetitive data in the capacity tier to increase the effective storage capacity of a cluster. The Elastic Deduplication Engine is the software-based feature that deduplicates data in the extent store. After AOS Storage marks the duplicate chunks for deduplication, the Curator MapReduce framework removes those chunks.  COM PRE SSION DE DU PL ICA T ION E RA SU RE CODIN G AOS Storage uses an innovative erasure coding technology that increases usable capacity significantly without affecting resilience. Instead of keeping one or two duplicate copies of data, it encodes a strip of data blocks on different nodes and calculates parity. In the event of a disk or node failure, parity is used to calculate any missing data blocks. The number of data and parity blocks in a strip is configured based on the number of failures you want the system to be able to withstand. Lesson 5 of 14 AHV Virtualization Enterprise Grade As the default option for Nutanix HCI, the native Nutanix hypervisor, AHV, represents a unique approach to virtualization that offers the powerful virtualization capabilities needed to deploy and manage enterprise applications. AHV is our virtualization platform built on the KVM open source hypervisor and completely integrated into our full Nutanix stack. Nutanix contributes regularly to open source projects which allows us to explore unique areas of innovation that are not possible when dependent on other virtualization platforms. It uses the best from open-source software, and Nutanix has spent the last 10 years making AHV enterprise ready with features like built-in software-defined networking, built-in security, high availability, and dynamic scheduling. AHV keeps up with and optimizes the latest hardware advances like vGPU/GPU passthrough for high performance AI workloads. and AHV Turbo, which is an I/O enhancement built to take advantage of next generation, ultra-low latency storage devices like NVMe. AHV supports most of the popular guest OS platforms and continually expand our ecosystems with over 750+ solutions validated to work on AHV.  While Nutanix AOS supports VMware ESXi and even Microsoft’s Hyper-V, which certainly have the potential to offer a robust and capable solution, AHV is the superior option for those looking to simplify or have specific needs, budget or operational constraints. AHV is included with NCI (no additional licensing costs) and completely integrated into our full Nutanix stack. Since NCI supports multiple virtualization solutions side by side from the same NCP platform, it prevents vendor lock-in and provides choice for future workloads. VM management on AHV focuses on creation, updates, deletion, data protection, and monitoring of VMs and their resources. Managing VMs and workloads is made simple with Prism. From on-premises multi-clusters to the single cluster at the edge to the public cloud, Prism Central provides the infrastructure management, monitoring and health, all from a single view. Key AHV Features Let's discuss some of the key AHV features available today VM High Availability The HA capabilities of AHV is designed to ensure that virtual machines (VMs) remain available and operational even in the event of hardware or software failures within the Nutanix cluster. When a host (node) fails, VMs running on that host are automatically restarted on other healthy nodes within the cluster. This minimizes downtime and ensures business continuity. Fast VM Migrations Nutanix AHV provides more efficient and faster VM migrations than ever with micro stunning, while on-demand Cross Cluster Live Migration (CCLM) enables smooth VM transfers across AHV clusters to ensure uninterrupted service and reliability. AHV also supports cross-hypervisor migrations. Nutanix simplifies the process of migrating existing VMs between an ESXi cluster and an AHV cluster using built-in data protection capabilities. You can snapshot VMs on the source ESXi cluster and replicate them to the AHV cluster, where you can restore them and bring them online as AHV VMs. Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling (ADS) Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling (ADS) proactively monitors your cluster for any compute and storage contentions or hotspots over a period of time. If ADS detects a problem, it creates a migration plan that eliminates hotspots in the cluster by migrating VMs from one host to another. It offers intelligent initial VM placement and adjusts workloads across the cluster for peak performance and streamlined efficiency. Intelligent VM Placement AHV offers intelligent VM placement and adjusts workloads across the cluster for peak performance and streamlined efficiency. With Automatic Cluster Selection in AOS 6.8, we can also intelligently initially place workloads across clusters. Comprehensive Security Nutanix AHV ensures a fortified virtualization space with one-click STIG applications, automated compliance and self-healing mechanisms. It also delivers data encryption, network microsegmentation and consistent security patches for comprehensive protection. Software-defined Networking Nutanix AHV networking simplifies network management with software-defined networking solutions and microsegmentation, ensuring secure, efficient traffic in virtual and cloud infrastructures. Lesson 6 of 14 Prism Management Nutanix Prism is the single pane of glass for Nutanix clusters and provides an easy way to manage Nutanix environments end-to-end. It combines multiple management aspects into a single consumer-grade product that lets IT admins manage infrastructure and virtualization, access operational insights, and fix problems, all with a few clicks. Just as NCI creates a data plane that spans the entire cluster for performance and resiliency, Nutanix Prism creates the same resiliency for management and operational intelligence. It is comprised of two components: Prism Element at the cluster level and Prism Central for multi-cluster management and analytics. A Prism Central instance can consist of either a single VM or a set of three VMs for a highly resilient deployment. A single instance can manage hundreds of clusters and can be deployed either on-premises or in the public cloud using NC2. Multiple Prism Central domains can be consolidated into a Nutanix Central console providing global visibility across multiple cloud deployments. Prism manages the entire stack from the storage and compute infrastructure all the way up to virtual machines (VMs). The Prism Central console is used to manage clusters, whereas single nodes can be managed by both Prism Central and Prism Element consoles. In addition to the device-friendly HTML5 Prism interfaces, all management capabilities are exposed through comprehensive APIs, PowerShell, and the command line interface (CLI) to facilitate integration and automation. Prism Capabilities  Prism provides a complete range of management capabilities, that can be broken down into three functionalities: IN FRA ST RU CT U RE CL OU D M A N A G E R PL A T FORM A DM IN IST RA T ION M A NA G E M E NT FU N CT ION A L IT IE S Prism Infrastructure enables the configuration and management of cluster components including: Hardware component dashboards with drill-down options to view details on clusters, hosts, disks, and GPUs across registered clusters Configuration and dashboards for managing VMs, VM templates, storage, and volume groups across registered clusters Configuration and dashboards for managing networking elements like subnets, VPCs, VPN, and security policies across registered clusters Configuration and dashboards for managing data protection including protection policies and recovery plans Activity monitors for events, tasks, and audits  IN FRA ST RU CT U RE CL OU D M A N A G E R PL A T FORM A DM IN IST RA T ION M A NA G E M E NT FU N CT ION A L IT IE S The Admin Center in Prism enables administrators to perform many platform-specific tasks including Perform inventory and software updates as part of Life Cycle Management (LCM) functionality Discover and deploy Nutanix apps such as NCM Self-Service, Files, Move, NDB, and more Enable a Marketplace to manage Nutanix apps and preferred partner apps Define and implement IT Projects based upon field requirements Manage Nutanix application licensing Define users, roles and authentication for Identify and Access Management (IAM) Manage security functionality  IN FRA ST RU CT U RE CL OU D M A N A G E R PL A T FORM A DM IN IST RA T ION M A NA G E M E NT FU N CT ION A L IT IE S Prism provides access to NCM functionality of Intelligent Operations and Self-Service. Cost Governance and Security Central are SaaS services that can connect to Prism. Intelligent Operations which provides full stack visibility (from compute to storage) across your environments. The AI-powered engine within NCM provides continuously predictive monitoring and can detect inefficiencies and generate actionable signals. ML- based analysis enables self-tuning or rightsizing applications based upon workload demands. Self-Service which enables building and using the cloud, and provides direct and efficient delivery of services to those outside of IT, but with the appropriate guardrails needed for optimal resource utilization, resiliency, and security. The one-click marketplace gives developers and other infrastructure users with the ease and convenience of quickly accessing the resources. Cost Governance which covers both on-premises and public cloud environments. For on-premises, there is a unique TCO model that allows the breakdown of spending as well as future forecasting. For public cloud deployments, you can see cloud spend across all cloud environments. Security Central which provides multicloud security with continuous security compliance monitoring, risk monitoring and planning, and custom audits to see what your risk posture is. Using the ML-based engine, NCM can detect things like user behavior anomalies and network threats, and can automate responses or provide alerts. Demonstration Sometimes it's easier to watch a demonstration that showcases features as opposed to reading about capabilities. Let's hear from Laura Jordana (Director, Technical Marketing, NCM) as she reviews key features of Prism. New Prism Central Experience in PC.2023.1 | Tech Bytes | … Lesson 7 of 14 Data Protection and Disaster Recovery NCI has a natively integrated Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution that combines disaster recovery (DR) and data protection (DP) under one umbrella. Nutanix BCDR gets your applications up and running with minimal downtime and data loss. It also helps customers avoid disruption by providing failover and failback for compute and storage with a range of recovery point objective (RPO) choices. As you can see, we have BOTH elements of BCDR shown: DR and integrated backup. Each of these solutions are zero-touch, meaning, once configured, no manual intervention is required to ensure data protection is occurring. The only thing left for customers to do is click once within Prism to failover in the event of a disaster. This is very different from traditional disaster recovery and data protection solutions, where orchestrating a response to a disaster is arduous, requiring lots of manual intervention. Comprehensive Backup with Partner Ecosystem Backup refers to the process of creating a copy of data to recover from data loss or corruption. Nutanix works closely with our partner ecosystem to provide a comprehensive backup solution based on customers’ needs. A widely recognized best practice in the industry, the 3-2-1 rule for backups calls for maintaining three copies of data stored in two different locations while the third copy is stored offsite. This safeguards data integrity by providing tiered backups in the event of compromise to the primary data source. In certain types of disasters, like ransomware attacks, having an off-site copy of the data is the only effective way to recover. New regulations like DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) creates a regulatory framework that all EU-based firms need to make sure they can withstand, respond to, and recover from all types of disruptions and threats. Having a strong backup plan can help to align with those new regulations. By partnering with leading data protection vendors, Nutanix ensures you can drop a reliable backup solution into your operations quickly and easily. Having a breadth of partners enables you to choose the best software for your organization and eliminates the time and expense of configuring stand-alone secondary storage solutions. Disaster Recovery Nutanix provides asynchronous, near-synchronous, and synchronous replication options to support different recovery SLAs as part of a complete business continuity plan. For each application, customers will define a Recovery Time Object (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Both objectives are time-based: RTO is the time allowed to restore normal operations when an IT failure occurs, and RPO is the maximum amount of data you are willing to lose, e.g. one hour's worth of data. Snapshots and backups can protect from certain types of events or failures, but only replication can help to meet RTO/RPO objectives in the minutes or even seconds of loss. Nutanix disaster recovery and replication capabilities are built on snapshot technology. VM snapshots can be asynchronously replicated or backed up to another datacenter based on a user-defined schedule. Asynchronous Replication Nutanix asynchronous replication makes it possible to create an affordable DR solution where the RPO is 60 minutes or greater. Replication topologies are flexible and bi-directional, enabling one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many deployments. During replication, data is compressed and replicated at the sub- block level for maximum efficiency and lower WAN bandwidth consumption. In this example, the primary site has two different application sets that have different replication needs. Applications in Protection Domain 1 will be replicated to the Secondary Site B, but applications in Protection Domain 2 are replicated to two sites for added protection. Site A also runs applications and uses Protection Domain 3 to replicate to the Secondary Site B as well. Near-Synchronous Replication with NearSync Nutanix NearSync builds on the asynchronous replication capabilities just described to create a solution that can achieve an RPO lower than traditional asynchronous replication and very fast RTO. RPO for this solution is targeted between 1 minutes and 15 minutes. Nutanix uses the lightweight snapshots (LWS) feature to handle a high rate of snapshots without affecting the running application. LWS tracks changes with markers instead of creating new vDisks for every snapshot. With markers, you don't need to maintain metadata or collapse long snapshot chains; however, when you enable NearSync, LWS handles all changes in SSD. To accommodate this trade-off, Nutanix reserves a percentage of SSD space for LWS when you enable it. When you configure a snapshot frequency of 15 minutes or less, NearSync is automatically enabled. Metro Availability For critical applications requiring zero RPO and near-zero RTO, Nutanix provides Metro Availability. Synchronous replication ensures continuous data availability across separate sites in a Metro Availability installation. During a disaster or planned maintenance, VMs can fail over from a primary site to a secondary site, guaranteeing nearly 100 percent uptime for applications. Metro Availability can be set up bi-directionally between two sites connected over an IP-based metro area network. The only network requirement is a round-trip latency of less than five milliseconds, driven by guest OS requirements for acknowledging storage writes. Data is written synchronously to both sites, so it is always available to applications in the event a site fails or needs maintenance. You can non-disruptively migrate VMs between sites for planned maintenance events or other needs. DR Orchestration The complexity of data protection—with multiple solutions, devices, and interfaces— is a huge problem. Prism can be used to manage all Nutanix data protection and DR functionality. Nutanix protection policies and recovery plans are available in Prism Central for AHV and ESXi to orchestrate operations around migrations and unplanned failures. A protection policy automates the creation and replication of snapshots across all the clusters managed by Prism Central. When you configure a protection policy to create local snapshots, you just specify the RPO, retention policy, and the entities you want to protect. If you want to automate snapshot replication to a remote location, you can also specify the remote location. A recovery plan orchestrates restoring protected VMs at a backup location, whether that location is on-premises or in the cloud. Recovery plans can either recover all specified VMs at once, or will execute a runbook functionality to recover applications gracefully and in the required order. Lesson 8 of 14 Container Support In addition to virtualization, NCI includes an integrated Kubernetes control plane to simplify the deployment and management of cloud native workloads deployed in containers. Nutanix Kubernetes Service (NKE) is fully integrated into AHV, enabling your organization to run cloud native workloads alongside your virtualized enterprise applications. NKE also includes an integrated CSI driver, providing applications deployed in containers with direct access to AOS storage for persistent data. In addition, NCI is an excellent platform for providing compute and persistent data services giving customers a choice of developer environments including Rancher, RedHat OpenShift, Amazon EKS-A, and more at the edge, core, and cloud. Nutanix Kubernetes Platform At the.NEXT Conference in May 2024, Nutanix announced Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) to simplify management of container-based modern applications using Kubernetes. NKP enables customers to innovate faster with a complete, CNCF- compliant cloud native stack that gives Platform Engineering teams a consistent operating model for securely managing Kubernetes clusters across on-premises, hybrid, and multicloud environments. This can help customers deploy more cloud native and containerized applications that can ultimately run anywhere. NKP targets a new class of Kubernetes Platform Engineering teams to bring enterprise resilience, day-2 operations, and compliance to modern applications at scale. For example, customers can manage clusters running containers on Nutanix on-premises and clusters running in the public cloud with one single pane of glass, cutting down on complexity and operating costs. It also enables organizations to manage clusters running in non-Nutanix environments, including popular public cloud Kubernetes services, as well as both connected and air-gapped environments. This helps customers innovate faster by removing the hurdles in adopting cloud native architectures for their applications. “One of the biggest challenges organizations face with cloud native applications is deploying, securing and managing the rapidly expanding fleets of Kubernetes clusters being deployed on premises and in public clouds and NKP simplifies this,” said Tobi Knaup, GM Cloud Native at Nutanix. “This work directly supports our vision, along with Project Beacon, to enable customers to run modern applications and their data anywhere.” NKP will replace NKE in the coming months. Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) expands the rich data services provided by AOS Core to stateful containerized applications running on the Kubernetes framework. It allows data protection and management services including asynchronous replication and disaster recovery to be configured seamlessly using self-service tools. It also provides for IT infrastructure monitoring and control using integration with Prism Central. NDK works with both NKE and NKP platforms. Lesson 9 of 14 Virtual Networking Flow Virtual Networking from Nutanix delivers security, automation, and software- defined networking (SDN) that simplifies the creation and configuration of virtual networks without time-consuming manual configurations of physical networks, routing, or IP address assignment. The VPC or Virtual Private Cloud is the basic unit of Flow Virtual Networking. Each VPC is an isolated network namespace with complete control over your networking environment, including IP address range, subnets, routing, and gateways. A VPC can expand to include any cluster managed by the same Prism Central, but generally a VPC should exist only within a single AHV cluster, or within clusters in the same availability zone. Core services like DHCP, NAT, routing, and security policies are all configurable from the from the Prism Central console. Manage policy-driven access controls to allow or deny communication between subnets. From there, you can create and manage network access policy or enhance security by inserting advanced security functions provided by Nutanix partners into the VPC environment. FVN can redirect traffic between subnets to a virtual appliance for additional processing or inspection. Prism also allows for self-service network creation, enabling and allowing users to create their own networks within the parameters you define. VPCs allow you to logically isolate virtual networks without changing underlying physical networks. Isolation using VPCs ensures workloads and VMs can be quickly and logically separated for testing, development, compliance, and security. It also easily enables multi-tenant capabilities, ensure strict compliance with multiple, segmented networks managed within the same cluster without additional complicated networking. VPC networking enables configurations and details to span private or public clouds without complex changes. Quickly connect VPCs on your local, DR, and public cloud-based Nutanix deployments. Using NAT and VPN Services, link your Nutanix VPCs to your other private and virtual public cloud networks. And easily stretch Layer 2 traffic across different VPCs for disaster recovery, partial failover, active/active sites, or bridging to a physical network. Use Cases Virtual networking has many use cases: Full Site Failure Re-IP Failover / DR Move network VPC Stretch Cloud Burst - Recommend new subnet or L2 stretch Migration - requires re-IP or Workload Placement L2 stretch Multi-cluster - automatic cluster selection  One or more VPCs per tenant Multi-tenancy Map VPCs to VRF - helpful for service providers Lesson 10 of 14 Security and Network Security Secure by Default NCP is hardened by default, leveraging features from NCI, then managed through NCM. Nutanix utilizes the principle of least privilege and delivers a true defense-in- depth model with turn-key security policies and controls across features like two- factor authentication and data-at-rest encryption. At the Nutanix core, a security development lifecycle is used across every feature and integrated into product development to help meet the most stringent security requirements. Nutanix helps achieve deeper alignment to critical frameworks and standards like the zero-trust security model or the CISA Cybersecurity Framework to improve cyber resilience and is certified across a broad set of evaluation programs to ensure compliance with the strictest standards. Its custom security baseline exceeds the requirements of the U.S. Department of Defense. Here are some security features built into NCI: Data-at-rest Encryption Data-at-rest encryption is delivered through self-encrypting drives (SED) that are factory- installed in Nutanix hardware. This provides strong data protection by encrypting user and application data for FIPS 140-2 Level 2 compliance. For SED drives, key management servers are accessed via an interface using the industry standard Key Management Interface Protocol (KMIP) instead of storing the keys in the cluster. Two-factor Authentication Nutanix solutions support SAML integration and optional two-factor authentication for system administrators in environments requiring additional layers of security. When implemented, administrator logins require a combination of a client certificate and username and password. Secure Access Nutanix also offers a higher security configuration option called Cluster Lockdown, which restricts access to a Nutanix cluster in security-conscious environments such as government and healthcare datacenters. Cluster lockdown not only disables interactive shell logins automatically but can also enable more restrictive access based on cryptographic keys. Security Development Lifecycle Nutanix uses a unique, well-defined Security Development Lifecycle (SecDL) to incorporate security into every step of the software development process, from design and development to testing and hardening. Threat modeling is used to assess and mitigate customer risk from code changes. SecDL testing is fully automated during development, and all security-related code modifications are timed during minor releases to minimize risk. Secure Configuration Baseline Nutanix provides a security baseline based on the US DISA STIG format in both human readable format and in eXtensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (XCCDF), which allows automated assessment tools, such as Host Based Security System (HBSS), to read it. This provides detailed information on how to assess a Nutanix system to determine compliance with the baseline requirement, cutting down accreditation time from 9-12 months to a matter of minutes. Flow Network Security Flow Network Security provides application security, visibility, service insertion, and network automation with partner solutions. Security includes east/west firewalls, or microsegmentation, allowing admins to easily manage network isolation and granular VM and application-level network policy. The extensive visibility makes it easier to see the complex interactions of modern applications, while also improving troubleshooting and simplifying policy creation and maintenance. Flow Network Security (FNS) quickly creates virtual firewalls between VMs and applications called microsegmentation managed centrally through Prism. Since FNS is application-centric, you can secure applications, prevent data loss, and support compliance goals. Microsegmentation moves security from the perimeter to VM or application granular controls that limit data center communication to what is minimally required for applications to operate. Moderns application have many components interacting with each other (east / west traffic) - it is operationally infeasible to secure them using a traditional perimeter firewall. In a microsegmented environment, malware spread is greatly reduced if not completely blocked. Service insertion and network automation help extend and enhance networking function through partner or API integrations with capabilities like deep packet inspection and threat intelligence. Security Central Security Central helps to extend Flow Network Security by helping to plan and deliver microsegmentation. It provides multicloud security with continuous security compliance monitoring, risk monitoring and planning, and custom audits to see what your risk posture is. Optimization Security Central uses Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to learn about the users, entities, and network logs. Based on this information, Security Central builds a baseline profile of regular activities. Any activity deviating from the baseline profile gets classified as an anomaly. It constantly looks for anomalies in counts, patterns, place, and time of day. When anomalies are detected, they can be responded to automatically or alert notifications can be sent to administrators for action. Click on each "plus sign" in the Dashboard to read more about each widget.        Security Overview The Security Overview provides a quick snapshot of the overall security posture, by region or cloud or cluster. It shows open issues and color-coded open issues in the last week.   Regulatory Compliance Compliance governance at your fingertips, by compliance policy and risk assessment It shows your compliance score for supported regulatory standards.   Network and Microsegmentation Get the pulse of your network traffic with Network and Microsegmentation. It monitors new traffic flows, the network traffic that was blocked, and a graph of traffic activity over the past period.   VM Security Status Provides a snapshot of VM security status, including those VMs that are unprotected (without a security policy).   Recent Findings This shows the recently opened issues (last 24 hours) for selected policies, sorted by severity and issue count. The Security Central Investigate feature enables you to run queries on network logs and inventory attributes using Common Query Language (CQL), which is similar to SQL. You can use Investigate to retrieve resource information to identify any configuration errors, unprotected traffic flows, and detect policy violations that expose your resources to risk and non-compliance to industry benchmarks. Investigate allows you to identify possible security risks in the environment so that remediation actions can be taken. Compliance The Security Central platform is highly trusted and undergoes strict security vigilance. Compliance can also be validated against regulatory policies, with out- the-box policies for HIPAA, PCI, CIS benchmarking for public cloud, NIST, GDPR, and more, along with Nutanix prescribed security best practices. Visit Nutanix Trust to view Security Central compliance certifications. Security Central generates reports to track security compliance across all your cloud accounts or scopes at both aggregate and granular levels, and can report on specific compliance standards like PCI-DSS or HIPAA. Reports can be generated at scheduled times and emailed out automatically to key stakeholders. Lesson 11 of 14 Nutanix Cloud Clusters Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is a hybrid multicloud platform with natively integrated networking between private and public clouds. It allows seamless application migration and license portability across all environments and enables customers to run the full Nutanix software stack anywhere—in private or public clouds. NC2 is an extension to the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) platform. It leverages capabilities within NCI, including AOS, Prism, Flow Virtual Networking, AHV, and Nutanix Disaster Recovery. Other products, like Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), can greatly enhance the hybrid multicloud experience using features like Cost Governance, Self-Service, Intelligent Operations, and Security Central for security and compliance. Customers running Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) and Nutanix Database Service (NDB) can provide data storage and database services across both public and private clouds, simplifying application mobility. Nutanix designed its software to give customers running workloads on cloud computing providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the same experience they expect from on-premises Nutanix clusters. This is accomplished by running the full NCP platform stack on both on-premises and public cloud. By using the same NCI platform, NC2 extends the ease of use of the Nutanix software stack to the public cloud and greatly reduces the operational complexity of extending, bursting, or migrating your applications and data between clouds. Because all cloud platforms run Nutanix AOS and AHV with the same CLI, UI, and APIs, existing IT processes and third-party integrations continue to work regardless of where they run. A management console, the NC2 console, is available via MyNutanix manages hybrid multicloud lifecycle operations in AWS and Azure, and provides provisioning and scaling of Nutanix clusters on bare metal nodes. NC2 on AWS NC2 on AWS installs the complete Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack directly on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) bare-metal instance. Nutanix provisions the full bare-metal host for your use, and the bare-metal hosts are not shared by multiple customers. Using bare metal, and installing the Nutanix stack on top, allows leveraging AWS networking components to connect to the network and VMs don't require any additional configuration to access AWS services or other EC2 instances. This greatly simplifies the administration and management of the platform. There are a variety bare metal configurations to choose from, with the ability to create large 28-node clusters. Descriptions of the AWS bare metal configurations can be found on the Nutanix Hardware Platform Spec Sheet website. NC2 on Azure NC2 on Azure installs the complete Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack directly on bare-metal instances in a dedicated infrastructure within Azure. This solution offering was a joint engineering effort with Microsoft and Nutanix, and Microsoft spins up this platform in regions around the world, ready for customers to consume. NC2 on Azure works with certain bare-metal instances in specific regions. There are 2 bare metal configurations to choose from, with the ability to create large 28-node clusters. Descriptions of the Azure bare metal configurations can be found on the Nutanix Hardware Platform Spec Sheet website. Lesson 12 of 14 Resources Additional resources for NCI can be found here: NCI Spot Page Intranet site for all questions and content on NCI SPOT Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure NCI page on the nutanix.com site NUTANIX.COM Definitive Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure A comprehensive document on the features and value of HCI EBOOK Definitive Guide to Nutanix AOS Storage A thorough discussion on the capabilities of AOS Storage EBOOK Definitive Guide to Data Protection and Disaster Recovery A comprehensive review of Nutanix data protection and disaster recovery solutions EBOOK Lesson 13 of 14 Assessment Question 01/13 What are some benefits of adopting hyperconverged infrastructure in a data center? (pick 3) Reduced hardware costs Increased power consumption Simplified management Improved resource utilization Question 02/13 Which of the following are key features of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)? (pick 3) Vendor lock-in Support for multiple hypervisors Platform choice for hardware Seamless movement between on-premises and cloud environments Question 03/13 What is the primary benefit of data locality in AOS Storage? It reduces network congestion It enhances data compression It improves data encryption It increases storage capacity Question 04/13 What are the key resiliency features of AOS Storage? (pick 3) Automatic self-healing Independent scaling Tunable redundancy Granular and efficient snapshots Question 05/13 What storage optimization techniques are used in AOS Storage? (pick 3) Erasure coding Compression Deduplication Data locality Question 06/13 Which features are part of AHV's key capabilities? (pick 3) VM High Availability Software-defined Networking Fast VM Live Migrations Manual VM Scheduling Question 07/13 What does Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling (ADS) do in AHV? Manages network traffic Handles user authentication Encrypts data in transit Optimizes VM placement Question 08/13 What are the deployment options for a Prism Central instance? Two VMs or four VMs Three VMs or six VMs Single VM or five VMs Single VM or three VMs Question 09/13 What is the primary advantage of Nutanix asynchronous replication? It achieves RPO lower than 1 minute It allows for flexible replication topologies It requires less than 5ms round-trip latency It enables zero RPO and near-zero RTO Question 10/13 What capabilities does Flow Network Security provide for application security? (pick 3) Microsegmentation Application-level network policy East-west firewalls Physical network reconfiguration Question 11/13 What is a primary function of Flow Virtual Networking? It only works with non-Nutanix clusters It provides physical network configurations It simplifies virtual network creation It requires manual IP address assignment Question 12/13 What is the main function of Flow Network Security's microsegmentation? To manage physical networks To create virtual firewalls To reduce network costs To increase network speed Question 13/13 What are the key features of NC2 that enable a consistent experience across on- premises and public cloud environments? (pick 2) Using the same CLI, UI, and APIs Providing different management interfaces for each cloud Utilizing cloud-specific hypervisors Running the full NCP platform stack Lesson 14 of 14 Feedback We greatly appreciate any comments or feedback that you can provide which will help us to improve the learning experience for the Sales community. Please click on the following link to provide feedback to our team. Update URL Feedback for Learning Academy on this course