Data Protection on Thoughts and Ramblings by Mike

Nutanix Instant Restore: A Big Win for MST

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Over the past couple of posts, I have covered what MST is and how to choose between Zero Compute and Pilot Light deployment models. Throughout that series, I mentioned that a new capability in Prism Central 7.5.1 was what prompted me to revisit MST in the first place. This is that post.

If you're new to MST, check out my earlier posts. If you have spent any time evaluating or working with MST for disaster recovery, you know the value proposition: replicate VM and Volume Group snapshots to object storage, keep costs down, and recover workloads when you need them. The architecture is sound, the durability is there, and the cost profile makes it easy to justify. But there has always been one conversation that got uncomfortable: "How long until my VMs are actually running again?"

MST Deployment Models: Zero Compute vs. Pilot Light

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

In my previous post, I covered what Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) is, the object stores it supports, and where it fits in your DR strategy. Now I want to dig into the decision that shapes most of your MST architecture: which deployment model to use.

Nutanix offers two distinct approaches, Zero Compute and Pilot Light, and they trade off cost against recovery speed in ways that matter a lot depending on the workloads you are protecting. Getting this decision right can mean the difference between a recovery that takes minutes and one that takes hours, with very different cost profiles along the way.

A Practical Look at Nutanix MST for Disaster Recovery

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

I have been recently revisiting Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology, aka MST. What prompted the fresh look was the Instant Restore capability that shipped with Prism Central 7.5.1. When a feature fundamentally changes the recovery time story for an entire DR approach, it is worth going back and re-evaluating the technology as a whole. I will get to what started all this - Instant Restore - in a follow-up post, but first I want to walk through what MST actually is, what it supports, and why it deserves a closer look if you have not evaluated it recently.

Prism Central Backup Best Practices and Gotchas

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 07:38:39 -0500

Introduction

Prism Central is the command and control plane for your Nutanix infrastructure, managing multiple clusters, providing unified visibility, and orchestrating critical operations across your environment. Given its central role, protecting Prism Central is not just important—it's essential. A failure or data loss event affecting PC can impact your ability to manage your entire infrastructure.

Here's the thing: I've lost count of how many times I've had conversations with customers who insist on backing up their Prism Central VM with their existing backup solution—Veeam, Cohesity, Rubrik, you name it. "We back up everything with our backup tool," they say, "and Prism Central is just another VM, right?" Wrong. And I get it—it's a perfectly natural impulse. You've invested in enterprise backup software, your operations teams are trained on it, and you want consistency across your environment.

Backup Support for Nutanix AOS 7

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 09:21:15 -0400

#comment: true # Disable comment if false.

If you've been holding off on upgrading to AOS 7 due to backup vendor support, we've crossed that bridge! Let's take a quick look at the current landscape of AHV and AOS releases, and then do a quick rundown of the current support from a few major backup vendors to see how they are landing with the latest AOS releases.

Time to queue up some AOS 7 and AHV 10 upgrades!

Saved by Pure Storage: Ransomware Recovery Success

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This past weekend, I got to experience with another customer an unexpected intrusion, one of the worst I’ve honestly experienced in my years. Once I was onsite and got to see the level of sophistication on this attack, I realized that we had our work cutout for us.

Backup solution, gone…
User Files, hijacked…
VMFS datastores, encrypted…
Pure Storage Primary Array snapshots, deleted + eradicated…

The first 2 in that list are ones that yeah, we see quite often during these scenarios. But those last 2, ESPECIALLY the last one really made me realize how intrusive this was. This mean that somebody physically got access to the array to issue the commands to delete the snapshots.

Acropolis Data Protection Configuration Guide

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Part 4: Prism Central Deployment and Configurationetween clusters for VM migration and disaster recovery testing."

date: 2016-09-21 featured: false draft: false toc: false usePageBundles: true categories:

"Technology"

tags:

"acropolis"
"ahv"
"nutanix"
"data-protection"
"replication"

Welcome back to my series on our journey of testing Nutanix and Mellanox. Part 1 & 2 of the series focused on Nutanix AHV networking and integrating with Mellanox, so we’re going to shift in Part 3 and look at the AHV configuration for getting Data Protection going and performing a failover test.