The Need for Elastic Infrastructure

In today’s digital landscape, agility and resiliency isn’t just a nice to have, for many organizations it’s considered mission-critical. Whether you’re supporting seasonal growth, accommodating sudden spikes in analytics workloads, or preparing for disaster recovery, your infrastructure needs to scale with you. Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) deliver just that, the ability to run the Nutanix Cloud Platform natively on AWS and Azure on bare metal services, and scale it elastically as your needs evolve. This post dives into how NC2 enables efficient and intelligent scaling across both clouds, whether you’re adding nodes or leveraging native cloud storage like Amazon EBS or Azure Elastic SAN. It will not cover the details of the NC2 deployment though.

NC2 on AWS and Azure — The Basics

Nutanix NC2 brings the full Nutanix stack to bare metal instances in AWS or Azure (and now GCP, but we'll keep that for a later post). These clusters reside in your cloud environment, consuming networking and other resources, allowing you to extend your private data center into the public cloud without changing how you operate. That means consistent operations, integrated disaster recovery, and cloud-smart hybrid strategies, all managed from a single control plane that mirrors on-premises deployments.

Deploying NC2 gives organizations the ability to quickly deploy a Nutanix cluster into a public cloud, deploying resources in the same manner which they are used to with on-premises deployments, while leveraging the scalability of public cloud resources. An NC2 cluster includes the complete Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack directly on bare-metal instances. These bare-metal instance runs the Controller VM (CVM) and Nutanix AHV, just like any on-premises Nutanix deployment, using the AWS Elastic Network Interface (ENI) or Azure VNET to connect to the tenant network.

Nutanix Flow is used in both AWS and Azure with NC2 to integrate network connectivity for User VMs, providing both NAT and No-NAT services to either isolate or extend networks in the public cloud environment.

Consuming the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) service on AWS or Azure delivers several strategic benefits for organizations looking to modernize, protect, and scale their infrastructure, I've listed a few below that through discussions with customers really show the value:

1. Seamless Disaster Recovery (DR): Use NC2 as a cloud-based DR site without the need to refactor workloads. Protect on-premises Nutanix workloads and recover them natively in AWS or Azure leveraging Nutanix Disaster Recovery services.
2. Rapid Cloud Bursting & Elasticity: Quickly scale capacity by adding NC2 nodes in the cloud to meet seasonal or unexpected demand without procuring new hardware.
3. Lift-and-Shift Without Refactoring: Migrate workloads to the cloud with zero code changes. NC2 maintains the same Nutanix AHV stack, enabling seamless VM portability between on-premises and cloud environments.
4. Accelerated Cloud Adoption: Enable faster adoption of public cloud while maintaining control and operational consistency, ideal for regulated industries or complex enterprise environments.
5. Subscription-Based Flexibility: Using a pay as you go model in AWS or Azure enables OPEX-based budgeting, right-sizing your footprint based on need.

Scaling Compute and Storage via Node Expansion

When organizations need more capacity, the simplest option is to scale out by adding additional nodes to the cluster. Just like with on-premises deployments and adding capacity, with NC2 this process is straightforward is triggered via the NC2 console for both expansion and shrinking an existing cluster. New nodes bring both compute and storage capacity, increasing the cluster’s ability to support more virtual machines, containers, and workloads. Depending on your workload profile, you can choose from general-purpose or high-performance node types in each cloud provider’s catalog, ensuring that your capacity matches your performance needs.

This is great, however by adding nodes this will inject additional cost not only in the bare metal resource costs, but also in the NCI licensing costs, but what if there was a better way!

Disaggregated Storage Options

In many cases, scaling compute and storage together isn’t ideal depending on the desired outcome, regardless of cost. Maybe you need more storage for large datasets, but your current compute resources are sufficient. Or perhaps you’re optimizing for cost by avoiding the need to add full nodes just for disk space. Think about the on-premises options we have, where we can add Compute, Balanced or Storage Dense nodes to optimize our cluster resources.

This is where NC2 really shines with additional value by supporting disaggregated storage models in each cloud.

AWS: EBS Integration

With NC2 on AWS, you can attach Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes to your Nutanix nodes to extend your storage capacity. By default with an NC2 on AWS deployment, each node in an NC2 cluster has two EBS volumes: AHV EBS and CVM EBS. Both are encrypted gp3 volumes and are used as boot volumes for AHV and CVM, respectively. The AHV EBS volume is 100 GB, and the CVM EBS volume is 150 GB.

The image below provides a high level breakdown of the EBS capabilities for an NC2 host in AWS.

Rather than adding additional nodes to provide additional storage, you can attach additional EBS volumes to certain bare-metal instances to augment the data storage capacity of each host. While adding EBS volumes has a cost associated with it, this cost can be much less than the additional nodes and licensing that goes with that expansion.

Per Nutanix, the following are a few considerations about the EBS volume support:

• EBS Volume is supported with only new clusters. You cannot attach EBS volumes to existing clusters. This one definetely requires a bit of crystall ball and planning!
• Features, such as Hibernate and Resume, Cluster Protect, and Software data-at-rest encryption, are supported with EBS attached nodes.
• When a cluster with EBS volumes attached is hibernated, the NC2 console deprovision the EBS volumes. When such a cluster is resumed, new EBS volumes are provisioned and attached to the cluster.
• You can only increase the EBS storage.
• EBS volume support is available only with NCI Ultimate licenses.
• The EBS Volumes are listed as CLOUD-SSD tier on the Hardware dashboard of Prism Element Web Console UI. However, these are displayed as SSD-PCIe when checked on the Cluster > Hardware Overview page of the Prism Central UI.

Azure: Elastic SAN Integration

Recently announced at this years .Next conference, Azure users will be able take advantage of Elastic SAN capabity with NC2, a high-performance block storage offering designed for scalability and availability. Just like with AWS EBS volumes, by integrating Elastic SAN with NC2 clusters, customers gain the flexibility to scale storage capacity without overprovisioning compute infrastructure at cluster deployment. Elastic SAN is particularly well suited for high-throughput or IOPS-heavy workloads and helps streamline storage provisioning across virtual workloads, databases, and hybrid applications.

While the available documentation is currently light, I expect this to be a welcome addition to the NC2 on Azure capabilities. For example, with 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.

Conclusion: Elasticity Without Complexity

With Nutanix NC2, scaling is no longer a tradeoff between performance, capacity, and simplicity. Whether you’re running mission-critical apps or planning for DR, you can scale your environment horizontally by adding nodes or vertically by integrating external storage. The result? A cloud-smart platform that’s ready for anything, with the operational elegance Nutanix is known for.

While this is great for a cluster deployment, stay tuned for an upcoming post around DR strategies and a zero-compute option for NC2 deployments, really exciting!

Have feedback or feel like you really want some more details, reach out!

Thanks for reading!