Deploying Windows VMs on Nutanix AHV requires VirtIO drivers that aren't included in the standard Windows installation media. This means manually loading drivers during setup or mounting driver ISOs after installation. I've built a PowerShell tool that simplifies this process by injecting the VirtIO drivers directly …

Advanced automation through in-guest scripts takes disaster recovery from good to great. While Recovery Plans handle infrastructure orchestration, there are application-specific configurations that require execution inside the guest operating system; DNS reconfiguration, IP changes, and service initialization as a few …

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 …

Not all failovers are created equal. Planned failover enables zero data loss migrations for maintenance windows, while unplanned failover optimizes for speed when disaster strikes. This post explores how Nutanix handles both scenarios, recovery point selection strategies, cross-cluster live migration for zero-downtime …

A disaster recovery plan that hasn't been tested is just expensive fiction. This post explores non-disruptive testing methodologies with Nutanix, including test failover on isolated networks, validation strategies for RTOs and application functionality, compliance reporting, and building organizational confidence …

Recovery Plans are your automated DR runbooks, orchestrating the complex choreography of failover to bring applications back online in the right order with proper network configuration. This post explores power-on sequencing, network mapping, VM selection strategies, and non-disruptive testing—transforming disaster …

Protection Policies are the foundation of Nutanix DR, defining how recovery points are created, replicated, and retained. This post explores the three replication types—Asynchronous (1-24 hour RPO), Near-Synchronous (1-15 minute RPO), and Synchronous (zero RPO)—covering configuration, performance impacts, distance …

Nutanix offers two distinct approaches to disaster recovery: Protection Domains (the battle-tested foundation) and Nutanix DR (the policy-driven evolution). This post explores both methods, their capabilities, when to use each approach, and how they complement each other. Understanding the difference is crucial for …

Welcome to the Disaster Recovery Series I've been sitting on writing a series about Disaster recovery (DR) for a while, but maybe the writing bug has caught me - more after some recent conversations with customers. DR has evolved from a nice-to-have backup plan to an absolute business necessity. In 2025, organizations …

Took me a bit longer to get back around to writing Part 2, life get's in the way sometimes! Following up on Part 1 where I covered the benefits (and some pitfalls) of Affinity and Anti-Affinity polices with AHV, this post will cover the configuration and validation of these policies. Affinity and Anti-Affinity policies …