Drive Innovation with AWS native services and Nutanix Cloud Cluster running on AWS

By Kiran Reid, Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS
By Elvis Pappachen, Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS
By Jonas Werner, Advisory Solutions Architect, Hybrid Multicloud, Nutanix, Inc.

As organizations embark on their cloud journey, they seek to leverage the over 200 cloud-native services offered by AWS to drive innovation, increase agility, and optimize costs. However, migrating and refactoring existing workloads to take advantage of these services can be complex and time-consuming. Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS bridges this gap, enabling organizations to seamlessly extend and migrate their on-premises workloads to AWS Cloud without the need for refactoring applications.

By leveraging NC2 on AWS, customers can effortlessly integrate their existing workloads with AWS native services, from enhancing application performance and scalability to leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities. The integration with AWS native services empowers organizations to modernize their IT infrastructure at their own pace, without disrupting critical business operations.

Workloads running on NC2 on AWS can integrate with AWS Cloud native services, providing a robust and flexible hybrid cloud environment.

In this blog, we will cover a few examples of integration, but there are many more where AWS offers purpose-built pre-defined integrations.

AWS networking and Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)

NC2 on AWS is deployed into a customer’s AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and uses AWS native AWS networking capabilities. This integration eliminates the need for complex networking configurations and enables you to leverage AWS native networking services, such as security groups, network ACLs, and VPN as well as Direct Connect connectivity.

Figure 1 shows that customer virtual machines (VMs) running on top of NC2 can either leverage AWS native subnets or alternatively use the Nutanix Flow Virtual Networking overlay networks. Please note, while the EC2 hosts are in a single private subnet, there are a total of four AWS subnets used when Flow is enabled.

NC2 network connectivity on AWS

Figure 1 – NC2 network connectivity on AWS

Flow Virtual Networking overlay networks allow organizations to create additional networks with CIDR ranges which are separate from the native AWS VPC. Those overlay networks can in turn use either NAT or No-NAT networking.

The Flow Virtual Networking overlay networks is added to the native AWS VPC default route table. This makes it possible for native workloads to access the VMs on the overlay network as if it was a native AWS VPC CIDR range.

Web workload running NC2

Web applications, like in Figure 2 can run on NC2 and can benefit from DNS hosted and handled by Amazon Route 53. In addition, it is possible to enhance security using AWS WAF and load balance web requests across the virtual machines with Elastic Load Balancers (ELB).

NC2 - Web application accessible from Internet using AWS services

Figure 2 – Web application accessible from Internet using AWS services

NC2 workloads, behind NAT networking, can have floating IP addresses from the AWS native VPC CIDR range assigned to facilitate routing for clients. Assigning floating IP addresses is suitable for a smaller number of workloads, but when a larger number of VMs need to be made available from outside NC2, no-NAT networking is recommended.

With No-NAT, the Flow Virtual Networking overlay networks are added to the native AWS VPC default route table. This makes it possible for native workloads to access the VMs on the overlay network as if it was a native AWS VPC CIDR range. No-NAT networking can be used when VMs on NC2 are used for running services which should be accessible from outside the NC2 cluster.

Data Protection for NC2 on AWS

You can use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as the destination storage to copy snapshots from the NC2 cluster by using the Nutanix Multi Cloud Snapshot Technology (MST) feature. This ensures that your VMs are securely stored and easily recoverable in the event of a failure. By extension, the MST capabilities can also be used to relay snapshots from on premise Nutanix deployments to S3 storage, providing a simple and low-cost option for recovery.

Some customers may wish to use their exist 3rd party backup products as well as, or instead of, the Nutanix native data protection options. In this case a wide variety of backup vendors are supported on NC2 including Veeam, HYCU, Rubrik, Commvault, Veritas and Cohesity with more validations in the pipeline. These backup vendors can have integrations directly with the Nutanix storage layer that mean improved throughput and more efficient backups, depending on the options set.

Storage integrations with NC2

To ensure the applications have access to necessary storage resources without compromising on performance, you can use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Amazon EBS volumes can be included with each NC2 server node at the time of cluster deployment. EBS volumes are currently supported with i3, i3en and i4i bare-metal node types.

Amazon FSx and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) can be used for those workloads and applications requiring file storage access. This is made available, to the NC2 VMs, either through AWS public or private endpoints. In Figure 3, the NC2 VMs are accessing both FSx and EFS file storage directly from the VMs to the private endpoint.

NC2 VMs accessing Amazon file storage services

Figure 3 – NC2 VMs accessing Amazon file storage services

Systems management

Even legacy workloads can benefit from the patching and fleet management tools. AWS Systems Manager allows organizations to embrace best practices for keeping up with operating system (OS) updates by using AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager. The VMs running in NC2 on AWS, as well as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances can be managed holistically through AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager. Inventory data can be gathered, put into S3 and have the format changed into data which can be searched through Athena. The inventory data can then be visualized in Amazon QuickSight.

To manage VMs running in NC2 on AWS through AWS Systems Manager, the VMs will need AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) installed. Once the agent is running, the VMs can be added to AWS Systems Manager through a Hybrid Activation, after which the VMs will show up in the SSM Fleet Manager as a Managed Instance.

Conclusion

In this blog, we looked at how organizations can achieve seamless hybrid cloud operations, optimized resource utilization, enhanced scalability, and improved business continuity by leveraging Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) and the AWS native services. With a unified management experience and robust disaster recovery capabilities, enterprises can extend their workloads to AWS Cloud, maximizing flexibility, cost-efficiency, and overall operational resilience. You can also get NC2 on AWS through the AWS Marketplace.

Additional resources

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