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Get started with Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure

  • By Sarah Apel, Infrastructure Go-To-Market Manager, UK Azure Business Group

With the general availability of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure in UK South, Nutanix customers in the UK now have the ability to migrate and extend workloads to Azure without modification or retooling. Michael Wignall, Azure Business Lead at Microsoft, explains:

“We are pleased to announce the general availability of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure. The update allows customers to scale and manage workloads across both public and private cloud environments, with only minimal adjustments required.  Existing skill sets can be leveraged to take advantage of this new functionality, helping customers to rapidly accelerate their hybrid cloud deployment strategies.”

What are Nutanix Cloud Clusters?

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure is a hybrid cloud solution that functions as a single cloud, allowing you to manage apps and infrastructure in your private cloud and Azure. This means that with NC2 running on Azure, you can seamlessly move your apps between on-premises and Azure, use your existing Azure accounts and networking setup (VPN, VNets, and Subnets), and eliminate the need for any complex network overlays. You use the same Nutanix software and licenses across your on-premises cluster and Azure.

Nutanix customers will be able to port their existing term licenses to NC2 on Azure or get on-demand consumption of Nutanix software through the Azure Marketplace. Customers can also take advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit as well as Extended Security Updates to improve cost, security, and efficiency. Azure offers further flexibility when it comes to consumption models, allowing customers to gain additional cost efficiencies with reservations or commitment based discounts.

The NC2 console can create a cluster, update the cluster capacity (the number of nodes), and delete a Nutanix cluster. You can operate the cluster in the same manner as you operate your on-premises Nutanix cluster with minor changes in the Nutanix command-line interface (nCLI), Prism Element and Prism Central web consoles, and APIs.

Why use Nutanix Cloud Clusters?

One of the best reasons to use NC2 on Azure is to leverage your team’s existing Nutanix skills and tools. Operations and cluster management are nearly identical to on-premises, allowing our customers to combine the respective strengths of Microsoft and Nutanix with a unified and consistent management plane. Migrating and extending Nutanix workloads to Azure is as easy as moving existing applications and data as-is without refactoring or retooling. This allows customers to truly decouple apps from the underlying hardware platform and to modernize at your own pace without disruption or complexity.

Being able to spin up or spin down Nutanix resources in Azure as needed is a great way to accommodate ever-evolving business needs. Whether it’s gaining access to native Azure services, improving your disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities to better protect yourself from data loss, cyber attacks and hardware or software failures and providing on-demand elasticity without hardware or datacentre capacity constraints, there are many use cases you can explore.

Sammy Zoghlami, SVP EMEA for Nutanix, explains what the new NC2 offering on Azure could mean for you and your organisation:

“Hybrid multicloud is the future of cloud computing, as evidenced by our customers’ requirements. It enables organisations to scale from on-premises to public cloud with ease, optimise costs for secure workloads, and adopt a flexible subscription model. With Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure, our customers can leverage their existing Nutanix skills and tools, add Azure services and gain cost efficiencies by using their existing licenses. NC2 on Azure gives customers the assurance of a frictionless on-ramp to Azure with consistent management of apps and data across their hybrid multicloud environment”.

Get started with Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure

Before you get started, be sure to run through this list of requirements to make sure you’re ready to use Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure. You can then sign-up to use NC2, as well as learn how you can set it up on Azure.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure is now generally available in many Azure regions, including UK South, West Europe and many other global Azure data center regions. Other global Azure regions are coming soon, and you can track their progress on both the regional updates page, as well as in the monthly Azure features and functionality articles on TechNet UK.

Learn more

Sarah Apel
Sarah Apel
Infrastructure Go-To-Market Manager, UK Azure Business Group

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