Building and managing a hybrid cloud is easier said than done. We are excited to be adding Nutanix Clusters to the Nutanix Test Drive family. Nutanix Clusters bridges the gap between public and private clouds by providing a single platform that gives you the freedom to choose your operating model without cloud lock-in. Take a quick peek at this video. You enjoy the same unified management experience regardless of where your workload lives.

Give Nutanix Clusters a try and see how easy it is to build and manage a hybrid cloud through Test Drive. It’s available to you for free without any setup or downloads. Test Drive lets you try out the Nutanix platform easily and quickly through your web browser. If you are new to Nutanix Test Drive, read this post to gain a general understanding of what it is. Our new and improved Test Drive 2.0 that we launched earlier this year runs on Google Cloud Platform and showcases Nutanix products and solutions through guided tours.

Test Drive Nutanix Clusters

Get started from our Test Drive Nutanix Clusters site. When you log in, you will be greeted with the Test Drive menu inviting you to “Extend Your Datacenter to the Cloud.”

Clusters Test Drive menu over the unified Prism UI for hybrid cloud management

The guided tour covers three primary topics, all of which will simplify your hybrid or multi-cloud journey.

• Access to world-wide cluster provisioning and native cloud networking.

• Migrating workloads with built-in DR features of Prism Central.

• Bursting cloud-native apps without making any code changes.

Access to World-wide Cluster Provisioning

First, the guided tour lets you quickly provision a Nutanix cluster in any of the 20 global regions that Clusters on AWS is available with your own AWS account. You can be anywhere on the globe to use Nutanix Clusters as long as you have access to these 20 regions.  After your cluster is provisioned, you get to see how simple it is, thanks to the native cloud networking integration, to finish the end-to-end setup and get down to migrating workloads to your new cluster in AWS.

Built-in native network integration gives you instant access to all cloud services

Migrating Workloads 

Next, you will see the power of having the same management tools for both private and public clouds. We use a disaster recovery as a use case here, showing how easily the integrated DR orchestration can quickly move workloads into AWS. You will perform a planned failover of an application that already has a protection policy applied. Since there is native AWS networking, your migrated virtual machines will be able to access any AWS service once they are powered on.

Planning for failover to a cloud DR site

Gaining Cloud-Native Velocity

You will be able to see your on-prem application take advantage of native AWS services. Burst into the public cloud by deploying a VM running on the AOS-on-AWS cluster and integrate with native AWS services, including a native EC2 instance and a cloud-based load balancer. The beautiful part is your application didn’t have to change any lines of code, thanks to built-in native network integration.
 

Your app running in AWS

Oscar app moved from On-prem to AWS

Tips & Tricks

• If you want to explore outside of the guided tour, click the “X” on any of the on-screen prompts. To return to the guided tour, use the Quick Links button at the bottom right.

• If you have any questions during your test drive, you can use the chat function found at the bottom right of the screen to chat with a Nutanix Engineer.

• The networking section of cluster provisioning can be closed when finished to head back to the Test Drive menu.

• Once done, you can explore other Test Drives available by clicking “Test Drive Other Nutanix Solutions” in the Quick Links menu.

Nutanix Clusters is giving our customers an easy way to manage a hybrid cloud by breaking management silos and enabling you to continue to use the same work process for private and public clouds. Seeing is believing. I hope you take the Nutanix Clusters Test Drive and share your experience with us. 

Looking forward to your comments!

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