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Nutanix licensing for DR

  • 5 February 2021
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T
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Is nutanix licensing tied to hardware?   use case for the question is a cold DR site.

Scenario - VMs are backed up w 3rd party product and replicated to a DR site, e.g. SunGard,  and now its time to restore them for the DR test.

If using Nutanix at this cold DR site, you have to build it from scratch before you can being restoring VMs to it, can the licensing used at the primary site be used for this?  or is the licensing restricted to the hardware it was installed on at the primary site?   

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Best answer by Alona 14 February 2021, 23:17

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Alona
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Wouldn’t you need to build the DR site before you are able to store back up data there? That would still need a license. Or have I misunderstood?

T
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Hi Alona - the answer to your question is no.  

Larger enterprises that leverage SunGard, Iron Mountain, and or IBM Sterling forest DR facilities lease the hardware, and this hardware is often only available during DR testing and DR events, its a way to lower contract costs and is the primary method used at these sites.  What is live at the DR sites mentioned since tape has been dying slowly are slices of leased storage arrays \ appliances that receive replicated data from the primary customer sites, typically backup data from appliances like the EMC data domain.  

In order to use Nutanix as a replication target you would need to license and build out the destination cluster, this constitutes a live site.   So for example, in our case we have an enterprise backup solution that backs up both our VMware and Nutanix clusters, sends those backup to a target appliance that then replicates the backups to the DR site, servers aren’t needed for this, they are only needed to bring the workloads to life during a test or actual DR event.  

That said, the obvious here is that this is really a license question more than anything.  I want to verify that our Nutanix licenses in use at our production site in fact could be re-assigned to hardware at our DR site in the event we lose our primary datacenter.   Makes sense right?   I would assume yes, but would also assume there might be some juggling to do in the portal regarding these licenses, but not sure.  I would love it if you could elaborate on the steps to re-assign a license to new hardware if we need to do so, not only for DR, but even for our production site.

Alona
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Thank you for taking the time to explain the scenario in the details. I did check with our licensing team. To transfer the license one would first need to release it and for this, the site must be available which is the opposite of the DR scenario.

I recommend still checking with your Account Manager to see the options available. It is likely that you are not the first to ask the question and if you are then I am certain that Nutanix would come up with something.

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