We have several AHV clusters across the WANscape all managed from Prism Central.
On one AHV cluster, I created a Windows Server 2016 and a Windows Server 2019 VM from CD ISOs, patched and tweaked and these are our “Golden Images”. I clone those and run sysprep and those are what I make new VMs from.
Now I have two problems: 1.) in each cluster we have an RF2 container and an RF3 container so these VMs are bound to one or the other, and 2.) how do I get these to other clusters?
To address the differing containers, I end up using the image service (create image of the disks and create new VM from those disks). But now I’m wasting storage because I’m keeping copies of the same VM on two different containers.
To address the differing clusters, I was thinking about setting up Protection Domains and letting Nutanix replicate them to each cluster. They would only get updated once or twice per month for Windows patches. Doing it this way would allow me to control replication schedule and bandwidth but would only replicate snapshots so recreating the VMs on the other end would require manually restoring from snapshot.
If I am not mistaken, there is an Image Service in Prism Central that would be globally available to all the clusters? If I put the disk images in that, is there a way of controlling the bandwidth used?
Does anyone have any best practices to accomplish this?
Thanks!