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Hello everyone,

I am new to Nutanix and I have an on-premises cluster with multiple VLANs configured in Prism Central. My VMs are currently placed inside these VLANs.

I am planning to migrate everything to a new NC2 cluster on Azure, but I need to keep the same VM IP addresses.

I have a few questions regarding this scenario:

  1. Is it possible to maintain the same VM IPs when migrating to NC2 on Azure?
    Are there any prerequisites on the on-premises Nutanix cluster to make this possible?

  2. What if the on-prem VLAN is also used by other physical servers outside of Nutanix?
    How would these physical servers communicate with VMs in NC2 on Azure?

  3. How can native Azure components or other third-party networks connected to my Azure environment reach the servers in this stretched network?
    For example, if I have some VMs on-prem, some on NC2, and some on other physical on-prem servers.

  4. Is this configuration intended as a temporary transition, or can it be permanent?

  5. Regarding traffic from a physical server in the same VLAN going to other native services in Azure:
    Would this traffic go through some Nutanix appliance for the extended network, or is there another recommended approach?

Any advice, best practices, or references to documentation for such a migration scenario would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Hi. First off that for running Nutanix!

  1. - Yes you can, 
    1.  You can, Probably best to let your physical networking infrastructure handle creating the VTEP to create the L2 instead of creating the vtep on Nutanix.
    2. Yes, they will be able to talk to each other. The big thing will be planning out  routing. On the Nutanix side on NC2 we have policy based based routing. Do you want traffic routing out through the on-prem side or nc2 when leaving that VLAN. You want to ensure traffic doesn’t get dropped if you have a stateful firewall.
    3. I would say you really only want the L2 for migration purposes but yes some let it in place. 
    4. It really depends on the routing setup. 
       


      The NC2 specialists are really rock solid. They will be able to engage the right people. 


Thank you for your precious feedback.

How do the Virtual WAN and Route Server components fit into the Nutanix architecture? What role do the BGP VMs play in this setup? Is it possible to rely solely on routing instead of using NAT? Regarding the Gateway VMs (VTEPs), how will their configuration be removed or decommissioned once the migration is complete? Any difference between VPN or ExpressRoute in Azure? 

I am using ExpressRoute in my Hub VNET and I don’t have Virtual WAN as of now.

 


I would read this section on flow networking from the technote for the BGP part → https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/solutions/details?targetId=TN-2156-NC2-on-Azure:tn-flow-virtual-networking.html . BGP works with PC and the route server to advertise the FVN User VPC to the rest of Azure instead of doing manually routes which you would have to do if you’re not using HA with the Flow Gateway VMs.

You can use NAT or no-NAT(routed path). I think 95% of customers are using mostly no-NAT.

You don’t need to use VWAN, you can add a routeserver in your existing setup. Might have to setup a different VNET for it though. 

ExpressRoute is a lot simpler of a design than using VPN due to the fact of the delegated setups. Delegated subnets can’t do active/active vpn so the network topology changes a bit. 

removing the VTEPs, the VMs will just use their local gateways instead of the VTEP.