Nutanix Disaster Recovery

Good morning... evening... night all over the world ^^ I'm wondering what are the technical differences between Async DR and Backup. What I've red in documentation is that Backup does not allow running the virtual machines on the remote site. This comes with many questions as I couldn't find any detailed description of the backup mechanism. As far as I understand, both works exactly the same. Only difference is that on the remote site, the backup target PD cannot be promoted to allow running of the VMs. Is this correct ? is this the only difference ? Otherwise, what are all the differences between both modes ? Any impact on the size of used on the target space ? ...

Hi, I couldn't find this in the documentation. As I understand, the choice of Async DR vs Backup is to be made at remote site configuration. I would like to replicate some VMs for DR, and some for backup only. Is it possible to create two remote sites in a cluster pointing to the same remote site, thou allowing to have one remote site set as " Async DR" and the second one as "Backup" ?

Thoughts I'd post this rather than bugging our SE over and over ;) Trying to get a disaster recovery plan in place to protect against a major disaster such as server room fire... We have a couple of clusters geographically separated which I have set up as remote-sites. Site A and B lets call them. I've set up a PD w/ consistency group with the VMs to protect and periodically snapshot from site A to B. Now in the case of a fire/destroyed cluster at site A... obviously step one is rebuilding a cluster at that site with the appropriate configs, but then... With a brand new cluster in place, what is the standard process to retreive the snapshots from site B back to the new site A ? So far, I've activated the backup on site B (as if it was an unplanned outage and left it off). and recreated the remote-site link on the newly built out site A. I am thinking I now create a new PD to shuffle the VMs/consistency group back to Site A and then activate there and I am done ? I know this

Hello, Has anyone had success making Hyper-V VM level backups up in to the cloud? We were going to use DPM to send backups up there but it requires an agent to be installed on the SMB server so it wouldn't work on Nutanix. We also looked at Azure Cloud Connect to replicate our containers to Azure but that is backing up at the container level and restoring an individual VM can be difficult. What have you been using to achieve offline VM level backups? My organization's goal is to go back to any point within 35 days and the backups must be in the cloud(Amazon or Azure, prefer Azure).

From this tech note - http://go.nutanix.com/rs/nutanix/images/TechNote-Nutanix_Storage_Configuration_for_vSphere.pdf, my impression is that Nutanix thin provisions a VM if the disk are set to "Thick Provisioned Lazy Zeroed". All Nutanix containers are thin provisioned by default; this is a feature of NDFS. Thin provisioning is a widely accepted technology that has been proven over time by multiple storage vendors, including VMware. As containers are presented by default as NFS datastores to VMware vSphere hosts, all VMs will also be thin provisioned by default. This results in dramatically improved storage capacity utilization without the traditional performance impact. Thick provisioning on a VMDK level is available if required for the limited use cases such as fault tolerance (FT) or highly demanding database and I/O workloads. Thick provisioning can be accomplished by creating Eager Zero Thick VMDKs. Eager Zero Thick VMDKs will automatically guarantee space reservations within N

Hello, Is there a way (other than REST or scripting/crontab) to put any new VM created inside a container to a "default" protection domain? The rationale is to create a "standard" policy for all VMs of a cluster like "this cluster is replicated every 2h, by default", then if exceptions need to be handled, they can be treated on a case by case basis. I have a customer that is PoCing Nutanix, with the goal to move from a NetApp/NFS/IBM Blades solution to Nutanix if everything goes well. Problem is, they use SnapMirror to replicate their datastore (1 by cluster) every 1h. They do want to be able to replicate just a VM, but they don't want to have to add each new VM individually to a protection domain. Sylvain.

trying to connect the maxCapacity and totalImplicitReservedCapacity fields with data from Prism gui. As of yet, unable to connect the dots. I'm assuming the amounts being presented from the cmdlet is in bytes. If so, I've got 28TB per the cmdlet in way of maxCapacity, but the Prism gui for that container returns 24.48TB as the max capacity. --- example out put from cmdlet PS C:usersmeDesktop ools> Get-NTNXContainer -Id 00052bfc-1527-12fd-46e3-246e96026620::13840122 id : 00052bfc-1527-12fd-46e3-246e96026620::13840122containerUuid : f72335e2-bf87-4c9c-a7db-64cf3ce5e88aname : D-RTP-A1-NTX-XC630-1-P-01clusterUuid : 00052bfc-1527-12fd-46e3-246e96026620storagePoolId : 00052bfc-1527-12fd-46e3-246e96026620::13storagePoolUuid : f0efd6cb-8839-43a0-b30f-c2aad97ce5demarkedForRemoval : FalsemaxCapacity : 30999844125064totalExplicitReservedCapacity : 0totalImplicitReservedCapacity : 14227079168000advertisedCapacity :replicationFactor : 2oplogReplicationFactor : 2nfsWhitelist : {}nfsWhitelistI

Hi, Does anyone have any experience backing up VMs (specifically Hyper-V VHDX files) running on a Nutanix cluster using EMC Networker? Was the backup done using the Hyper-V agents, or was direct Nutanix SMB share backup taken advantage of? If there are links to help or steps to follow, it would be of great help. So far, all I find is help for Veeam. Thanks, Schubert

We've got a 11mb pipe between sites that bursts to about 20. We have some PD's that we've set up with about 30 machines in them and turned on replication. Its not surprising that initial replication is going very slow and we have an estimated completion time measured in months. Both sites are in production. I can't take on cluster down and bring it locally to the other site to get the intial replication done at high speed. Is there a white paper or procedure or even someone in here who's got some tricks to help us get replication moving? I was thinking of Starting a new PD, setting up replication, then adding one or two machines at a time until it's full and replicated. That seems pretty tedious and very time consuming. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm fairly certain this is possible, but going is rough for finding it documented. Let's say I have a remote container setup in a NTX cluster in LA. Can I created protection domains in a NTX cluster in Miami and NewYork and point them both to the remote container in LA? Sort of a many to one type approach in using protection domains and any limits on how many you can point at one? Any documentation anyone's found covering this and docs on where the snaps are stored (I don't see them in the ESXi datastores) and how much data is used from remote snaps. Thanks!

Hi, Scenario: Currently Client is having Nutanix with VMware as hypervisor and planning to replicate VMs to DR that will running Acropolis. Can Data Protection support it? if Yes: How do we do it? What are the requirements?

Hi Have seen a few articles regarding Commvault Intellisnap support being available but cannot seem to find anything in the available documentation. Does anybody know what the deal is? Cheers

Is anyone using the Nutanix SRA in conjunction with Site Recovery Manager (SRM)? What are your experiences good, bad, or otherwise? We are currently using a vSphere replication server/appliance to replicate from one Nutanix cluster to another and it is working perfectly fine. I'm tempted to investigate Nutanix's SRA as a potential replacement, but as they say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I would be interested to hear overall experiences as well as any viewpoints that are able to compare the Nutanix SRA against VMware's VRMS. Thanks.

Hello, In NOS Version 4.1.3 SyncRep for Hyper-V is release, which enables to have stretch cluster on Hyper-V as mentioned in release notes, Is there any configuration guide or document highlighting similar to Metro Availibility Best Practise document but for Hyper-V. Appreciate.. vF.P

hi all, there is this best practice http://go.nutanix.com/metro-availability.html on the page 24 it says if we want schedule a Planned Failover with vMotion Using vMotion to move virtual machines to the standby site will provide the highest uptimeduring planned failovers. Operationally, the use of vMotion will take more time comparedto a cold migration, as the virtual machine memory state will need to be transferred acrosssites. The planned failover process with vMotion is outlined in Figure 16. (see the following steeps) we want planned failorver on site A to B -1) Vmotion VMs from active to Standby site -2) shutdown VMs agaisnt standby containers site B -3 "disable metroavailability from the site active A -4 promote the Standby containers site B -5 power On VM sites B -6 renable the replication my question is I understand why we need to shutdown the VM (step 2) it's too bad we must diseable metro availbility before to promote. there some body know if i

Hello Community. havent been here, since "next beta" turned to NEXT :o I cant find anything about the VSS Provider backing up VMs running on a Hyper-V Nutanix Cluster. Anyone exerienced want to enlighten me?

Hi, it would be nice to see a metro availbility reference architecture with automated failover support + split brain avoidance for dual site deployments for e.g. with clusterlion . best regards

Nutanix Best Practices for Veeam for Microsoft Hyper-V Environments Veeam and Nutanix together can help tackle data protection challenges in virtualized environments. Get it here

Nutanix and Veeam Backup & Replication for vSphere: Best Practices Veeam and Nutanix together can help tackle data protection challenges in virtualized environments. This document makes recommendations for the optimization and scaling of Veeam Backup & Replication v7 with Nutanix for VMware vSphere. It shows the scalability of the joint solution and provides configuration information for both Veeam Backup & Replication and Virtual Computing Platform. Get it here  

We are evaluating a Nutanix solution vs a normal 2012R2 HyperV with VNX SAN cluster. As we are a Microsoft shop, we are going with HyperV to reduce licenses. We have an HO and a DR site for Disaster Recovery. Our normal HyperV design involves having a HyperV cluster in each site with HyperV REPLICA to replicate data to the DR site. We have calculated this to give us an RPO of 30 seconds (HyperV Replica can even go to 5sec RPO) and an RTO of 15mins. Does Nutanix have any replication methodology that can give us a similar RPO? It looks like the RTO can be reached, but the RPO is at least 5mins and can't go below. Note that we have to use a HyperV engine and not VMWare. If this cannot be done with Nutanix replication, will Nutanix support a HyperV REPLICA between the 2 sites?

We have a single 3 node 1350 with starter licensing running VMware vSphere. Is it possible to configure replication to another non-NDFS datastore with any available built in tools or processes? What would be the best method that does not incur additional costs. In this sort of instance, would vSphere replication make sense backup to another datastore?

Hi , Does Nutanix has it's own backup software to take scheduled backup for production VM's created on ESXI hosts ? or I need to use third party backup solution like Veem or netbackup? if available , does it require base license or enterprise license please note the from prism in licensing part I saw the field Dataprotection and deduplication and others with status off,is this mean that these functions are not supported with the current license or just need to turn on? Regards

Is anyone using Veeam to backup their virtual environment on a Nutanix cluster? If so, how have you configured your backup proxy (how many, virtual or physical, 1 arm or 2 arm configuration, etc)? What are you using for a backup target? What kind of throughputs or processing rates are you seeing? I am running some test jobs, and a few of the jobs I have run identify the soure (Nutanix) as the bottleneck in the job. My backup proxy is a VM with a 2 arm configuration (1 vNIC in the production storage VLAN and 1 vNIC in the backup storage VLAN) running in Network Mode. I'm wondering if there are other modifications I can make to alleviate the source (Nutanix) from being the bottleneck in the jobs.