Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) empower you to seamlessly deploy and run the Nutanix Cloud Platform on bare-metal instances across public clouds — including AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — without refactoring your workloads. It gives IT teams a unified hybrid experience by allowing you to manage both on-premises and cloud clusters through a single control plane.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) serves as a hybrid multicloud platform that extends the Nutanix Cloud Platform to public environments like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. By running the core Nutanix software stack directly on bare-metal cloud instances, organizations can migrate workloads without the need for code refactoring or complex network redesigns. The system utilizes a unified management plane through the NC2 Portal and Prism Central, allowing administrators to oversee both on-premises and cloud resources through a single interface. Key technical enhancements, such as native networking integration and Flow Virtual Networking, optimize performance and prevent resource exhaustion by mapping virtual subnets directly to cloud provider infrastructures. Furthermore, the platform supports high availability through partition placement policies and provides flexible consumption models, including license portability and pay-as-you-go options. Ultimately, these sources highlight how NC2 facilitates on-demand capacity scaling, disaster recovery, and seamless application mobility across diverse cloud ecosystems.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters for AWS, Azure, Google
Accelerate innovation with a simpler, faster and more cost-effective way to run apps, data and AI across clouds, while meeting sovereignty requirements.
Key Benefits
Faster time to value: Accelerate cloud and digital transformation initiatives at a lower risk and without lengthy hardware delays.
App mobility: Quickly migrate applications to public clouds without refactoring, re-architecting or relicensing software.
Cloud-native integration: Gain direct access to the cloud-native services and features of AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and OVHcloud.
Integrated visibility and control: Use one unified management control plane to see, manage, move, and secure data and apps across diverse cloud environments.
Built-in expertise: Avoid retooling and reskilling as you make changes to your hybrid multicloud.
Dynamic access to IT resources: Immediately tap into public cloud resources to manage unpredictable or seasonal usage spikes.
Product Advantages
Nutanix simplifies your ability to run, manage and operate apps, data and AI with a hybrid cloud infrastructure optimized for all workloads.
One Platform
A unified, secure, AI‑enabled hybrid multicloud platform delivering consistent operations across on‑premises, edge locations, and in public cloud.
Accelerated deployment
Cut deployment times from 18–24 months to 3–6 months based on feedback from Nutanix customers and research analysts at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
Efficient scaling
Quickly leverage the rapid scale out of a common cloud platform across both on-premises and the public cloud locations.
Consistent management
Use the same interface as the Nutanix Prism management solution to control day-to-day operations, reporting and analytics across all your locations.
Unified policies
Apply consistent security, encryption, replication, deduplication, and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) policies through Nutanix Prism and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for all locations.
Flexible modernization
Enhance workloads at your pace with Kubernetes, database, AI, and other Nutanix services while integrating with native cloud services.
Cost-effective BCDR
Reduce your BCDR solution costs by leveraging the public cloud as a recovery site, which eliminates the like-for-like need for secondary or tertiary on-premises datacenters.
Enhanced cost awareness
Improve visibility into cloud consumption with a heterogeneous cloud cost-governance solution that provides actionable recommendations for cost reduction.
Simplified IT modernization
Leverage your public cloud commitments to simplify IT modernization initiatives without requiring new on-premises infrastructure or lengthy hardware delays.
Optimized resource utilization
Reduce microwaste with t-shirt sized cloud-native VMs and enhance cost efficiency by oversubscribing resources across VMs.
Core Platform Architecture
Complete HCI Stack: NC2 places the full Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) stack — including the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) software — directly onto cloud bare-metal nodes.
Unified Management: You can manage operations across data centers, edge, and public clouds using the familiar Prism Central console, removing the need to learn new, cloud-specific infrastructure management skills.
Native Networking: The clusters run in your existing cloud Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), eliminating complex networking overlays.
NC2 on AWS
Infrastructure: Operates on dedicated or default-tenancy Amazon EC2 bare-metal instances (utilizing locally attached NVMe disks for storage performance, alongside EBS volumes for AHV and CVM).
AHV Hypervisor: Exclusively uses the AHV hypervisor for clusters running in AWS.
Disaster Recovery: Features seamless data mobility and disaster recovery, allowing you to easily offload snapshots to AWS S3.
Sovereign & Government: Expands compliance benefits to AWS GovCloud (US) and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC).
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS
NC2 on AWS is a mature integration that leverages AWS Bare Metal instances to run Nutanix software natively.
Hardware and the Nitro System
The foundational technology for this integration is the AWS Nitro System. Nitro offloads networking, storage, and security tasks to dedicated hardware, ensuring that the physical resources of the host are fully available for Nutanix workloads.
Performance: By running on bare metal, NC2 avoids the performance tax of nested virtualization.
Instance Types: NC2 supports a variety of instances, including i4i, i3, i3en, and the newer i7 families. The i7 family features fifth-generation Intel Xeon processors with built-in AI acceleration.
Networking and Security
NC2 on AWS integrates directly with native AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networking.
Native IP Addresses: Every VM deployed on NC2 receives a native AWS IP address, facilitating direct, low-latency access to AWS services like S3 or RDS.
Cloud Port Manager: This internal service manages Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) to prevent IP exhaustion and optimize network routing.
Security Groups: Customers can use existing AWS security groups to protect their clusters and manage traffic at the subnet level
Learn more or take a test drive on the Nutanix NC2 on AWS page.
NC2 on GCP
Infrastructure: Operates natively on Google Compute Engine, supporting bare metal instances in the Z3 and C4 machine families (powered by the Titanium offload system).
Modernization & AI: Because of its native placement in Google Compute Engine, NC2 on Google Cloud directly unlocks rapid modernization by connecting workloads to native services like BigQuery and Vertex AI without moving data.
Simplified Procurement: You can procure Nutanix NC2 licensing directly from the Google Cloud Marketplace, allowing you to use existing Google Cloud spend commitments to pay for Nutanix software.
NC2 on Google Cloud extends the Nutanix stack into the Google ecosystem, enabling organizations to run workloads on Google Compute Engine (GCE) bare-metal instances.
Key Advantages of the GCP Integration
Titanium Offload System: Similar to AWS Nitro, GCP uses the Titanium system to handle storage and networking tasks, providing high I/O throughput and low latency.
AI and Data Analytics: Workloads on NC2 can tap directly into Google’s advanced tools, such as Vertex AI, BigQuery, and Gemini Enterprise, with minimal latency.
Simplified Networking: Unlike other implementations, NC2 on GCP does not require additional Gateway VMs for North-South traffic, integrating more natively with the Google Cloud VPC.
**Supported GCP Infrastructure
**NC2 on Google Cloud supports several high-performance machine families:
Z3: Storage-optimized with large local NVMe SSDs.
C4: General-purpose compute with high vCPU density.
C3 (Diskless): A unique “diskless” entry that utilizes Google Cloud Hyperdisk for storage, allowing compute and storage performance to be decoupled and scaled independently
Explore the deployment capabilities on the Nutanix NC2 on Google Cloud solution overview.
Strategic Use Cases
NC2 on AWS and GCP is designed for several practical hybrid scenarios:
Cloud Disaster Recovery (DR): Organizations can use the cloud as a secondary site, utilizing a “Pilot Light” (small standing cluster) or “Zero Compute” (snapshots stored in object storage) model to reduce costs.
On-Demand Capacity: Rapidly scale capacity for seasonal spikes, VDI workloads, or development and testing without waiting for hardware deliveries.
Data Center Exit: Migrate entire estates to the cloud without the risk and complexity of replatforming.
AI Innovation: Deploy AI-ready infrastructure that can process data on-premises and run inference at the edge or in the cloud
Business and Financial Value
References:
Nutanix Cloud Clusters for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and OVHcloud
Nutanix Cloud Clusters datasheet
Hybrid Cloud made easy with Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS datasheet
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