AWS and Nutanix
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS** bridges on-premises infrastructure and the public cloud into a unified, high-performance hybrid architecture. By running native Nutanix software and the AHV hypervisor directly on bare-metal Amazon EC2 instances, NC2 integrates deeply with your Amazon VPC and Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs). This design enables zero-refactoring workload migrations, on-demand disaster recovery with low-cost "pilot-light" clusters, and seamless access to native services like Amazon S3.
Architectural Synergy: Building a Hybrid Multicloud with NC2 on AWS
Enterprise IT architecture is no longer about choosing between on-premises datacenters and the public cloud. Instead, the focus has shifted toward building an agile operational model that seamlessly connects both environments without introducing complexity.
Historically, extending on-premises hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to public cloud environments meant sacrificing native cloud integration, refactoring core applications, or managing disparate operational silos. Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS eliminates this friction. By running Nutanix’s enterprise cloud platform directly on bare-metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, organizations achieve a unified control plane across on-premises environments and AWS.
Architectural Integration and Core Capabilities
NC2 on AWS is not an emulation layer or secondary virtualization stack. It runs native Nutanix AOS software and the AHV hypervisor directly on AWS bare-metal nodes (such as i3en.metal or i4i.metal instances) inside your existing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
This joint architecture delivers three primary operational advantages:
- Native VPC Network Integration: NC2 integrates directly with AWS Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs). Guest virtual machines running on Nutanix AHV receive native Amazon VPC IP addresses, allowing workloads to communicate with native AWS services—such as Amazon S3, Amazon Aurora, or Amazon Bedrock—with zero network translation overhead and minimal latency.
- Distributed Storage Performance: Primary storage is driven by Nutanix Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF), aggregating local, high-performance NVMe drives attached to EC2 bare-metal instances into a single distributed pool with built-in data replication.
- Unified Operational Control: Administrators manage compute, storage, and virtual networking across both environments through a single pane of glass using Nutanix Prism. Expanding an existing cluster is as simple as triggering automated AWS API calls to provision new EC2 bare-metal instances and automatically join them to the storage pool.
High-Impact Use Cases
- Zero-Refactoring Migrations: Rehost enterprise workloads to AWS without converting VM formats, changing network subnets, or altering application code.
- On-Demand Disaster Recovery: Maintain a minimal "pilot-light" footprint in an AWS Region, rapidly scaling up bare-metal node capacity via AWS APIs only during a failover event.
- Application Modernization: Place legacy enterprise databases next to cloud-native analytics, AI, and serverless pipelines.
By combining Nutanix’s software-defined HCI layer with AWS bare-metal scalability, enterprise architects build a resilient foundation that eliminates vendor lock-in, optimizes operational TCO, and accelerates digital transformation.
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