At a company that has just moved premises, the server room houses two machines bought in 2017. One runs about ten virtual machines, including the management software; the other holds their replica, a few metres away, in the same room. Backups go to a network storage device in another building. The VMware licences are perpetual, and the owner now disputes both their cost and their terms. When the assessment reaches Nutanix licensing, the first question concerns how to pay, while the decision with the most consequences concerns the replica.
A flood or an electrical fault in that room would stop the original and the copy at the same time. With the path towards ISO 27001 certification just started, the replica has to move elsewhere, and the cost of the second site enters the monthly fee from the very first estimate.
Is Nutanix licensing paid yearly or monthly?
Nutanix sells subscription licences; through a service provider such as Aesir the licence is applied on a monthly or yearly basis, with no one-off purchase.
The owner, used to perpetual licences, put the question bluntly. Is the licence annual, or is it paid once and then keeps working? In the vendor’s model the answer is a subscription with multi-year terms. Under the programme for service providers the same Nutanix licensing is activated with monthly billing and follows the growth of the infrastructure.
For the finance director the most relevant consequence concerns sizing. Capacity is based on consumption measured today and added when needed, instead of paying up front for growth estimated over three years. Moving to a higher edition is done from the management console, and billing changes from that moment. Vendor support, available around the clock, is included, and support tickets are opened by the service provider. Rented hardware, licences and support can be combined into a single monthly fee.
What does basic Nutanix licensing include?
The licence includes the hypervisor, distributed storage, networking and security functions, snapshots and replication to another site; according to the vendor, container management too.
With basic Nutanix licensing, disaster recovery is part of the package and does not require a separate product. What changes from one edition to the next is how often data can be replicated. With the entry edition the minimum interval between two replications is around one hour. Higher editions bring the interval down to a few minutes, and synchronous replication belongs to the top tier. The same logic applies to GPUs for artificial intelligence workloads and to encryption of data at rest. GPUs are shared between several virtual machines through dedicated profiles.
A company that must replicate its management software every fifteen minutes needs a different edition from one that is satisfied with a nightly copy, even with the same number of virtual machines. Two quotes with different editions on the same hardware therefore protect data differently, and should be compared on this point before the fee.
Is a powered-off replica node enough for disaster recovery?
It is enough if the company can accept a few hours of downtime; to restart within minutes the replica cluster must stay powered on and licensed, even for a few machines.
Without a running cluster, the second site only holds copies on object storage. In an emergency the cluster takes about three quarters of an hour to start; configuration and restoration of the machines follow, and the overall time is measured in hours. With a cluster already running and licensed, even for a few virtual machines, recovery drops to a few minutes.
The two routes weigh on the fee in different ways. A site that is always on carries, all year round, the licences of the second cluster plus the hardware, or the cloud resources, that host it. With a site created on demand, only the storage space for the copies is paid continuously, and compute resources from the moment of activation. The difference is quantified in the quote, starting from the list of machines that must restart first, and the same inventory is used to compare the fee with the VMware licence renewal.
Not every machine needs to sit in the recovery site. A subset that must restart first is chosen, with reduced resources, and Nutanix licensing for the replica is sized on that subset. The comparison between a backup copy and a service restart is covered in the article on backup and disaster recovery.
Two companies, two acceptable recovery times
A banking application runs on two production virtual machines and two test machines. The applicable standard requires a recovery point and a recovery time of around fifteen minutes. Copies on object storage were the cheapest solution, and under those constraints they were unusable: restoration would have taken hours. The company chose a replica cluster that is always on, with the edition that allows replication every fifteen minutes. The project then moved on to quoting the hardware for the second site.
An IT services firm with clients in the legal sector, around seventy users and about three terabytes of data, started from the opposite need. It had to offer its own clients a complete switchover to the other site, yet its databases required application-level synchronisation in any case. Faced with the real timings, management decided that the previous night’s replica was sufficient. The scope of disaster recovery, and with it the licensing for the second site, shrank accordingly.
Insight. In the first case the fifteen-minute constraint came from an external standard and dictated both the edition and an always-on cluster. In the second, the company set the constraint itself and opted for the nightly copy. Both times, Nutanix licensing for the second site was defined only after writing down, machine by machine, how many minutes of downtime and how much lost data were acceptable.
Does the same Nutanix licensing work in the public cloud?
Yes, for the Pro and Ultimate editions: subscription licences are portable between the company data centre, branch sites and public clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OVHcloud.
In the public cloud the platform is installed on the provider’s dedicated servers, with the same console used on premises. The vendor documents this on its page on Nutanix Cloud Clusters. That page also sets out two conditions worth knowing beforehand: compute resources are paid to the cloud provider, and a licence taken to the cloud must be a Pro or Ultimate edition. The entry edition stays confined to on-premises infrastructure.
The public cloud mainly helps companies for which fitting out a second server room makes no sense: the secondary cluster is created when needed, starting from copies already transferred. It also addresses hardware lead times. In a recent project server delivery took around one hundred and ten working days, while a cloud cluster can be up in a few hours. How to size the nodes is described in the article on migrating to Nutanix.
Nutanix licensing and the second site: options compared
| Configuration | Restart and data loss | What is licensed |
|---|---|---|
| Copies on object storage, recovery cluster to be created | Restart within a few hours, data up to the last copy | The main cluster; the second one when it is created |
| Replica cluster running, hourly replication | Restart within minutes, up to one hour of data lost | Both clusters, including per virtual machine |
| Replica cluster running, replication every few minutes | Restart within minutes, loss limited to the interval | Higher edition on both clusters |
| Synchronous replication to a nearby site | Restart within minutes, no data loss | Top edition and a low-latency link |
Before signing for Nutanix licensing, it pays to have to hand:
- the inventory of virtual machines with actual consumption, collected with RVTools or Nutanix Collector;
- the number of physical cores, to compare per-core and per-virtual-machine licensing;
- for each machine, the downtime and the amount of data the company can afford to lose;
- the list of machines to move to the recovery site, with the reduced resources planned;
- where the second site will be: company premises, provider data centre or public cloud;
- the edition required by the replication interval, by any GPUs and by public cloud use;
- how the existing backup integrates with the new platform;
- who triggers disaster recovery, with which procedure and with which times written into the contract.
Aesir’s role in the subscription model
Aesir Srl is a Nutanix Professional Partner and works as a service provider: it applies Nutanix licensing on a monthly basis and opens tickets with the vendor. The platform is managed within the same contractual scope in which Aesir operates as an MSP and MSSP. The Cloud Platform business unit delivers private and hybrid cloud from proprietary Tier IV data centres located in the European Union, with replication to a second site. ISO 9001, 27001, 27017 and 27018 certifications also cover this infrastructure. On specific request, projects extend beyond Italy to Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Further questions before renewal
Is per-core or per-virtual-machine licensing better?
It depends on density. For small environments, in the region of fifteen to twenty virtual machines, per-virtual-machine licensing is better value and offers the same functions; above that threshold physical cores are licensed.
Can a company start with the entry edition and move up later?
Yes. The edition change is made from the console and billing adjusts from that moment. Replication requirements should still be checked at the outset, because they are what most often force a higher edition.
Are new licences needed to move machines to the cloud?
Not for the Pro and Ultimate editions, which are also portable to the public cloud; the entry edition first requires an edition change. Cloud compute resources are paid separately, directly to the chosen provider.
Does the licence include containers?
According to the vendor, management of container environments is included in the main licence. Advanced functions of the Kubernetes platform have dedicated tiers, to be assessed once container applications reach production.
How long does it take to activate a second site?
With new hardware, timing depends on deliveries, which in recent projects have exceeded three months. A public cloud cluster can be activated within a few hours and can act as a bridge until the physical site is ready.
Let’s talk
Nutanix licensing is chosen well when the conversation starts from the machines to be protected and the acceptable minutes of downtime for each. The edition, the location of the second site and the monthly fee all follow from there. If you would like to explore the subject or assess the situation in your own company, you can fill in the form at the bottom of this page or write to support@aesir-tech.it: we will arrange a free consultation and start from your numbers.