Unleash DevOps Power with NC2: Stretching Your Layer 2 Network Seamlessly to Azure

With the latest release of the Nutanix Prism Central™ multi-cluster manager and the Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) hybrid multicloud platform, you can stretch your layer 2 network from on-premises to the Microsoft Azure® cloud. The ability to have the same network active/active in both datacenters allows applications to run without modification regardless of where they run. Application and operation staff can failover to either datacenter without changing IP address or updating the network. Time saved from mundane and time-consuming tasks can be focused on helping the business progress instead of trying to keep the lights on. These new time-saving capabilities are possible in the new AOS™ 6.6 and Prism Central 2022.9 releases with NC2.

Moving applications to Azure has never been easier.

Possible options before having a layer 2 subnet stretched - as is now possible with these new AOS and Prism Central releases - was to have  active / backup subnets keeping the same subnet in both datacenters or change the application IP address upon failover. 

If you kept the same subnet, the operations staff had to:

• Run a full subnet failover using Nutanix DR
  • This was all or nothing. It requires all applications to be moved since you can’t have the same subnet active simultaneously.  In larger or older environments this may not be practical.
• The networking routes would have to be updated.
  • Multiple network devices would have to be touched depending on how users would connect to the new site. This being a manual effort introduces the chance to miss something.

If you went with the new IP address at the secondary datacenter option, the application staff would have to:

• See if their application worked with DNS or a load balancer.
  • Was the database connection created with a DNS name?
  • Are clients connecting to the application with a friendly DNS name like app1.nutanix.com or using an IP address. If clients were using an IP address this could cause an avalanche of support requests after the failover.
• If the applications IP address were hard coded or DNS wasn’t used throughout the application stack you would have to make manual changes. Even with testing it’s easy to forget something, especially if the application has evolved over the years and application staff have changed roles.

While these steps accomplished the desired outcome, the process required careful consideration and, the most valuable resource of all - time that could be spent on other business needs.  Fortunately, with the advent of these updates to AOS and Prism Central, you can put those worries behind you. If you have already implemented Flow Virtual Networking on-premises and established a connection with Azure, extending your subnet into Azure can be done easily with a few simple steps:

1. Deploy a local VPN/VTEP Network Gateway VM in Azure and on-premises
2. Configure a remote VPN/VTEP Gateway in Azure and on-premises to point to the far-end device.
3. Create a VPC Subnet in Prism Central with the same network address and mask in both Azure and on-prem
4. Extend your network to Azure using the Create Subnet Extension wizard.

With this configuration in place, VMs in the on-prem subnet will have reachability to VMs in Azure subnet using the exact same IP subnet range.

Upgrade today and start a free* trial of NC2 on Azure and make your life a little simpler.