What is Nutanix Leap architecture

What is Nutanix Leap?

Nutanix Leap (Disaster Recovery runbooks) help orchestrate, automate and test failover and failback processes for applications running on top of Nutanix AOS. Nutanix leap do not require the deployment of additional components. It is a part of Nutanix Prism Central. If you have Prism Central deployed, you are only a few clicks away from having a fully functional solution.

Nutanix Leap Architecture

Nutanix Leap leverage Prism Central as a management and control plane and to store all configuration data (categories, protection policies, recovery plans). All configuration data is automatically replicated between Prism Central instances which are part of the solution. A single availability zone can have multiple replication targets (Nutanix clusters) configured and available for replication. In Nutanix AOS 5.17.X Leap support 1:1 replication target and Synchronous, nearsync andAsync replication. In upcoming AOS releases expect to new functionalities and enhancements to existing features.

Requirements:

• Prism Central 2020.08 or newer
• Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)
• VMware ESXi
• Nutanix AOS 5.17.X or newer
• Nutanix Xi Leap account. If you plan to use Nutanix Leap and failover to Nutanix Xi Leap (DR as a Service).
• Firewall ports open between clusters and Prism Centrals
  • Nutanix Leap Synchronous replication port diagram
  • Nutanix Leap Asynchronous replication port diagram

NOTE: Deploy scale-out Prism Central to provide high availability for management plane.

Nutanix Leap provides following features.

• Planned failover and failback
• Unplanned failover
• Failover testing
• Cross hypervisor DR – from VMware ESXi to Nutanix AHV
• RPO=>1h (Asynchronous replication)
• RPO=<15minutes (Nearsync replication)
• RPO=0 (Synchronous replication)

As you can see, Nutanix Leap Architecture is very simple. Does not require additional virtual machines or other virtual appliances.

As mentioned before, Prism Central is a key part of the solution. From Prism Central you configure all Nutanix Leap components, create categories, adding VMs onto protection plans. Failover, failback and DR testing actions are initiated from Prism Central too.

Terminology

• Availability Zone – it is represented by all resources (Nutanix Clusters) connected to Prism Central or Xi Leap Availability zone. Depends on the architecture, the Availability zone can represent the geographic territory, data center, or server room in the datacenter. Protection policies – in protection policies you set up (RPO, Retention), rules to auto-apply policies to virtual machines
• Recovery plans – required information to start an application:
  • Boot order
  • virtual machine IP address management
  • virtual network mapping
• Categories – are used to assign VM or set of VMs to Protection policies.

To learn more about Nutanix Leap – check out Nutanix product page