Are you considering Nutanix with all the VMware turbulence lately? Can’t say I blame you. This is a great time to know what your options are in case that your conversion from perpetual to subscription spikes up more than 2x than what you had budgeted for.
How do you license Nutanix software though? I break down the following components one by one below.
– Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) subscription
– Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) subscription
– Nutanix Hardware Support (as long as NX series HW is selected)
– Nutanix Software Support
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
There are 3 types of licensing available for standard workload clusters, Starter, Pro and Ultimate, and they are licensing by CPU cores.
– Starter is the most basic one for small scale deployments with limited set of features available for up to12 nodes per cluster. Those features include RF2 redundancy, data compression/deduplication, async replication to another cluster (1 hour or greater), lifecycle management, etc… This licensing is available on-premise only.
– Pro is meant for larger deployments that require richer data services and higher resiliency. Can support more than 12 nodes in a cluster, up to RF3 redundancy, erasure coding, VM Flash mode pinning, multiple site replication, GPU Passthrough and some other smaller features too.
– Ultimate includes the full suite. The main differences are advanced replication (metro, nearsync, orchestration, cross-cluster migration), encryption (data at rest, native kms), micro-segmentation and multiple managed Kubernetes clusters.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) also offers a specialized license model for VDI which includes three tiers as well, and it is licensed by User count instead of CPU cores.
– Starter here is very similar with basic functionality up to 12 nodes.
– Pro includes same features as NCI Pro, along with 50GB of Nutanix Files per user.
– Ultimate includes the same features as NCI Ultimate, along with 100GB of Nutanix files per user, plus Cloud portability to NC2 (AWS or Azure)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
This is basically the licensing required for Prism Central and it is licensed by CPU core too. Three licensing tiers available just like the others.
– Starter which includes AIOps, monitoring, planning, rightsizing and some automation.
– Pro includes self tuning capabilities enabled by Machine Learning, cost governance (mainly for public cloud), and more robust automation capabilities (runbooks).
– Ultimate includes application blueprints, more governance (quotas, approvals, scheduler) and higher security/compliance features.
Nutanix Hardware support offers 2 options:
– Production support which translates to Next Business Day
– Mission Critical which translates to 4-hour part replacement
Nutanix Software support offers 2 options:
– Production support which translates to 1 hour SLA for P1 cases.
– Mission Critical which translates to 30 minutes SLA for P1 cases, along with direct routing to Sr. level engineers
Hope that was clear enough, but if you have any questions, please contact me and let me know so I can expand on it!
