VMware SRM: Nutanix provides a certified Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Nutanix SRA 2.5 (AOS 5.10 and 5.11) shows official support for SRM versions 8.2, 8.1 and 6.5.

Nutanix AOS 5.11 introduced support for NearSync replication. A NearSync schedule can now be created on a protection domain for SRA replication. The NearSync schedule can coexist with an asynchronous schedule.


Xi Leap: In November 2018 Nutanix launched Xi Leap, its own built-in disaster recovery service (DRaaS) offering. Xi Leap allows end-user organisations to protect their applications and data running in Nutanix on-premises environments by replicating them to Xi Cloud by setting up protection policies. From the Prism management console, admins select virtual machines for protection and drag and drop them into the cloud environment. Disaster Recovery orchestration is provided by recovery plans, where boot sequencing of virtual machines can be controlled, re-IP can be configured and custom scripts can be included. The goal is to provide one-click failover and failback functionality. Xi Leap allows end-user organisations to verify and proof their DR readiness by offers non-disruptive testing and cleanup.

Network connectivity and common management between on-premises and cloud environments are preserved with Xi Leap, allowing end-user organisations to manage the source and target sites as a single environment.

Xi Leap supports Single Sign On (SSO) by integrating with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), as well as data at-rest and data in-flight encryption (AES-256).

Xi Leap is currently bound to the following maximums:
- 200 VMs per recovery plan
- 20 categories per recovery plan
- 20 stages in a recovery plan
- 15 categories per stage
- 5 recovery plans executed in parallel

Currently Xi Leap is currently available in 6 regions worldwide: US-EAST (Northern Virginia), US-WEST (San Francisco Bay Area), UK (London), EU-Germany, EU-Italy and AP-Japan. Each region comprises multiple fault-tolerant zones known as Availability Zones.

Xi Leap is supported for AHV and ESXi on-premises hypervisors (AOS 5.11 required).

Xi Leap subcription plans need to be paid for separately.

AOS 5.17 introduced more flexibility and granularity in Nutanix Recovery Plans, including in-guest custom script execution and IP address configuration during the recovery process. The latter enables automated disaster recovery without the need for stretched networks.

AOS 5.18 introduced self-service restore (=file-level restore) capabilities for Xi Leap. AOS 5.18 also introduced Cross-Hypervisor Disaster Recovery (CHDR) Support for NearSync Replication in Leap. This means that CHDR enables recovering VMs from AHV clusters to ESXi-based Nutanix clusters or VMs from ESXi-based Nutanix clusters to AHV clusters.

AOS 5.19 introduces multi-site replication capabilities for Xi Leap. Protection policies can now be created to replicate the recovery points to one or more recovery availability zones. Recovery points can be replicated to at most 2 different AHV or ESXi clusters at the same or different availability zones. To maintain the efficiency of replication only 1 recovery availability zone can be onfigured for NearSync replication schedules (1–15 minutes RPO) and Synchronous (0 RPO) replication schedules.
AOS 5.19 also introduces cross-cluster live migration capabilities This allows a live migration of guest VMs protected with a Synchronous replication schedule. Live migration offers zero downtime of protected guest VMs during a planned failover event to the recovery availability zone.