Keeps paired storage containers in step through synchronous replication, giving an RPO of zero. Prism Element sets it up on ESXi and Hyper-V 2016, whereas AHV Metro Availability has its own setup in Prism Central.
Read more: Nutanix docs
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Metro availability in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- General-purpose v1
The older storage account kind (
Storage), which lacks access tiers, Archive and premium file shares and retires on 13 October 2026. Converting to ZRS requires first upgrading to GPv2, a one-way change. - RPO
Recovery point objective: how much data, expressed as time, you can afford to lose. In a VM backup policy the smallest achievable RPO is the backup frequency.
- ESX
VMware's bare-metal hypervisor, installed on each host in a VCF fleet. Up to version 9.0 it was known as ESXi.
- Hyper-V
The hypervisor built into Windows. The VMs for the Azure Extended Network appliance require the Hyper-V role, using nested virtualisation, and an external virtual switch for each NIC.
- AHV Metro Availability
Combines a witness, cross-cluster live migration and synchronous replication with zero RPO to give AHV both high availability and disaster recovery. If no witness is present, replication stays synchronous but failures are handled by hand or after a timeout.
- Prism Central
A standalone instance, made up of either one VM or three in scale-out form, for monitoring and managing many clusters centrally.
Related terms
- APD
A state where a storage device returns no permanent device loss code to an ESXi host, so the host carries on issuing I/O. After a storage-only outage, VMCP APD is what lets Metro Availability on ESXi move VMs elsewhere.
- SIOC
A storage feature of ESXi, enabled by default on containers. Containers for metro availability need it turned off and its files deleted.
- Witness VM
Two-node clusters and ESXi metro availability built on protection domains get their witness from this VM. For AHV Metro Availability, a Witness Service takes the role instead, hosted in Prism Central or on its own VM.