Capture app-consistent recovery points before patching, replicate them to a DR cluster on schedule, slice Prism inventory by Category for chargeback, and run VMware-to-AHV migration waves when the moment comes.
Replace Nutanix Self-Service (Calm) and X-Play with a workflow engine that listens to schedules or migration waves, handles crash- or app-consistent recovery points with cross-cluster DR replication, and chains AHV with VMware, Ansible, and ServiceNow. Drop the Calm catalog license; cut VMware-to-AHV cutover risk to per-VM waves with rollback.
What Kestra wraps around your Nutanix clusters: how migrations from VMware land in waves, what gets a recovery point first, who approves an LCM upgrade, and where the audit lives. Prism Central and your AHV hosts stay in place. The Calm / Self-Service catalog gets replaced.
Drive Nutanix Move through the v2 REST API from a flow: add source and target providers, build a migration plan, run readiness checks, then cut over wave by wave when each VM hits state 5 (ready for cutover). Kestra handles the wave scheduling, dependency ordering, and rollback path that Move itself does not.
CreateVmSnapshot emits a recovery point through the Nutanix dataprotection v4 API, with optional expiration. Pick crash-consistent for speed, app-consistent (Guest Tools quiesce) for databases. RestoreVmSnapshot reverts on a failed health check, with the snapshotExtId flowing forward from the create step.
CloneTemplate, ConvertVmToTemplate, and ConvertTemplateToVm chain in a single flow. Build a new template version, deploy a test VM from it via ConvertTemplateToVm, run an Ansible smoke test, then mark the version active. Old versions stay deployable for rollback. The async taskExtId from each call is logged.
ListVms exposes the VMM v4 OData surface: filter, sort, select, and paginate by Category, cluster, power state, or tag. Build chargeback reports grouped by department, identify drift between Categories and ServiceNow CMDB, or pull only the VMs in a given environment for a wave migration.
A Kestra App is a typed form bound to a flow: dropdowns for the cluster, the Category, the template, the recovery point. Operators submit, the same audited flow runs every time. The Pause task suspends before DeleteVm, ResetVm, or a template conversion. Reviewer identity and resume timestamp land in the execution.
Every AHV task returns the async taskExtId from Prism Central. Kestra waits on the task, surfaces success or failure inline, and stores the operator, inputs, and resulting VM extId with the execution. Auditors get evidence by default, attached to the execution that produced it.
Patterns Nutanix platform teams run in production today. Each one shows the flow end to end, with the real plugin classes in play.
Inventory the source with vmware.vcenter.ListVms, build a Nutanix Move migration plan through the v2 REST API, drive readiness checks, then cut over one wave at a time. Move handles the data copy, Kestra orchestrates the wave schedule, dependency ordering, and the per-VM rollback path. The cutover commit happens only after the VM state reads 5 (ready).
Filter source VMs by Category (department, criticality, environment) and migrate one slice at a time.
Move handles the storage replication, Kestra runs the scheduling, dependency check, and per-VM cutover gate.
VMware source stays live until cutover; an errors branch can power the source VM back on and pause the wave.
Every cutover has the source vCenter UUID, the AHV extId, the operator, and the readiness state on record.
Pattern based on the documented Nutanix Move v2 REST API workflow (login, build plan, poll workloads to state 5, cutover).
CreateVmSnapshot emits a crash-consistent recovery point on the target AHV VM. A Shell task runs the OS update over SSH and reboots. An HTTP probe checks the application. On any failure, the errors branch fires RestoreVmSnapshot against the same snapshotExtId and pages on-call. Shipped as a working Kestra blueprint.
Pick consistency per VM. Databases get quiesce via Guest Tools, stateless tiers stay crash-consistent for speed.
The errors branch restores the recovery point if the post-patch probe fails, no human required.
Re-run the patch on the same VM with the same snapshotExtId from the execution UI.
Published as the nutanix-safe-patching-workflow blueprint in the Kestra catalog.
On a daily schedule, CreateVmSnapshot captures a recovery point on the production cluster. A core.http.Request call to the Prism Central v4 dataprotection API replicates the recovery point to the DR cluster. ListVmSnapshots on the DR side confirms the replica landed. The retention is set per environment via the API expiration field, so old recovery points cycle out automatically.
Production VMs get 14-day retention, test gets 3. The expirationTime on the recovery point enforces it.
ListVms + OData filter gives you the VMs in scope per environment, then ForEach handles the per-VM replication.
Re-run the verify task on demand to confirm a specific recovery point still exists on the DR cluster before a drill.
Same flow, target inputs flipped: restore on DR cluster, validate, restore production routing, all in one execution ID.
ListVms with an OData filter returns the VMs per Category (department, environment, owner). A small Python task aggregates vCPU, memory, and storage by department. The report posts to Slack and writes a row to a Google Sheet for chargeback. VMs without an owner Category get flagged as untagged.
Filter and select fields server-side via the v4 API, so the flow only ships the rows it needs.
VMs without the expected Category surface in a separate Slack alert so owners can claim them.
Each run appends a row to the Sheet, so leadership sees the per-department vCPU and memory trend over time.
Kestra allowed us to move from fragmented automation to a unified control plane, secure, scalable, and manageable by all our teams.
| Capability | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VMware-to-AHV wave migration coordination | Drives Move v2 API, wave gates, per-VM rollback, all in YAML | Not a Move orchestrator | Migration as a service offering | Possible via custom playbooks, no native Move integration |
| Crash- or app-consistent recovery points as flow steps | Native via dataprotection v4 API | Built-in policies, no flow chaining | Policy-driven, vendor-specific | Possible via Nutanix Ansible collection |
| Cross-cluster recovery point replication | Native v4 API call from flow | Leap policy (separate product) | Built-in replication | Possible via REST API calls |
| Categories and Prism inventory as flow inputs | ListVms with OData filter / sort / select | Calm uses Categories internally, less open | Tag-based but proprietary | Ansible dynamic inventory plugin for Nutanix |
| Self-service catalog (replacing Calm) | Kestra Apps, typed inputs, RBAC, audit | Calm catalog (the thing being replaced) | Morpheus catalog (proprietary) | AAP survey forms (basic) |
| Chain AHV with Ansible, Terraform, ServiceNow | Native, with outputs across tools | Calm integrations (DSL, limited) | Built-in connectors (proprietary) | Ansible-centric, glue collections required |
| Workflow language | Declarative YAML, Git-native, polyglot scripts | Calm DSL plus Python actions | Cypher / Morpheus-specific scripts | Ansible YAML + Jinja (Ansible-only) |
| Air-gapped deploy across multiple clusters | Self-hosted, per-cluster control plane | Centralized appliance | Centralized appliance | Self-hosted (Red Hat subscription) |
| Orchestrate beyond Nutanix | 1300+ plugins, cross-stack | Nutanix-centric | Multi-cloud (proprietary connectors) | Ansible-centric, broad collections |
Side-by-side breakdown across HCI day-2 ops, self-service catalogs, multi-cloud reach, and cross-stack orchestration.
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Keep Prism Central and AHV. Replace Calm / Self-Service with declarative YAML flows: crash- or app-consistent recovery points, cross-cluster replication, and Category-driven Prism inventory, all from one execution history.
