Nutanix has finally made its big move to take on VMware and take advantage of uncertainty and dissatisfaction with the new course that Broadcom has set out for the virtualization leader. At its .NEXT 2025 conference, Nutanix unveiled a slew of partnerships in storage, cloud and AI with players Nvidia, Pure Storage, Google Cloud and Canonical.
First the vendor revised Nutanix Enterprise AI, its platform developed to simplify and accelerate the deployment of AI workloads in enterprise environments. It supports AI models like machine learning and generative AI at scale, both on-premises and in hybrid/multi-cloud environments.
This new version adds deeper integrations with Nvidia AI Enterprise, Nvidia NIM microservices and its Nvidia NeMo framework. The goal of this release is to simplify the process of building, deploying, running, and managing models and inferencing services, from the data center to the edge to the cloud on a certified Kubernetes environment.
Next, the company has partnered with Pure Storage to provide a deeply integrated package that will let customers deploy and manage virtual workloads on a scalable modern infrastructure.
With this partnership, the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offering will be integrated with Pure Storage FlashArray over NVMe/TCP to provide performance for high-demand data workloads, including AI. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure consists of the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and Nutanix Flow virtual networking and security.
Key to this announcement was the ability for Nutanix’s standalone Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) to support Pure Storage’s system, according to Jason Ader, an analyst with the William Blair & Co. equity research firm in a report.
“Driven by customer requests, these partnerships highlight Nutanix management’s push toward unbundling AHV to capitalize on the ongoing VMware displacement opportunity. Running standalone AHV on existing three-tier infrastructure provides dissatisfied VMware customers with an easier migration route off VMware as it removes the need for hardware refreshes,” Ader wrote.
“While Nutanix still aims to eventually shift customers to one-tier hyperconverged infrastructure (which requires hardware replacement), this interim standalone AHV strategy offers Nutanix a beachhead on which to build its case for HCI [Hyperconverged Infrastructure],” Ader wrote. “Over time, we expect Nutanix to forge similar storage integrations with other vendors, including NetApp. We believe these partnerships illustrate the gradual ecosystem shift toward Nutanix as customers and VARs become increasingly disillusioned with Broadcom’s impact on the VMware organization,” Ader stated.
Keeping with the storage theme, Nutanix introduced Cloud Native AOS, a new service that extends Nutanix enterprise storage and advanced data services to hyperscaler Kubernetes without requiring a hypervisor.
In another storage related announcements, Nutanix announced the general availability of NCI Compute, enabling customers to leverage external storage with Nutanix Cloud Platform. The first supported solution is Dell PowerFlex, designed for mission-critical environments. Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix Cloud Platform will be offered alongside Dell’s HCI appliance, Dell XC Plus.
Nutanix also announced the public preview of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Google Cloud, expanding workload mobility and hybrid cloud capabilities. This solution allows organizations to deploy the Nutanix hyperconverged software stack on Google Cloud Z3 bare-metal instances, enabling quick migration, app modernization, and disaster recovery.
Finally, Nutanix announced a partnership with Canonical to provide built-in support for Ubuntu Pro in the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP). This integration promises to simplify Kubernetes installation and adoption on Ubuntu Pro, which has advanced security systems, including government regulatory security.
Source:: Network World