NEXT Conference: Nutanix Accelerates Hypervisor Innovation to Drive Enterprise Modernization

At NEXT Conference, Nutanix, Inc. announced new AHV deployment options and programs to help customers fast-track infrastructure modernization by reusing existing server hardware investments, while also adding more flexibility in deployment to meet different workload and cost management needs.

Additionally, the company announced new capabilities in the AHV hypervisor to strengthen resilience and support enterprise scale deployments, to help customers looking for a new virtualization and containerization platform.

“We made the decision to move all of our workloads, including our mission-critical 24×7 environment, entirely to Nutanix when we learned our existing hypervisor pricing would more than double,” said Andrew Phan, CIO, Treasure Island and Circus Circus Hotel Casino. “Moving to Nutanix was one of the fastest and smoothest migrations we’ve ever had.”

AHV deployment options
The company announced new AHV server capabilities, currently under development, to help streamline customer migrations to Nutanix from the incumbent legacy hypervisor. Ity is working jointly with Cisco Technology, Inc. to certify Cisco UCS blade servers as part of the strategic partnership between Nutanix and Cisco. This new functionality will enable enterprises to repurpose existing deployed servers, including blade servers, to run the AHV hypervisor. This will build on flexible scaling of the Nutanix architecture with compute-only nodes connected to HCI or storage-only nodes. The firm will also expand the ability to run AHV on a broad set of existing and new server configurations working with OEM partners over time, as part of the Nutanix Elevate Program.

“As customers race to modernize their infrastructure for their most demanding applications, we are collaborating with Nutanix to enable AHV to run on more server form factors than ever before, starting with the Cisco blade and rack server portfolio including the industry-leading Cisco UCS X-Series,” said Jeremy Foster, SVP and GM, Cisco Compute. “This will provide joint Cisco and Nutanix customers more choice as they look to modernize their data centers.”

Additionally, Nutanix supports repurposing many of the popular vSAN ReadyNode configurations to help customers simplify migration to the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution with the AHV hypervisor by enabling reuse of existing hardware. The ability to re-use existing server hardware, as well as the expansion of compute-only hardware options, can help lower the TCO for customers looking to modernize their infrastructure.

“We are excited to work with our partners to expand the reach of Nutanix AHV to compute-only servers beyond traditional hyperconverged servers, further accelerating its adoption by enterprise customers to simplify operations and increase cyber-resilience,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP, product management, Nutanix. “This year celebrates the 10th anniversary of the launch of Nutanix AHV hypervisor with a continued focus on innovation to deliver the best enterprise virtualization and containerization platform.”

AHV simplifies digital resilience and enterprise scale deployments
The company also announced new capabilities to help protect AHV workloads and their data from cyber attacks, as well as deliver maximum uptime for mission-critical applications in multi-site deployments. Specifically, it enhanced its Secure Snapshot capability to strengthen the platform cyber-resilience with a new multi-party approval control for privileged operations such as snapshot changes to protect vs. malicious actors and ransomware. Additionally, AHV will enhance its Metro solution with support for multi-site DR to help customers more quickly recover from 2 simultaneous site failures. This functionality may be helpful for customers subject to the Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA) which will go into effect for financial services organizations in the European Union in 2025. Customers will be able to run their largest, mission-critical systems on the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution and benefit from simplified operations and a unified hybrid multicloud operating model.

Additionally, Automatic Cluster Selection in AHV makes it easier for customers to deliver a cloud-like, self-service experience to their users across large Nutanix environments. This feature intelligently places newly created VMs across a set of clusters, balancing resource utilization without administrator involvement, simplifying self-service application provisioning. The company also continues to enhance core virtualization features, such as live migration. This latest innovation accelerates live migrations, particularly for large and highly active VMs, by managing the way memory is replicated to the destination host in a more intelligent manner.

Availability :

• New AHV server capabilities and AHV Metro multi-site DR are currently under development.
• Support for vSAN ReadyNode, Secure Snapshot and Automatic Cluster Selection in AHV are available to customers.

“Enterprise virtualization is back in the spotlight, and AHV is emerging as an attractive alternative for customers looking to manage risk while modernizing their IT operations,” said Dave Pearson, research VP for infrastructure, IDC. “The ability for customers to reuse existing servers as part of a new Nutanix HCI deployment removes a common point of friction for migrations, and improves the ROI for organizations looking to migrate to HCI.”

Resources:
Blog: Happy 10th Birthday AHV
Blog: Unlocking Performance and Seamless Operations: Exploring New Features and Enhancements in Nutanix AOS 6.8    
Blog: Cisco and Nutanix: Taking Hyperconverged Infrastructure to the .NEXT Level