The second part of today’s Nutanix barrage is aimed at the installed base of Cisco UCS servers and VMware vSAN systems, with the first part here and the third story here.
Software-defined Nutanix needs servers on which to run its HCI software and AHV hypervisor. Partner Cisco has thousands of installed UCS servers, both blades and rack shelves. Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has raised concerns among customers about the direction of VMware’s software development and changes in business practices. Nutanix aims to make it easier for installed base VMware vSAN customers to migrate their hardware to Nutanix.
Andrew Phan, CIO at Treasure Island and Circus Circus Hotel Casino, said: “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. Moving to Nutanix was one of the fastest and smoothest migrations we’ve ever had.”
Nutanix is working jointly with Cisco to certify Cisco’s UCS blade servers. An aim is to enable enterprises to repurpose existing deployed UCS servers, including blade servers, to run the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. We could see UCS blade, rack, and X-Series compute-only nodes connected to Nutanix HCI or storage-only nodes.
The AHV company also supports repurposing many vSAN ReadyNode configurations to help customers simplify migration to Nutanix’s Cloud Infrastructure/AHV offering by enabling reuse of existing hardware. This and the UCS support will help lower the TCO for customers looking to, Nutanix says, “modernize their infrastructure.”
Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management, said: “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.”
The cyber-resilience angle was reinforced by Nutanix enhancing its Secure Snapshot capability with a new multi-party approval control for privileged operations such as snapshot changes to protect against malicious actors and ransomware.
Nutanix is strengthening its AHV Metro offering with support for multi-site disaster recovery (DR) to help customers more quickly recover from two simultaneous site failures. This 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.
AHV is getting Automatic Cluster Selection to intelligently place newly created virtual machines (VMs) across a set of clusters, balancing resource utilization without admin involvement, simplifying self-service application provisioning. AHV’s live migration is being accelerated by managing the way memory is replicated to the destination host in a more intelligent manner. This will particularly help he migration of large and highly active VMs.
New AHV server capabilities and AHV Metro multi-site DR are under development. Support for vSAN ReadyNode, Secure Snapshot, and Automatic Cluster Selection in AHV are available to customers. More information here.
