Nutanix: Partnerships with NetApp and Cisco lower VMware migration hurdle

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At its in-house trade fair .NEXT in Chicago, Nutanix is positioning its cloud platform as an alternative for VMware customers who are rethinking their virtualization strategy after Broadcom's license changes. The most important levers for this are not its own products alone, but strategic partnerships with NetApp and Cisco. Both alliances aim to enable companies to switch platforms without having to abandon existing storage and hardware infrastructure.

The conference is taking place at a time when the virtualization market is more dynamic than it has been since the introduction of x86 virtualization. Broadcom's integration of VMware – with a new bundling model, changed support structures, and in some cases significant price increases – has not only caused dissatisfaction among many companies, but also strategic procurement reviews at management level.

Nutanix is benefiting directly from this: its own hypervisor AHV is included in the platform license and incurs no additional costs, unlike the previously very common combination of the Nutanix HCI storage platform with VMware's hypervisor platform.

Platform change as a strategic window of opportunity

Specifically, Nutanix is addressing the migration issue with a new zero-copy migration function, available immediately: for VMs residing on VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols), virtual disks can be converted directly into AHV vDisks – in-place, without data duplication. In practice, however, this option is likely to affect only a minority of installations, as vVols never achieved broad market penetration and have now been discontinued by Broadcom.

For the significantly more common VMFS and NFS-based environments, Nutanix Move with data replication remains the primary migration path. This tool offers automated VM conversion with network mapping and validation after migration. In addition, Nutanix is announcing a new partnership with Veeam, which will be able to rehydrate ESXi backups directly on AHV in the future – thus potentially eliminating the VMware license for older backup data for migrating customers.

For VMware customers, this results in a concrete decision scenario: those planning license renewals or hardware refreshes anyway can evaluate the platform change with comparatively little additional effort. The manufacturer also has answers for network and desktop virtualization requirements. Nutanix emphasizes that Flow Networking, as a counterpart to VMware NSX, covers microsegmentation, but admits that automatic policy migration from NSX is not supported.

In the VDI sector, the situation has changed since the spin-off of VMware Horizon to Omnissa: Omnissa Horizon 8 now natively supports the Nutanix hypervisor AHV – including automated provisioning via Prism Central, instant clone provisioning, and vGPU support. For existing Horizon customers, this removes a significant migration obstacle. An example from the Cisco ecosystem shows how concrete the migration pressure is already reaching manufacturers: Cisco has announced that it will validate its Unified Communications Manager (UCM), which previously only supported ESXi as a hypervisor, for AHV in the future.

Strategic Alliance with NetApp

One of the most significant announcements at .NEXT is the strategic partnership with NetApp. The integration of NetApp's Intelligent Data Infrastructure – built on ONTAP storage systems – with the Nutanix Cloud Platform and the AHV hypervisor is already in early access; general availability (GA) is planned for Q3 2026.

Technically, the connection is based on NFS: NetApp ONTAP storage is integrated as an external datastore for AHV VMs. This allows for the disaggregation of compute and storage – an architectural break from Nutanix's classic hyperconverged model, where compute and storage resources are always on the same nodes. Customers can now scale compute and storage independently and continue to use existing NetApp infrastructure.

For existing NetApp storage customers, this integration significantly lowers the migration hurdle: instead of replacing the entire storage stack, they can keep their existing ONTAP systems and only switch the virtualization layer. NetApp provides the Shift Toolkit for this, which is said to enable VM conversions in combination with Nutanix Move in minutes rather than hours, according to the manufacturer.

ONTAP provides ransomware detection, snap-based data resilience, and granular VM operations at the storage level – features that were previously primarily available in the VMware ecosystem. The partnership is thus also a signal to existing NetApp customers: switching from vSphere to AHV does not have to mean a break with existing storage infrastructure.

It is noteworthy that the NetApp alliance also extends into the Cisco ecosystem: Cisco announces that it will extend the Nutanix model to FlexPod – the long-standing joint platform of Cisco and NetApp. This creates a seamless architecture from Cisco compute to NetApp storage to Nutanix virtualization, which all three vendors position as an alternative to the previous VMware-centric stack.

Cisco Partnership: From Data Center to Edge

The deepening of the Cisco partnership is the second strategic pillar of the .NEXT announcements. Cisco and Nutanix are expanding their collaboration in several dimensions simultaneously: in AI infrastructure, at the edge, and in the procurement model.

In the AI sector, Cisco is integrating Nutanix Agentic AI – consisting of Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI), the Kubernetes platform NKP, and Unified Storage (NUS) – into its AI PODs. A Cisco Validated Design and a Nutanix Reference Architecture will provide a repeatable blueprint for AI deployments in the future, combining compute, network, and storage virtualization in one operating model.

At the edge, Cisco is bringing the Nutanix Cloud Platform to its Unified Edge Infrastructure. This allows customers to use the same AHV operating model they use in the data center at distributed locations – from retail spaces to production lines to logistics hubs. Early access began in April, with general availability planned for June. Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism will jointly manage the lifecycle across core and edge environments.

Commercially, it is noteworthy that Cisco is the first OEM to include Nutanix in its Enterprise Agreement (EA). This allows customers to procure Nutanix software through a joint framework agreement with Cisco – with price protection, true forward flexibility, and the option to add more Nutanix capacity during the term. For companies already operating Cisco infrastructure, this significantly simplifies the entry into the Nutanix platform, as a separate procurement process is no longer necessary.

FlashStack with Nutanix – a converged architecture of Cisco UCS, Pure Storage FlashArray, and Nutanix Cloud Platform – has been generally available since January. The solution enables independent scaling of compute and storage and also supports older UCS generations back to the B200 M5. For existing customers who want to keep their Cisco hardware, this is a concrete migration path: they can deploy AHV and the Nutanix platform on existing hardware without having to purchase new systems.

Spruced up for those willing to switch

The partner ecosystem strategy is at least as significant as the product announcements at .NEXT. With NetApp, Nutanix is opening up access to disaggregated enterprise storage and lowering the migration hurdle for existing ONTAP customers. With Cisco, a seamless stack from data center to edge is being created, including a simplified procurement path via the Enterprise Agreement. Both partnerships are based on the same fundamental assumption: companies switch virtualization layers more easily if they can keep their existing hardware and storage infrastructure.

At the same time, Nutanix is positioning itself for a platform role that goes beyond pure hypervisor replacement. However, the competition is broadly positioned: Red Hat with OpenShift Virtualization, Microsoft with Azure Stack HCI, the Chinese provider Sangfor, and open-source alternatives like Proxmox are vying for the same VMware customers willing to migrate. The platform decisions companies make this year are likely to shape their infrastructure economics for the next five to seven years.

(wpl)