Nutanix: Disgruntled VMware customers cause crowds at in-house exhibition
Broadcom upset clients with its VMware conversion and gave competitors a tailwind. Nutanix is delighted about a record number of visitors at its inhouse fair.
(Image: Jens Söldner)
- Jens Söldner
The US enterprise cloud provider Nutanix was pleased to welcome a large number of visitors to its annual in-house exhibition .NEXT: around 4,000 participants attended the event in Barcelona between May 21 and 23, 50 percent more than last year. One of the reasons for this is probably the great uncertainty that has prevailed in the virtualization and private cloud environment since the takeover of VMware by Broadcom. Nutanix was able to present several reference customers from the USA and Australia at its in-house exhibition, who reported on switching to VMware alternatives. In several technical sessions, Nutanix demonstrated migration paths away from VMware's hypervisor to its own AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor).
There was also great interest from German companies and authorities, even if there were no reference reports yet. On site, iX was able to talk to representatives from major German customers and authorities such as the Federal Employment Agency in Nuremberg - all of whom were united by the fact that they are currently looking for alternatives to the VMware stack, something they said they would not have done a year or two ago.
New version of AOS
The majority of Nutanix customers are still using VMware's hypervisor vSphere in combination with the in-house platform AOS (Acropolis Operating System), the heart of the "Nutanix Cloud Platform" (NCP) environment for managing a "hybrid multicloud".
One week before the conference, the manufacturer released the new version AOS 6.8, which is intended to bring a number of improvements to the performance and manageability of a Nutanix environment. These mainly concern the company's own hypervisor AHV, which was launched ten years ago as a KVM derivative. This can be obtained as part of the Nutanix Cloud Platform and operated on hardware certified by the manufacturer. When creating new VMs, administrators can now automatically select the optimal Nutanix cluster via the management software based on criteria such as resource availability or host affinity rules.
Live migration improved
The manufacturer claims to have optimized the live migration of virtual machines, which have very high change rates in main memory access, through detailed improvements. Specifically, the brief "stunning" of the VM required before completing the live migration has been accelerated and made more efficient thanks to "micro stunning". Enhanced protection against ransomware threats is to be provided by "Secure Snapshots", which require several administrators to approve critical changes via snapshots.
Another new feature is an improvement in the operation of so-called metro clusters with the Acropolis hypervisor. Nutanix now supports disaster recovery in the event of two simultaneous failures of complete sites – a functionality that is important for customers from the financial sector due to the DORA regulation from 2025. Nutanix lists the new features in AOS 6.8 here.
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More server hardware supported
For customers who want to migrate their workloads to the Acropolis hypervisor, Nutanix is expanding the range of supported server hardware. For example, Nutanix and Cisco are working together to support Cisco's UCS blade server for the operation of AHV. Another particularly clever move is that existing servers that are used as "vSAN Ready Nodes" in operation with VMware's hyperconverged storage service "vSAN" will soon also be supported by the manufacturer for the operation of AHV and the AOS platform.
Another announcement at the in-house exhibition concerned the manufacturer Dell, which was the owner of VMware before the takeover by Broadcom and has since continued to distance itself from its former subsidiary. For the first time, Nutanix wants to support external storage technology with Dell's PowerFlex storage system and thus pick up customers who want to scale their storage environment separately from their server systems - a novelty in the Nutanix world, which has so far been very focused on the convergence of servers and storage.
For those who want to try out the Nutanix platform in laboratory environments first, the manufacturer is now providing a free Community Edition that can also be operated with manageable hardware equipment.
(mma)
