I’m writing this article from the hotel room where I’ve been staying during this week-long business trip to Washington D.C., and I’ll try to sum up the main announcements Nutanix made during these days of .NEXT.
The event took place in a huge convention center in Washington D.C., a city that amazed me with how clean and quiet its streets are. A couple of years ago I went on vacation to New York, not far from here, and I have to say the experience couldn’t have been more different. Washington D.C. struck me as an almost “fake” city: few shops, few places to grab lunch, low-rise buildings and little urban decay (which is obviously a good thing) compared to New York and other American cities I’ve visited in the past.
Of course it was great to visit Washington D.C. and see places like the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the White House, etc…it’s always nice to see famous places in person, even if I had pictured some of them differently. The White House, for example, didn’t impress me all that much in person…I would have expected it to be bigger and more majestic; but never mind 😝
During the event I also took the opportunity to sit some Nutanix certification exams, all of which I passed, and I’ll be heading back to Italy with no fewer than 4 new badges:
- NCM-MCI 6.5 (Nutanix Certified Master – Multi Cloud Infrastructure 6.5)
- NCP-US 6 (Nutanix Certified Professional – Unified Storage 6)
- NCP-DB 6 (Nutanix Certified Professional – Database Automation 6)
- NCS-Core 6 (Nutanix Certified Services – Core Associate 6)
I wrote a dedicated post about the certifications I earned: https://www.silviobalduzzi.com/en/2025/05/nutanix-certifications/
Now let’s focus on the main topic: what’s new in the Nutanix landscape.
These were the topics that drove most of the presentations:
- Support for external storage (DELL PowerFlex and PureStorage Pure1)
- Artificial intelligence (where isn’t it being talked about???)
- New partnership with Google for NC2
- New integration with Omnissa Horizon (coming soon)
Support for external storage (DELL PowerFlex and PureStorage Pure1)
Departing from its origins, since last year Nutanix has started opening up to the possibility of providing storage through external solutions. In the past Nutanix had chosen to keep control of the storage, providing datastores solely and exclusively in hyperconverged mode; now, with this change of approach, software-defined storage solutions are starting to be supported (forget about support for Fibre Channel storage), and they can sit alongside the Nutanix hyperconverged solution, opening up new scenarios.
The move is in line with their (stated) goal of replacing as many VMware environments as possible at customers who are no longer happy with how Broadcom is running things (and with the major licensing changes). By opening up to external storage, Nutanix is trying to become even more of a one-to-one replacement for VMware, although of course just two storage vendors on the list won’t suit every taste; but you have to start somewhere.
Artificial intelligence
By now AI has become a hot topic for almost every software vendor, and Nutanix is certainly no exception. With its solutions, Nutanix lets companies build AI platforms delivered in-house, guaranteeing complete security for the data the AI will process. On top of that, Nutanix is starting to integrate AI into its own consoles and processes too, allowing an administrator to ask the AI, in natural language, to perform actions, and the AI then takes care of driving the platform, without the user having to write code or any kind of automation. Certainly an interesting solution, but nothing groundbreaking (at least in my eyes). Of course there were plenty of other small new features in this area, but nothing “Wow” here.
Partnership with Google Cloud for NC2
Google Cloud has finally joined the trio of Hyperscalers supported by the Nutanix NC2 platform, alongside AWS and Azure. With NC2 you can deploy Nutanix clusters on the Hyperscalers, using bare-metal hosts, and the addition of Google Cloud gives you even more choice and limits any lock-in. NC2 takes care of provisioning entire clusters on the Hyperscalers in just a few clicks, providing automation and control wherever they are deployed. A fantastic solution, if it weren’t for the fact that hyperscaler costs remain prohibitive for most Italian companies; it will surely do better abroad.
Omnissa Horizon with Nutanix AHV
Coming from the EUC world, this was the announcement I liked the most. Omnissa Horizon, which until a few months ago was a VMware product, is evolving into a hypervisor-agnostic platform and opening up to integrations with other hypervisors; in this case Nutanix AHV.
This is definitely interesting news because it will make it possible to run Horizon on virtual environments other than VMware ESXi, giving customers more choice and less lock-in.
The solution is currently in GA, so it will be publicly available in a few months (by the end of the year, I believe); considering how tightly Horizon was integrated with ESXi, I’m not surprised that Omnissa needs more time to finish development. I’m curious to see it in action!
Nutanix Multi Cloud Experts
I want to thank the Nutanix Multi Cloud Experts community for inviting us to take part in this fantastic event. This new team, created by Nutanix just a few months ago, brings together people with different backgrounds in the multi cloud landscape: several vExperts, public cloud experts, me coming from the Citrix world (and beyond) and many others. The representatives from Italy were me, Giovanni Dominoni and Giuseppe Pino. Here’s a photo (unfortunately not a particularly good one) of the MCExperts group. It was great to meet so many of you at this event! I can’t wait for the next opportunity!
During this week I had the pleasure of getting to know Giovanni Dominoni better; he too was invited by Nutanix to .NEXT as a Nutanix Multi Cloud Expert, and I really appreciated the seriousness, professionalism and eagerness to learn that set him apart. You can find his blog at https://www.giovannidominoni.it/ and I invite you to stay tuned for this new pair of partners in crime…we’re working on creating something unique together!