Nutanix product additions, partnerships designed to capitalize on VMware customer angst

Of course, Nutanix didn't mention VMware directly, but there are a few veiled references to its rival indicating that it smells opportunity. The Nutanix news lands a day after Rimini Street said it would offer third party support to VMware customers as they plan next steps.

The timeline since Broadcom closed its VMware purchase features a good bit of turmoil.

• May 6. Broadcom addresses concerns about VMware Cloud on AWS.
• April 15. Broadcom CEO Tan says VMware customers can get support extensions amid subscription transition.
• March 14. Tan recaps first 100 days of VMware purchase, noted that "this level of change has understandably created some unease among our customers and partners."
• Feb. 14. VMware acknowledges that changes have been rough on customers, but a long blog post could be classified as mansplaining.
• Dec. 11: VMware outlined product rationalization and subscription plan.

Here's a look at what Nutanix announced at its .Next Conference in Barcelona.

1. Nutanix added new deployment options for its Nutanix AHV hypervisor that preserves existing server investments and gives customers flexibility. Nutanix's release made a veiled reference to wooing VMware migrations after price increases. Nutanix said new capabilities in AHV will smooth migrations by repurposing the most popular vSAN ReadyNode configurations. Nutanix also added features for cybersecurity resilience, disaster recovery and virtual machine clusters.
2. Nutanix said it is working with Cisco to certify Cisco UCS blade servers so enterprises can redeploy existing deployed servers to run on Nutanix AHV hypervisor with compute only nodes or storage only nodes.
3. Dell Technologies andNutanix outlined a series of deployment options, partnerships and platform enhancements at its .Next Conference in Barcelona. The gist of the news: VMware we have you surrounded. Nutanix will launch hyperconverged appliances combining Nutanix Cloud Platform and Dell servers. The combination will cover a broad range of PowerEdge servers. The companies also said Nutanix Cloud Platform for Dell PowerFlex will combine Nutanix's platform with its AHV hypervisor with Dell PowerFlex storage. Dell and Nutanix also said they will collaborate on engineering and go-to-market efforts. Keep in mind that Dell said it was exiting its VMware hyperconverged partnership.
4. Nutanix added new integrations for Nutanix-GPT-in-a Box that includes Nvidia NIM inference microservices and Hugging Face large language models (LLM). The company also launched an AI partner program that'll enable companies to build generative AI apps on top of Nutanix Cloud Platform.
5. Red Hat and Nutanix said they will collaborate to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an element of Nutanix Cloud Platform. Nutanix AOS, which is part traditional operating system with additional packages, will build on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for operating system capabilities.
6. Nutanix launched the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) to simplify the management of container-based applications. Enterprises can manage clusters running Nutanix and third parties on one dashboard. NKP integrates with data services, simplifies management with automation, offers multi-cluster fleet management and is cloud native.