Microsoft and Nutanix

Hello Again! This is Vijay Tewari, Principal Group Program Manager for Private Cloud Solutions. Yesterday I had the privilege of joining Nutanix on stage for the keynote of their first ever .NEXT user conference. Microsoft and Nutanix have built a solid partnership, built on jointly engineered solutions and a laser focus on customer scenarios and success.

Just about a year ago, Nutanix launched the industry’s first hyper-converged solution for the Microsoft Private Cloud. The solution is validated through Microsoft’s Private Cloud Fast Track program, which helps partners deliver integrated systems to reduce the complexity and risk of deploying a private cloud based on Windows Server, Hyper-V, and Microsoft System Center.

The Nutanix solution helps customers deploy quickly and then and scale as capacity needs grow. It includes significant areas of integration with Microsoft’s Private Cloud stack, such as:

  • Automation: ability to use the Nutanix Windows PowerShell toolkit and Prism REST APIs to create custom scripts for tasks such as automated deployment, reporting, or even failover for Microsoft Private Cloud.
  • Azure-consistency: inclusion of the Windows Azure Pack which offers an Azure-consistent self-service portal with virtual machine hosting (IaaS), database as a service (DBaaS), and scalable web app hosting (PaaS).

In a session showcasing hybrid cloud solutions at .NEXT, we were joined by Fitness First and Synergics to talk about how they’ve used Nutanix and the Microsoft platform to create innovative solutions, greatly reducing complexity. With customer successes like Fitness First, Jabil, Direct One, and Cochise County, Hyper-V adoption with Nutanix solutions is growing fast (75 percent in the latest quarter) and substantially increasing share in the last year. 

We are in active roadmap discussions to continue our progress, making the solutions even more integrated and turnkey, and expanding our partnership to the Azure public cloud. At the keynote yesterday, Nutanix demonstrated future capabilities in the Nutanix XCP (Extreme Computing Platform) to move VMs from VMware to Hyper-V or Azure, as well as do backup and disaster recovery from Nutanix solutions to Azure.

Congratulations to Nutanix on a great .NEXT conference, and thanks for the invite!