Did you miss Nutanix .NEXT 2025 conference in Washington, D.C.? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Here is a recap of 9 announcements you should know about.
Nutanix introduced a sweeping set of innovations in AI, hybrid cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, security, and multi-cloud operations. These announcements reflect Nutanix’s continued mission to simplify enterprise IT while accelerating the adoption of AI and cloud-native applications across diverse environments.
- Nutanix Enterprise AI: Powering Agentic AI
- Strategic Integration with Pure Storage
- Cloud Native AOS: Bringing Nutanix Storage to Kubernetes
- Nutanix Cloud Clusters Now Available on Google Cloud (Public Preview)
- Omnissa Horizon AHV Integration
- Simplified Kubernetes with Ubuntu Pro
- Unified Citrix VDI Management with Prism Central
- Expanding the Security Ecosystem with NIST Alignment
- New Features for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
1. Nutanix Enterprise AI: Powering Agentic AI: Nutanix announced the latest release of Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI), featuring deep integration with NVIDIA’s AI stack, including NVIDIA NIM and the NeMo framework. The updated platform is purpose-built to accelerate Agentic AI. AI applications that can make independent decisions across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Key Highlights:
- Integration with NVIDIA Technologies: NAI now features deep integration with NVIDIA’s AI tools, including NVIDIA NIM and the NeMo framework, streamlining the development and management of AI models and inference services.
- Shared Model Services: The updated NAI offers a shared model service methodology, allowing multiple applications to utilize common resources and models efficiently.
- Centralized LLM Repository: A centralized repository for large language models (LLMs) is introduced, ensuring secure and private connections to generative AI applications and agents.
- Support for Kubernetes Platforms: NAI extends its support to various Kubernetes platforms, including AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE, facilitating flexible deployment options.
- Addressing Skill Gaps: By simplifying AI operations, NAI enables IT administrators to manage AI workloads effectively, mitigating the challenges of the shortage of specialized AI skills.
These advancements make it easier for enterprises to operationalize GenAI across use cases and infrastructure stacks.
2. Strategic Integration with Pure Storage: In a major partnership announcement, Nutanix and Pure Storage have combined a deeply integrated solution combining Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) with Pure Storage FlashArray over NVMe/TCP.
Benefits include:
- Scalable, Modern Infrastructure: The integrated solution offers a high-performance, flexible, and efficient full-stack infrastructure to support the most demanding business-critical workloads, including AI applications.
- Built-in Cyber Resilience: Customers can enhance their cyber-resilience posture by leveraging Nutanix’s native capabilities, such as Flow micro-segmentation and disaster recovery orchestration, alongside Pure Storage’s features like data-at-rest encryption and SafeMode.
- Freedom of Choice: The partnership provides customers a resilient and user-friendly alternative to existing market options, offering greater agility and control over their mission-critical environments.
This solution supports operational efficiency without compromising on performance or reliability.
3. Cloud Native AOS: Bringing Nutanix Storage to Kubernetes: Cloud Native AOS extends the enterprise-grade capabilities of Nutanix storage to Kubernetes environments on hyperscalers and bare metal, with no hypervisor dependency.
Highlights:
- Hypervisor-Free Deployment: Cloud Native AOS allows organizations to deploy Nutanix’s advanced storage capabilities directly onto Kubernetes platforms without relying on a hypervisor, enhancing flexibility and reducing complexity.
- Enterprise-Grade Storage Services: The solution brings Nutanix’s robust storage features—such as data protection, replication, and disaster recovery—to Kubernetes environments, ensuring high availability and resilience for containerized applications.
- Simplified Operations: By integrating with Kubernetes, Cloud Native AOS streamlines day-two operations, including monitoring, scaling, and maintenance, thereby reducing the operational burden on IT teams.
- Consistent Management Across Environments: Organizations can achieve a unified storage management experience across on-premises data centers, public clouds, and edge locations, facilitating a true hybrid multicloud strategy.
This empowers DevOps teams to run resilient, scalable Kubernetes workloads while leveraging proven Nutanix storage capabilities.
4. Nutanix Cloud Clusters Now Available on Google Cloud (Public Preview): The long-anticipated Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Google Cloud is now in public preview, enabling seamless deployment of Nutanix’s HCI stack on Z3 bare-metal instances.
Key Features and Benefits:
- Seamless Integration: NC2 on Google Cloud allows for deploying Nutanix HCI software within customers’ Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), providing a consistent operating model across on-premises and cloud environments.
- Enhanced Performance: NC2 utilizes Google Cloud’s storage-optimized Z3 bare-metal instances, delivering high compute and storage density and optimizing performance for demanding workloads.
- Simplified Operations: Organizations can manage their hybrid cloud infrastructure through a unified platform, streamlining operations and reducing complexity.
- Flexible Licensing: Nutanix’s portability feature allows customers to move licenses between on-premises and Google Cloud environments, offering greater flexibility and cost efficiency.
- Rapid Deployment: The NC2 solution can be deployed in just a few hours, accelerating time-to-value for cloud initiatives.
This, combined with existing NC2 support for AWS and Azure, further strengthens Nutanix’s multi-cloud strategy and workload portability vision.
5. Omnissa Horizon AHV Integration: Nutanix announced support for Omnissa Horizon on the AHV hypervisor, simplifying VDI and app delivery through Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.
Key Benefits:
- Unified Management Platform: The integration allows for managing VDI deployments through a single, consistent platform, streamlining operations and reducing complexity.
- Enhanced Performance and Resilience: Leveraging Nutanix’s web-scale architecture, the solution offers high availability and performance, ensuring a reliable end-user experience.
- Simplified Application Delivery: Omnissa App Volumes dynamically delivers applications and user data to desktops, facilitating faster updates and minimizing user disruption.
- Cost Efficiency: By eliminating the need for separate hypervisor licenses and complex infrastructure layers, organizations can achieve a more cost-effective approach to VDI.
- Built-in Security: The solution includes Nutanix Data Lens, a SaaS-based data security tool that offers ransomware resilience, monitoring, and intelligent analytics.
This empowers IT teams to deliver reliable virtual workspaces across the enterprise’s footprint.
6. Simplified Kubernetes with Ubuntu Pro: A new partnership with Canonical brings Ubuntu Pro to the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), streamlining Kubernetes deployments and offering a secure, enterprise-ready Linux base for AI workloads.
Key features:
- Built-in Ubuntu Pro Support: Ubuntu Pro is now a built-in option for NKP Pro and Ultimate, providing a secure and stable Linux operating system tailored for AI workloads.
- Enhanced Security Features: Ubuntu Pro offers over 10 years of security maintenance, live kernel patching without system reboots, and support for FIPS 140 compliance, ensuring robust security for Kubernetes clusters.
- Operational Flexibility: While Ubuntu Pro is integrated, NKP maintains flexibility by allowing other operating systems to accommodate diverse infrastructure requirements.
This collaboration ensures NKP customers can operate AI workloads securely with long-term OS support.
7. Unified Citrix VDI Management with Prism Central: Nutanix introduced multi-cluster support for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops running on AHV, which is managed via Prism Central.
Capabilities:
- Unified Management: Administrators can manage multiple Citrix clusters from a single control plane, streamlining operations and reducing complexity.
- Optimized Image Management: Utilizing AHV versioned templates, the solution enables efficient sharing of master images across clusters, enhancing resource utilization.
- Versatile Multicloud Support: The integration supports seamless deployment across on-premises, public cloud, and hybrid environments, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, via Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2).
- Enhanced Security: Built-in, policy-driven security features allow for proactive assessment and mitigation of data security risks.
This simplifies VDI management across cloud and edge deployments.
8. Expanding the Security Ecosystem with NIST Alignment: Nutanix reinforced its security posture by expanding its partner ecosystem and aligning with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0.
New integrations include:
- Vulnerability Management: Integrations with Qualys and Tenable enable continuous monitoring and risk mitigation through native plug-ins and API integrations for Nutanix AOS and AHV. This provides customers with enhanced visibility into vulnerabilities and streamlined remediation processes.
- Privileged Access Management: Partnership with CyberArk strengthens the protection of privileged credentials by enforcing secure, auditable access and credential rotation policies, reducing the risk of credential misuse.
- Network Security: Collaborations with Check Point and Palo Alto Networks enhance network security measures, providing advanced threat prevention and secure connectivity.
- Data Protection: Integrations with Cohesity, HYCU, Rubrik, and Veeam offer robust data backup and recovery solutions, ensuring data integrity and availability.
- Endpoint and Identity Security: Partnerships with CrowdStrike and BigID enhance endpoint protection and data privacy compliance, respectively.
- Security Central: A centralized security management tool that offers visibility into security configurations and compliance status across the infrastructure.
- Flow Network Security: Provides micro-segmentation and advanced network security features to protect against lateral movement of threats within the network.
- Data Lens: Offers data governance and security analytics, enabling organizations to monitor data access patterns and detect anomalies.
These capabilities allow Nutanix customers to implement a defense-in-depth strategy across the full stack.
9. New Features for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2): To round out the announcements, Nutanix delivered several new updates for NC2, including:
- NC2 on Google Cloud – Public Preview: Nutanix announced that NC2 will enter public preview on Google Cloud starting June 20, 2025. This expansion allows organizations to run Nutanix workloads on Google Cloud, complementing existing support for AWS and Azure.
- Enhanced Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST): MST now supports Azure Blob Storage, enabling replication of Nutanix-based snapshots to Azure. This feature includes support for pilot light and zero-compute deployments, facilitating cost-effective disaster recovery solutions. Additionally, MST can now be deployed directly from the Prism Central marketplace, simplifying installation processes.
- Support for Elastic SAN on Azure: NC2 clusters on Azure can now utilize Elastic SAN volumes, allowing for scalable storage expansion without adding more bare-metal nodes. This flexibility supports dynamic storage needs and disaster recovery scenarios.
- Introduction of AWS i7 Bare-Metal Instances: Nutanix introduced support for AWS’s new i7 and i7ie bare-metal instances, featuring 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. These instances offer enhanced performance for AI and machine learning workloads, with improved cost efficiency and storage options.
- Networking Enhancements on AWS: Upcoming improvements include dedicated gateways for each VPC in AWS, enhancing resiliency and bandwidth. Additionally, NC2 will support increased VLAN subnets per cluster, allowing for more extensive network segmentation and management.
These updates further solidify NC2 as a robust platform for hybrid and multicloud operations.
Summary: With this wave of announcements, Nutanix continues to deliver on its hybrid multicloud promise, focusing on simplicity, flexibility, and performance. From AI to security and Kubernetes to VDI, .NEXT 2025 has positioned Nutanix as a leader in building the enterprise cloud stack of the future.
What Do You Think?
Is this something you’re excited about? Did we miss any features you’re curious about? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below—we’d love to hear from you!
