A Look Back at Nutanix .NEXT 2025
US Signal |
Written by John Hein, US Signal Cloud Specialist
Let’s take a quick look back at Nutanix .NEXT 2025, held in Washington, D.C., from May 7–9. If you weren’t able to attend, here are a few of my favorite highlights worth catching up on.
Not-So-Secret Announcement: Disaggregated Storage
While it wasn’t exactly the world’s best-kept secret, Nutanix officially announced support for two non-hyperconverged storage platforms: Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage. These integrations enable both to act as primary storage services within the Nutanix Cluster architecture.
So why the pivot away from the traditional HCI-only approach? According to Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami, after 15 years of delivering HCI solutions, the company had only tapped into about 20% of the total addressable infrastructure market. His message was clear: technology never stands still, and neither can Nutanix.
For now, management is a mix of Prism Central and vendor-native tools. Full GA for Pure Storage is expected later this summer. Industry watchers expect more storage vendors to follow suit—my money’s on NetApp.
This shift blows the doors wide open for Nutanix to engage with enterprise customers entrenched in traditional 3-tier architectures. And with Broadcom’s recent changes to VMware’s licensing and business model, the timing couldn’t be better for many companies to give Nutanix a serious look—whether they’re in the middle of a refresh cycle or just reevaluating strategy.
FlashStack: Back to the Future?
Taking things a step further—and giving us strong VCE Vblock vibes—Nutanix announced FlashStack, a new reference architecture in partnership with Cisco and Pure Storage. GA is expected in late 2025.
Virtual Desktop Highlights
On the VDI front, we saw two major developments:
1. Citrix + AHV Integration
Nutanix and Citrix deepened their integration, focusing on centralized management through Prism Central. This brings policy-based management across clusters and leverages AHV’s versioned templates for streamlined image handling.
Additionally, NetScaler VPX is now integrated into Prism Central, consolidating load balancing, security, and performance optimization in one virtual appliance.
2. Omnissa (formerly VMware EUC) + Nutanix
This one surprised me. After nearly 7 years working with Nutanix-based solutions, I never thought I’d be sitting at a .NEXT session learning about Horizon. But here we are.
Omnissa (formerly VMware’s EUC division, now owned by KKR) announced Horizon 8 support on Nutanix AHV.
The beta program is expected soon with the following prerequisites:
- Nutanix HCI
- AHV 10.0.x
- AOS 7.0.x
- Prism Central 2024.3 or later
- Greenfield deployments only
Omnissa is rolling out Horizon with three tiers of partner licensing. If you’re interested in beta testing, here’s the link to sign up.
Migration Support Gets a Boost
With over 700 new customers per quarter, Nutanix continues to improve Nutanix Move, its core migration tool. Notable updates include:
- 1. Support for Dell PowerFlex
- 2. Performance improvements for in-place migrations
- 3. Firewall policy migration support, coming GA summer 2025
Multicloud Expansion: NC2 on Google Cloud
Nutanix added Google Cloud to its NC2 (Nutanix Cloud Clusters) portfolio, allowing customers to run the Nutanix stack natively on Google Z3 bare-metal instances. This expansion is now in public preview and gives customers yet another way to run workloads consistently across clouds.
Z3 Specs:
- 96 physical cores
- 1.5 TB RAM
- 72 TB NVMe SSD
Agentic AI: The Future is Autonomous
Finally, while there were plenty of announcements I couldn’t cover here, I’ll leave you with one of the more futuristic ones: Agentic AI.
Now part of the Nutanix AI portfolio, Agentic AI enables the deployment and management of autonomous AI agents across data centers, public clouds, and edge environments.
These agents are designed to:
- Operate autonomously
- Learn and adapt over time
- Make decisions with contextual understanding
Nutanix demoed an AI agent that could generate a legal document and instantly translate it into multiple languages. Cool stuff—and yes, maybe just a tiny step closer to the worlds of Terminator and The Matrix. Just kidding… mostly.
