Nutanix AHV

Nutanix AHV is the hypervisor built into Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, running virtual machines and containers with what the vendor describes as licence free virtualization. It is not sold separately from the platform, which is the central fact about how it is bought and the main reason organisations evaluate it against a separately licensed hypervisor.

Removing the hypervisor licence is the commercial argument and it lands differently depending on where a buyer is starting from. For an organisation already committed to Nutanix infrastructure, the hypervisor stops being a separate line item, a separate renewal and a separate vendor relationship. The trade is that the hypervisor and the infrastructure platform come from one supplier, which simplifies support and reduces cost while concentrating the dependency.

Ease of management is the second theme, with the vendor emphasising intuitive tooling and automated workflows for the routine work of creating, moving and maintaining virtual machines. Day to day virtualization administration is mostly repetitive, so the value of automation here is measured in hours returned to a small infrastructure team.

Enterprise capability is where AHV has to match the incumbents to be credible, and Nutanix states the hypervisor includes the advanced features needed to meet demanding service level agreements. It sits alongside AOS Storage, Nutanix Flow for network security and Nutanix Disaster Recovery within the wider Cloud Infrastructure product set.