Nutanix .NEXT first day

When I got to the key note this morning, the word was out that there would be some pretty cool announcements be made. And that was the fact.

One of the biggest announcements is Acropolis.
This is Nutanix own hypervisor platform with there management interface Prism. The hypervisor is based on KVM but is modified to run optimal with Nutanix filesystem. Acropolis is not the name of the hypervisor but the solution. And it can not only manage KVM but also VMware and Hypev-V. During the key-note we saw a a demo that a ESXi hosts was reinstalled with KVM managed from the Prism interface.
The vision of Nutanix is a multi-hypervisor world were you put your workload on the hypervisor you think it best fits. Al managed from one interface. Even the creation of one or more VMs are done from Prism.

I must say that I’m impressed with the capabilities of Acropolis. One single interface for multiple hypervisors. Nice!

I don’t think that a company want to run multiple hypervisor in there environment. Even if it’s managed from one interface. Every hypervisor must be managed and configured for performance, security and patches. Same goes for upgrades. Most company will choose one hypervisor as there standard.

On the other hand, if you choose for a web scale solution like Nutanix, you have the possibility to change your hypervisor without loosing your management interface. Reducing the learning curve for your IT department. And you have to possibility to use a different (cheaper) hypervisor for you R&D or LAB environment.

Some other features of Acropolis are:

• Ip address management for virtual machines.
• Collection of statistics of different hypervisors.
• HA scheduler
• VM console (done with VNC)
• Configuring network settings for VMs.

Beging a old Novell consultant/trainer I’m pleased that a open source project as KVM gets a boost for the enterprise with a company like Nutanix. Although not everything is possible at the moment (VDI for example) I’m confinced this is only a matter of time.

I’m impressed with the work that Nutanix has done in the last 5 years and I’m curious whats coming .NEXT.