Nutanix gets a bit more agnostic

With the intention of making its datacentre infrastructure solution even more hypervisor-agnostic, San Jose-based Nutanix has introduced a technology preview of its Nutanix OS (NOS) 3.5, which adds support for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 to the existing support for VMware vSphere and KVM.

Taking a hypervisor-agnostic approach to its software architecture has been a core part of the company’s goal of creating a common data fabric that powers hybrid enterprise datacentres that will need to accommodate different workloads running on multiple hypervisors.

Adding Microsoft’s widely used Hyper-V Server 2012 to the new release of the OS enables the most deployment scenarios, and the largest variety of virtualised private cloud workloads, under a single unified data fabric. The technology preview includes support for the Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol 3.0, which is used for providing shared access to files between nodes on a Windows-based network.

Nutanix Prism is a another addition to the new release. This is a completely redesigned User Interface to provide users with the same management tools for a Nutanix cluster, regardless of the underlying hypervisor.

The release also adds new functionality for VMware customers, including a validated SRA for vCenter Site Recovery Manager as well as a certified vSphere VAAI integration.

“By delivering our support for Microsoft Hyper-V, we have extended the benefits of our ground-breaking converged compute and storage platform to nearly all corners of the enterprise market,” said Howard Ting, vice president of marketing, Nutanix. “Companies of all sizes, regardless of budgetary constraints, will now benefit from the unprecedented scalability, performance and simplicity of our solution.”

It will be interesting to see when, or if, the company adds the Xen hypervisor, which is said to be the most widely used amongst big cloud service providers such as Amazon and Rackspace.