Next DC Recap 123
Overview
.Next 2025 in DC: Connections, Choice, and Clarity
Last week, I had the pleasure and privilege of attending the Nutanix .Next conference in Washington, DC, a city renowned for its monuments. For a few days, it became a beacon of innovation in IT infrastructure. It's always nice to spend a few days in DC, growing up there I almost took for granted how much there is to offer in that city.
This year marked my seventh attendance at .Next, and each time I am reminded why I continue to return. Over 5,000 customers and numerous partners gathered under one roof, not merely to discuss technology, but to connect, learn, and grow collectively.
This conference is more than discussions about product lines or the latest features. It highlights what Nutanix has become: a platform, an ecosystem, and a community with a focus on modernizing IT amidst constant change. While it originated with hyperconverged infrastructure, today it encompasses delivering flexibility, simplicity, and freedom of choice across the full stack.
As always, the most valuable aspect of .Next is not solely the presentations. It is the conversations in the hallways, reconnecting with colleagues, and the shared passion from customers, partners, and even competitors. The energy...
Was I Right?
In my post before .Next, I called out a few announcements I was watching for, so how'd I do? Let's recap what I called out before the conference:
- Pure was announced as a Platinum Sponsor. What's this all about?
- Omnissa Non-Persistent AHV support. Pretty please?
The Announcements: It’s All About Choice
This year’s announcements weren’t just evolutionary, they were directional. Nutanix is clearly leaning in on a strategy that emphasizes choice, flexibility, and ecosystem expansion, especially for customers looking to navigate a rapidly changing VMware world. Here are the standouts:
Omnissa Horizon Support for Nutanix AHV (Expected, but still Excited)
The foremost announcement for me was Omnissa’s official support for Horizon on Nutanix AHV.
Although this may not have been unexpected, it remains significant.
Reasons for its importance:
- It translates a long-standing request into a fully supported reality, officially validating AHV as a Horizon-ready hypervisor.
- Previously, Horizon on AHV was limited to manual desktop pools, which required individual management of desktops. Now, organizations can benefit from automated provisioning and instant clone workflows, enhancing scale and efficiency.
- It offers customers genuine freedom of choice in their VDI architecture, decoupling Horizon from VMware ESXi at a time when many organizations seek alternatives.
- Omnissa’s announcement is not only about compatibility, it is about empowering customers to design environments tailored to their needs rather than aligning with vendor preferences. Although anticipated, this development remains transformative.
PowerFlex Now GA with Nutanix: Enabling Disaggregated Scaling
Nutanix announced general availability of support for Dell PowerFlex, providing enhanced flexibility for customers seeking disaggregated infrastructure models. This integration allows deployment of Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) with AHV and AOS on PowerFlex compute nodes, utilizing an external PowerFlex storage cluster for shared storage.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) running on Dell PowerFlex brings together the simplicity of Nutanix with the flexibility of a disaggregated compute and storage architecture. This joint solution delivers high-performance virtualization, software-defined storage, and cloud-like scalability—all within the data center.
Let's take a look at the topology of a AHV + PowerFlex deployment, in the image below.
Compute Layer At the heart of this solution is a Nutanix compute cluster running on Dell PowerFlex nodes. These nodes host virtual machines using Nutanix AHV and AOS, installed on boot devices like Dell BOSS cards. The cluster has no direct-attached storage, instead consuming shared storage over IP from the PowerFlex storage layer. Nutanix handles VM availability, security, disaster recovery, and lifecycle management.
Storage Layer Underneath, the Dell PowerFlex software-defined storage cluster provides resilient, high-performance IP-based storage to the compute layer. It’s responsible for ensuring data persistence, reliability, and security while delivering the scalability and efficiency expected from modern infrastructure.
Together, this decoupled yet tightly integrated architecture offers a flexible and robust foundation for modern workloads—ready for whatever comes next in your hybrid cloud journey.
Reasons for its importance:
- Independent scaling of compute and storage, optimizing infrastructure investment.
- Combining Nutanix's simplicity with Dell’s versatile software-defined PowerFlex storage for operational flexibility.
- Supporting data protection, disaster recovery, and robust networking capabilities, ideal for hybrid cloud operations and scalable workloads.
This option enables organizations to modernize with Nutanix while leveraging existing Dell infrastructure investments meaningfully.
Nutanix + Pure Storage: Finally Official (But We All Knew It Was Coming)
Nutanix and Pure Storage have formalized their partnership, enabling scale-out block storage for AHV via Pure FlashArrays. This is an exciting one for me, only slightly behind Omnissa in the key announcements. I love the simplicty and scalability that Pure brings to external storage, their support is hands down amazing (and only second to Nutanix), and the product has never let me down.
While expected, this announcement validates the collaboration, and the customer demand for additional choices.
Much like with the PowerFlex architecture, Nutanix+Pure will leverage Compute nodes, with connectivity being provided to the Pure array via NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP). While details are still coming together, it does seem that those customers with Pure arrays providing connectivity via FC will be left out. Is that a miss? Not in my book. Nutanix can't support every topology out there!
Let's take a brief look at the topology of a AHV + Pure deployment, in the image below.
Reasons for its importance:
- Protecting customer investments by pairing Pure’s storage natively with Nutanix AHV.
- Offering hybrid flexibility with external FlashArray storage backing AHV clusters.
- Streamlining management through the Nutanix platform.
This relationship provides new options for customers in performance-heavy and storage-centric environments. I could hear all those Healthcare customers running Epic and using Pure for ODB and other heavy hitting databases cheering. Bring on the GRefs/s challenges!
FlashStack Featuring Nutanix
Not to miss out on an announcement, Cisco extended their FlashStack architecture with Pure Storage to include Nutanix. Cisco’s expansion of the FlashStack architecture to include validated designs for Nutanix AHV is a strategic move that gives customers more flexibility in how they modernize their data centers. By combining Cisco UCS compute and networking, Pure Storage’s all-flash performance, and Nutanix’s enterprise-grade hypervisor, AHV, organizations can now deploy a fully validated, cost-effective alternative to traditional virtualization platforms like VMware. This integrated solution offers:
- A validated reference architecture combining compute, networking, and storage.
- Rapid deployment of private cloud infrastructure with Nutanix software at the core.
- Simplified, scalable design suitable for standardizing across vendors.
This move highlights the growing Nutanix ecosystem and shared vision of choice, speed, and simplicity.
NCI Licensing - Where are you going?
NCP with Dell PowerFlex, and presumably at the release of NCP with Pure Storage, in both cases leveraging external storage, is available with the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure - Compute (NCI-C) license. I'm not sure how I feel about this, as I was burned a few times with the NCI-D license, which provided no support for running AHV, only ESXi. Will NCI-C provide a migration path if the customer in the future wants to move to a non-disaggregated architecture, can they move to NCI easily with some hardware additions?
Not Steering Away—Doubling Down on Customer Choice
Some may look at these announcements and wonder if Nutanix is shifting away from its hyperconverged roots. I see the opposite.
By enabling external storage on AHV and validating multi-vendor designs, Nutanix is doubling down on what matters most to customers: freedom of choice.
This isn’t about abandoning HCI. It’s about adapting HCI to meet customers where they are. Whether they’re consolidating storage, extending previous investments, or preparing for a hybrid cloud future, Nutanix continues to offer an experience that feels integrated and simple, regardless of what’s under the hood.
Scoot Club: Because Not Everything Happens in the Convention Center
While .Next is always packed with content, networking, and announcements - sometimes the best moments happen outside the conference agenda.
This year, several of us got together and kicked off what I proudly dubbed the DC Scoot Club. This became an impromptu nightly adventure hopping on scooters and cruising around the city. From scenic monuments to late-night laughs, we took in the sights, shared stories, and reminded ourselves that fun and connection are a big part of community too.
It was a blast, and honestly? A welcome reminder that even in tech, human connection is what powers real momentum.
Final Thoughts: A Comprehensive Platform
After seven .Next conferences, it is clear that Nutanix has evolved beyond its hyperconverged origins. This year in DC underscored that Nutanix isn't building infrastructure, but platform, and a community designed to support organizational modernization. My Key takeaways:
- Partnerships are increasingly important.
- Customers demand and deserve flexibility.
- Simplicity does not equate to compromise.
Join me this Thursday for a deeper dive into .Next announcements and their implications for your infrastructure and hybrid cloud journey.
I look forward to seeing you next year in Chicago, we're headed back to the Windy City. If we missed each other in DC, let’s connect over coffee, lunch, a bourbron or a scooter ride - very soon.
Thanks for reading!