Empowering Enterprises & Service Providers: Migrations to Nutanix Projects

The Nutanix Move migration tool 6.3.0 now supports Nutanix’s Projects platform initiative, empowering Service Providers (SPs) and Large Enterprises to seamlessly migrate VMs and security policies into multi-tenant Nutanix environments built on Nutanix.

Architectural Overview: Hierarchical Tenancy Model

The diagram below illustrates the high-level architecture of this hierarchical multi-tenant model:

Core Components Breakdown

• Foundational Layer (Prism Element): At the base, a Prism Element (PE) represents a physical cluster of nodes—the foundation of Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). These clusters can run distributed AOS storage across HCI nodes or consist of compute nodes connected to external storage. Clusters can be geographically distributed across multiple datacentres worldwide.
• Centralized Management Layer (Prism Central): Prism Central (PC) provides a single-pane-of-glass management plane for one or more Prism Element clusters. It delivers advanced capabilities including monitoring, VM lifecycle management, and unified security policies across the infrastructure. 
• Management & Multi-Tenancy (Nutanix Central & SP Central): To scale efficiently, Service Providers deploy Nutanix Central (NC) to manage all underlying Prism Central (PC) instances. Within Nutanix Central, a logical construct called a Domain establishes a 1:1 mapping with each Prism Central instance.
• Shared Responsibility Framework: Nutanix Central and all managed underlying infrastructure clusters fall under the management domain of the Service Provider along with infrastructure security.Tenants maintain sole responsibility for the administration, configuration, and security of their hosted virtual machines and applications.
• Tenant Onboarding & Allocation: Onboarding a tenant into SP Central (Nutanix Central) allocates resource quotas across designated domains. Providers can restrict regional domain access to align with tenant preferences. Although domains can be shared, multi-tenancy and logical separation remain enforced at every layer. Isolation across compute, storage, and networking is supported through AHV control mechanisms, isolated VPCs, and dedicated storage containers per tenant. 

Tenant Workflows and Projects 

1. User Onboarding: Onboarding automatically creates a Tenant Admin, who can subsequently onboard additional users with specific roles (e.g., Tenant Consumer).
2. Project Scoping: Under the hood, each tenant is automatically mapped to a Project. All workloads, policies, and data remain strictly isolated within the scope of that specific Project.

Migrating Workloads with Nutanix Move

Nutanix Move enables Service Providers to migrate tenant's Virtual Machines (VMs) from VMware environments directly into target Nutanix SP Central tenant projects.

Migration Setup and Workflow

• Deployment: Service Providers can deploy Nutanix Move within their default internal administrative project.
• VM Selection: Providers construct migration plans using built-in Move filtering options, such as VM names, tags, or vSphere Resource Pools.
• Target Mapping: A migration plan maps to a single Project Tenant. This automatically restricts VM target selection to Nutanix containers scoped strictly within that tenant's project boundaries.
• Ownership Assignment: Providers assign the appropriate tenant user as the owner of the target VMs for proper post-migration access control.
• Advanced Features: All core Move features are available and work as is, including IP address retention, Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) installation, VM tag-to-Nutanix category mapping, and post-migration script execution via Nutanix Self-Service.

Joint Responsibility Model: Provider & Tenant Collaboration

Migrating workloads from VMware to Nutanix involves coordinated execution between the Service Provider and the tenant across two key stages:

1. VM Preparation (Tenant Domain)

Tenants must prepare their source VMs by installing the necessary Nutanix VirtIO drivers required for AHV compatibility.

Note: Nutanix Move automatically generates an offline driver bundle within the migration plan. Service Providers can share this package—along with command-line instructions—with tenants to execute on Windows or Linux VMs prior to migration starting.

2. Cutover Execution (Provider & Tenant Coordinated)

Migrating from ESXi to AHV requires a brief maintenance window where source VMs are powered off, a final data sync occurs, and target VMs are powered on. Once VM preparation is verified and both parties agree on a schedule, the Service Provider can trigger the cutover during the scheduled time.

Upon completion, migrated VMs appear directly in the tenant's SP Central view for immediate use, while Service Providers can monitor infrastructure-level status within Prism Central.

Conclusion

With Projects integration, Nutanix Move helps Service Providers, whether using VMware Cloud Director (VCD) or non-VCD setups,  deliver a unified path to transition workloads into a multi-tenant Nutanix architecture.

In addition to VMs, providers can migrate existing VMware NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) security policies or create fresh policies on the Nutanix side. This capability equips both Service Providers and tenants with a streamlined, secure route to modern hyperconverged infrastructure.

For more information on Nutanix Move please visit the product page:

https://www.nutanix.com/products/move

For read more about Nutanix Service Provider Central:

https://www.nutanix.com/blog/scaling-multi-tenant-services-for-next-generation-of-service-providers

© 2026 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo, and all Nutanix product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom. VMware and the VMware product names (including VMware ESXi and VMware NSX) recited herein are registered or unregistered trademarks of Broadcom in the United States and/or other countries.Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s)

This content may contain express and implied forward-looking statements, which are not historical facts and are instead based on our current expectations, estimates and beliefs. The accuracy of such statements involves risks and uncertainties and depends upon future events, including those that may be beyond our control, and actual results may differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements. Any forward-looking statements included herein speak only as of the date hereof and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update or otherwise revise any of such forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. Any future product or product feature information is intended to outline general product directions, and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation for Nutanix to deliver any functionality. This information should not be used when making a purchasing decision.