Embracing Nutanix AHV: A Financial Services Firm’s Journey to a Future-Proofed Citrix Environment

A leading financial services company in the EMEA region has long relied on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to empower its workforce with virtual desktops and applications. With a substantial Citrix footprint that included both VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and Shared Hosted Desktops, the company had been running its operations on traditional storage and server infrastructure paired with a well-established hypervisor. Given its significant investments in automation, tooling, and institutional knowledge, the firm initially opted to maintain its existing hypervisor when it embarked on its Nutanix journey a few years ago. This approach allowed them to leverage the advanced capabilities of the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution while preserving the value of their prior investments.

However, the landscape shifted when the vendor providing the client’s long-term hypervisor was acquired by another tech giant. This acquisition created the prospect of significant price increases that threatened to disrupt the financial predictability and cost-efficiency the firm had meticulously cultivated. Faced with this challenge, the customer began exploring alternatives to mitigate the threat of rising costs and potential dependency on a single vendor. Nutanix AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor) quickly emerged as a viable solution, prompting the firm to initiate a proof of concept (POC) to evaluate its performance in a real-world setting.

Nutanix AHV: A Modern, Enterprise-Grade Hypervisor

Nutanix AHV is an enterprise-grade, built-in hypervisor designed to simplify and streamline virtual infrastructure management. As a critical component of Nutanix's HCI platform, AHV eliminates the need for separate licensing costs associated with third-party hypervisors, offering a seamless and integrated experience. It supports various workloads, including virtual desktops and applications, with robust security features and simplified operations through Nutanix's management platform, Prism. AHV is optimized for performance and efficiency, allowing organizations to achieve high user density without sacrificing the user experience.

The Proof of Concept: Testing Nutanix AHV in a Real-World Citrix Environment

To assess the viability of transitioning to Nutanix AHV, the financial services firm collaborated closely with Nutanix to design a comprehensive POC. This was not a controlled lab test but rather a live workload scenario that reflected the actual demands of the business. The company's project team, comprised of seasoned IT professionals and Citrix experts, created a new virtual machine image tailored for Nutanix AHV, integrating the latest VirtIO drivers to ensure optimal performance.

The primary goal of this POC was to match or exceed the current user density achieved with the existing hypervisor, all while maintaining—or ideally enhancing—performance levels. Early adopters within the organization were selected to participate, providing candid and actionable feedback on their experience. The POC proved to be a resounding success. The tests revealed a 29% increase in user density on Nutanix AHV, achieved without any degradation in performance. 

This outcome underscored Nutanix AHV’s capability to deliver cost savings and significant operational efficiencies. By enabling higher user density, the financial services firm could further optimize its infrastructure, reducing the total cost of ownership while enhancing the user experience. 

As a result, the firm can transition more of its Citrix workloads to Nutanix AHV thus reducing costs as AHV is already in the Nutanix stack. More importantly, now that AHV is proven as a hypervisor, it can be rolled out to many other workloads at the company, with confidence that this move would future-proof its infrastructure and shield it from risks of increased prices due to the acquisition of the legacy vendor. This POC began a broader transformation, setting the stage for further innovation and operational excellence. 

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