Reclaiming Control: Delivering Virtualization Freedom

The enterprise virtualization market is undergoing a major transition.

Recent licensing and pricing changes have forced many organizations to re-evaluate their virtualization strategies. Rising costs, increased complexity, and concerns about vendor lock-in are driving IT leaders to explore alternative approaches.

Industry observers expect a significant share of VMware workloads to migrate to alternative platforms ⁽¹⁾. This underscores the urgency for organizations to identify flexible, future-ready solutions.

For organizations, large-scale migrations can become costly, disruptive, and risky.

Today, that tradeoff disappears.

The solution brings together Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, with its included AHV hypervisor, and NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure. Planned for availability this Fall with an upcoming Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure release, the solution is designed to combine Nutanix compute powered by AHV with NetApp ONTAP storage using NFS connectivity.

The configurations are intended to give enterprises an option to modernize their virtualization platform while continuing to evaluate existing storage and server investments. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure can help separate the virtualization layer from the underlying storage infrastructure.

Modernize Without a Rip-and-Replace

One of the biggest advantages of the Nutanix and NetApp integration is flexibility.

Rather than forcing organizations into a disruptive infrastructure overhaul, the solution allows businesses to continue leveraging existing NetApp AFF and FAS storage arrays while adopting Nutanix and Nutanix AHV hypervisor as their virtualization platform.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for External Storage separates compute software from storage capacity. This gives organizations the freedom to modernize the virtualization layer while continuing to use trusted storage systems for business-critical workloads.

The result is a practical migration path that helps organizations:

• Evaluate the reuse of existing storage investments
• Plan migration requirements
• Continue using established operational processes, where supported

By separating the virtualization layer from storage, customers can evaluate additional options for their architecture and infrastructure spending.

Migrate Faster with Zero-Copy Data Conversion

Data migration is often the most challenging aspect of a virtualization transformation project. Moving large volumes of data can require months of planning, significant network resources, and temporary storage capacity.

Using Nutanix Move, organizations can automate workload migrations at scale, including network mapping and validation, enabling a smooth transition with minimal disruption. Nutanix and NetApp are working together to bring support for the NetApp Shift Toolkit soon, which gives customers greater flexibility to use Nutanix Move or NetApp Shift Toolkit to perform zero-copy migrations without moving the underlying data.

Instead of lengthy migration projects that require duplicate storage and extensive downtime windows, organizations can move workloads more efficiently while maintaining business continuity.

Operations Across Storage and Virtualization Teams

After migration, teams benefit from a clear separation of responsibilities.

Virtualization administrators can manage virtual machines and applications through the Nutanix Prism management console, benefiting from a simple, cloud-like operating experience. 

Storage administrators continue using familiar NetApp ONTAP tools and workflows to manage storage performance and storage efficiency services.

This approach allows both teams to maintain ownership of their respective environments without sacrificing integration or operational efficiency.

See It in Action

Virtualization freedom is no longer a future concept. It's here today.

Visit the Nutanix, NetApp, and Cisco teams at NetApp INSIGHT 2026 in Las Vegas, September 29 through October 1, to see live demonstrations of the joint solutions, explore migration architectures, and learn how to accelerate your transition with less risk and disruption.

The path to a more flexible, cost-effective, and future-ready virtualization strategy is now open.

For more information, visit www.nutanix.com.

1. ”VMware to lose 35 percent of workloads in three years – some to its friends at ‘proper clouds’”,  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor, The Register;  9/11/2025

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