Driving VM Agility, Simplicity and Efficiency: What’s New in the Latest AHV Release

By Rahul Devaruaju, Product Management, Nutanix, Bob Ball, Product Manager, Nutanix, Samina Diamond, Product Management Nutanix, Bill Parks, Product Marketing, Nutanix

December 15, 2025 3:08 pm |

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With the release of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 7.5, our native Nutanix AHV hypervisor comes packed with some fantastic updates. As organizations increasingly look for modern, resilient, and cost-effective virtualization, AHV has quickly become the platform of choice. This release doubles down on that promise, delivering massive storage flexibility, smarter automation, and additional enterprise capabilities.

Whether you're migrating from another hypervisor or scaling your existing Nutanix environment, these new AHV features are designed to simplify your operations and unlock new possibilities.

Operational Efficiency & Automation

Modern applications often consist of multiple tiers such as web, app and database that rely on each other to function correctly. During a host failure or full cluster restart, virtual machines (VMs) are brought back online automatically, but without any defined order. This can cause dependent services to start too early, leading to application failures or delays in recovery. Introducing VM Startup Policy which addresses this by letting administrators define the dependency between the applications/VMs. During high availability events or cluster restarts this function enables your applications to come back online in the correct order.

Customizing Windows VMs settings like domain name, password and IP addresses when deployed at scale can be cumbersome and potentially error-prone. Introducing Guest Customization Profiles to simplify the Windows guest customization by allowing an administrator to pre-define the settings to be customized. These settings can be applied during VM creation using Templates and Cloning, simplifying the bulk management of Windows VMs.

Performance of API calls and upgrades have also been a major focus in this release. There are improvements across many API operations, streamlining the process for many batch operations. This not only helps scaling up, but also general responsiveness across a very wide range of actions. The AHV upgrade experience has also been revamped, simplifying the process to upgrade AHV.

Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) “just works” better. When you clone a VM or deploy from a template, NGT configuration is preserved, eliminating the need for reconfiguration. NGT now supports up to 2048 VMs per cluster, and provides additional guest VM metrics like uptime and fully qualified domain name for better visibility.

For enhanced automation and integration, a new v4 API allows for programmatic launching of the VM console. This allows users to access their VMs without requiring full Nutanix Prism Central access and unlocks the ability to use this in your home grown management tools.

Enhanced Flexibility & Mobility

Do you have one cluster that’s low on storage while another has plenty to spare? Introducing Elastic VM Storage which helps you optimize storage usage across your infrastructure by allowing Nutanix HCI cluster to share its storage with other clusters within Prism Central. VMs can now be deployed using storage served from a different Nutanix HCI cluster, helping you make full use of available capacity, manage costs and potentially limit the need to purchase new nodes solely for additional storage.

Cross-Cluster Live Migration (CCLM) is now more flexible, allowing you to select a specific target storage container during migration, removing the requirement for identical container names across clusters. We have also added support for migrating VMs protected by Flow Network Security (FNS) policies across different Prism Central instances. Enabling mobility while maintaining security.

This new release of Nutanix AHV is more than a list of features. It’s a framework for building a more resilient, automated and efficient distributed sovereign cloud. It’s about giving you the control to enable your applications to run, the automation to free up your time and the flexibility to maximize your infrastructure investments.

For more information on NCI 7.5 and key features, please visit these supporting blogs:

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