How VMware Inspired Nutanix AHV

Wikibon has a great analysis of the pending VMware acquistion by Broadcom, Broadcom Aims to Tame the VMware Beast. The article includes several mentions of Nutanix, providing an excuse to tell the story of how VMware inspired development of Nutanix’s competing HCI-integrated hypervisor, AHV.

When I first joined Nutanix in March of 2013 to launch the company’s Americas channel program, the company was still a small startup and many of us wore multiple hats. Since the company lacked a formal partner alliances person, I drew upon my deep relationships at both Citrix and VMware to help move the fledgling partnerships along.

Nutanix's relationship with VMware was very good in those days. The HCI pioneer only supported the VMware hypervisor, and it won Best of VMworld Awards in 2011, 2012, and in 2013. ?Nutanix even included an evaluation copy of VMware ESX already installed on every node.

Around 2014, things unraveled in a big way. Perhaps it was due to VMware’s plans for their own HCI solution or perhaps it was retribution for all the VMware employees joining Nutanix. Whatever the reason, VMware forbade the practice of including its evaluation licenses. The sudden change in policy left Nutanix in a panic.

An extremely resourceful and innovative startup, Nutanix engineers quickly developed Nutanix Foundation which allowed administrators to completely bootstrap, deploy and configure a bare-metal Nutanix cluster from start-to-end in matter of minutes. Foundation also installed VMware ESX as part of the setup.

Before too long, Nutanix also supported both Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. But during the development of Foundation, one of the engineers on the project brought up an interesting question: “With the increasing popularity of KVM, why do we need to rely on VMware or any proprietary hypervisor? Why not add the management, security, and resiliency capabilities to KVM necessary to make it enterprise-grade, and then include it with every node?

And that was the genesis of Nutanix AHV which first debuted in 2015. Its ease of deployment, management simplicity, and high performance quickly won acceptance not only by customers, but also support by other software manufacturers including both Citrix and Microsoft. Today, 57% of Nutanix cores run AHV. Some newer solutions, such as Nutanix Cloud on Equinix Metal and Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), do not support ESX at all.