Nutanix teams up with Microsoft Azure for a seamless hybrid experience

Nutanix announced a new partnership with Microsoft that will enable both companies to deliver a hybrid solution with seamless application, data, and license mobility as well as unified management across on-premises and Azure environments, using Nutanix Clusters on Azure.

“With this partnership, Microsoft and Nutanix show our commitment to delivering a true, unified hybrid and multi-cloud environment,” said Tarkan Maner, Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix. “We know customers are looking for solutions to truly — and simply — advance their cloud journey. This partnership helps us deliver a single software stack across public and private clouds, resulting in increased agility, streamlined operations, and significant cost savings.”

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and AI, at Microsoft Corporation, said, “Many companies face complexities when managing hybrid cloud environments across private and public clouds. We are excited to collaborate with Nutanix to give customers flexibility and a seamless experience with hybrid Nutanix and Azure solutions.”

As a result of the partnership, Nutanix and Microsoft will deliver:

• Nutanix Clusters on Azure: As part of this collaboration, both companies will focus on extending the Nutanix hybrid cloud infrastructure to Azure. The collaboration will include the development of Nutanix-ready nodes on Azure to support Nutanix Clusters and services. Customers running workloads on Nutanix Clusters on Azure will benefit from Azure Hybrid Benefit as well as extended security updates to improve cost, security, and efficiency. They will also be able to deploy and manage Azure instances from Nutanix’s management interface. This will deliver a consistent experience, tooling, and operational practices. Most importantly, it will enable customers to run hybrid workloads seamlessly across private and public clouds without needing to rearchitect their applications. This solution aims to provide the flexibility of choosing the right cloud for each workload, without the operational and technical challenges of managing multiple environments, potentially resulting in significant cost savings to the customer.
• Seamless Procurement and Support: Microsoft and Nutanix will collaborate to offer customers seamless sales and support experiences. Microsoft Azure customers will be able to use their existing Azure credits, as part of Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), to purchase Nutanix software; in turn, Nutanix customers will be able to port their existing term licenses to Nutanix Clusters on Azure or get on-demand consumption of Nutanix software through the Azure Marketplace, enabling frictionless movement between private and public clouds within Azure. Additionally, to deliver a truly end-to-end hybrid experience to customers, Nutanix and Microsoft Azure will partner to provide customer support.
• Integration with Azure Arc: Nutanix and Microsoft will also enable managing servers, containers, and data services on Nutanix HCI, on-premises, or in Azure, through the Azure Arc control plane. This integration will allow customers to extend key Azure services to their Nutanix environment, including running Azure Arc servers, Azure Arc containers, and Azure Arc data services, adopting Azure cloud practices on-premises, and extending Azure security anywhere.

All features and capabilities are currently under development, in preview with select customers. More information on the partnership is available here.