Nutanix Cloud Platform — Hyperconverged Virtualization
Hands-on Nutanix Cloud Platform — AHV, Prism, container services, AI and BCDR on the market-leading HCI foundation.
What a customer gets out of it
- Give customers hands-on time on the leading HCI platform rather than a slide deck
- Show AHV and Prism as a complete virtualization stack — hypervisor, storage and management in one
- Demonstrate what the HCI foundation carries above it: container services, enterprise AI and unified storage
- Walk a real BCDR architecture — snapshots, replication and the RPO/RTO trade-offs behind each tier
- Support like-for-like comparison against VMware VCF, OpenShift and HPE VME on identical lab hardware
Why it matters
Nutanix pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure and remains the leading HCI vendor, which puts it in nearly every datacenter refresh conversation — and, since Broadcom's repackaging of VMware, in most platform re-evaluations as well. Its argument is consolidation: one platform providing compute, storage, management, containers, AI and disaster recovery, with the hypervisor included rather than licensed separately. That is a claim customers should test rather than take on trust. A bookable Nutanix environment lets them run their own workloads on AHV, drive Prism themselves, and see what the surrounding stack actually does — then compare it directly against VMware, OpenShift and HPE VME running on the same hardware in the same lab.
Lab overview
No walkthrough is recorded for this demo yet, so this is a 21 sec tour of the lab and how to use it.
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Overview
This environment builds a Nutanix cluster across the lab's demo hypervisors, giving customers, SMEs and engineers hands-on time with the Nutanix Cloud Platform on real hardware — without touching a production estate.
Bookable as a guided demo, a hands-on POC, or a classroom for a group.
Why Nutanix
Nutanix created the hyperconverged category and remains the leading HCI vendor. Its position rests on a single idea: collapse compute, storage and management into one software platform on commodity servers, and remove the separate storage array and separate hypervisor licence along with it.
Everything else Nutanix sells is built on that same foundation — which is what makes it a platform conversation rather than a storage one, and why it appears in most datacenter refresh and platform-migration evaluations.
What you'll explore
- AHV — the built-in hypervisor, included with the platform rather than licensed separately. The line item most customers are doing the arithmetic on.
- AOS — the distributed storage fabric underneath: data locality, resilience and the self-healing behaviour that lets a node fail without a storage event.
- Prism — management and operations. Prism Element runs a cluster; Prism Central runs a fleet, and is where multi-cluster policy, automation and reporting live.
- Container services — NKP (Nutanix Kubernetes Platform), formerly Karbon, delivering managed Kubernetes on the same infrastructure and the same console as the VMs.
- Enterprise AI — running inference and AI services on-premises, next to the data, on the same cluster rather than a separate GPU silo.
- Unified storage — files, objects and block presented from the same platform, so it is not only a VM host.
BCDR architecture
Business continuity is a first-class part of the platform rather than a bolt-on, and this demo covers the architecture rather than just the feature list:
- Local snapshots and application-consistent recovery points
- Asynchronous and NearSync replication between sites, and the RPO each tier actually buys
- Nutanix Disaster Recovery (formerly Leap) — orchestrated, tested failover with runbooks
- Metro Availability — synchronous replication for zero-RPO, and the distance and latency constraints that come with it
The point of the section is the trade-offs: what each tier costs, what it protects against, and which one a given application actually needs.
What you'll learn
- Operating a complete HCI stack — hypervisor, storage and management as one system
- Where AHV genuinely replaces an existing hypervisor, and where it does not
- Running Kubernetes and AI workloads on the same platform as the VM estate
- Designing a BCDR tier that matches the recovery objective instead of over-buying it
- How Nutanix compares against VMware VCF, OpenShift and HPE VM Essentials — all four run on identical lab hardware, so the comparison is like-for-like