Nutanix expands NCP, AI and ecosystem at .NEXT

At its .NEXT Conference in Chicago on April 7, 2026, Nutanix announced extensive new capabilities for the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) designed to support expanding AI workloads, more complex hybrid multicloud environments and constrained hardware supply. The company said NCP aims to help customers modernize virtual machines and containers while maintaining flexibility, performance and cost predictability.

NCP is positioned to let organizations make better use of existing infrastructure and choose from a broad ecosystem of hardware vendors, hyperscalers, neoclouds and service providers. Nutanix highlighted zero-copy migrations from VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes to AHV vDisks, which are generally available and designed to enable near-instant, in-place workload conversion without data duplication.

Nutanix announced its Agentic AI solution, a full-stack software solution unveiled at NVIDIA (NVDA) GTC on March 16, 2026, and currently in early access, which is designed to help enterprises build and operate AI applications on NCP. The full solution, expected in the second half of 2026, will provide a secure, high‑performance virtualization foundation that integrates compute, storage, networking and Kubernetes services.

Separately, Nutanix said it will extend its Nutanix Agentic AI solution in the second half of 2026 to support neocloud providers, with new multitenant and AI management capabilities delivered through Nutanix Service Provider Central. These include strong tenant isolation, granular resource management and a catalog of GPU‑aaS, K8S‑aaS, VM‑aaS, Notebooks‑aaS, VectorDB‑aaS and Models‑aaS offerings.

Enhancements to Nutanix Cloud Manager add monitoring and usage‑based metering so providers can track and bill based on GPU usage, API calls or model consumption. Nutanix said these capabilities are intended to help neocloud builders operate distributed AI infrastructure as a service while maintaining operational control.

Nutanix also announced that NetApp ONTAP is planned to be integrated into Nutanix Agentic AI to help accelerate AI innovation, and that its Nutanix Database Service now has a certified integration with MongoDB Ops Manager, generally available, to automate provisioning and lifecycle management across infrastructure and database environments.

Nutanix introduced NKP Metal, an extension of the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform that brings Kubernetes directly to bare‑metal infrastructure. NKP Metal is in early access for NKP PRO and NKP ULT customers and is expected to reach general availability in the second half of 2026. It is designed to deliver the performance required for edge environments and AI training workloads using dense GPU infrastructure.

The company said NKP Metal extends its operating model and HCI stack to bare‑metal Kubernetes, combining automated lifecycle management with Cloud Native AOS data services. Organizations can run containers directly on physical servers while maintaining automation, networking and enterprise data services consistent with virtualized environments.

Complementing compute and Kubernetes updates, Nutanix announced Data Lens 2.0, generally available and able to run fully on‑premises, including air‑gapped environments, bringing ransomware analytics, data audit and governance to sovereign and dark‑site deployments. Nutanix Unified Storage 5.3 is also generally available, expanding Smart Tiering to Google Cloud (GOOGL) and OVHCloud S3 and adding multitenant object scaling and quotas for large AI data lakes, with RDMA acceleration for S3‑compatible storage planned later in 2026.

Nutanix and NetApp announced a strategic alliance to integrate NetApp Intelligent Data Infrastructure, built on NetApp enterprise storage systems and ONTAP, with NCP and the Nutanix AHV hypervisor later in 2026. The joint solution is designed to deliver built‑in cyber resilience, VM‑granular operations, simplified administration and NFS‑based integration aimed at fast VM migration using NetApp Shift toolkit and Nutanix Move.

The collaboration is intended to let customers separate scaling of compute and storage, modernize virtualization and the hypervisor layer, and prepare for future containerized workloads. NCP with NetApp AFF all‑flash A‑series and select FAS hybrid‑flash systems, and Cisco (CSCO) collaboration on FlexPod with Nutanix, are expected to be available later this year.

Separately, Nerdio announced a strategic technology alliance with Nutanix to extend Nerdio Manager’s Azure Virtual Desktop orchestration and management to NCP. Nerdio is prioritizing NCP as the first hybrid Azure Virtual Desktop environment integrated into Nerdio Manager and has launched a private preview at Nutanix .NEXT 2026, giving organizations a new path to modernize legacy VDI while managing desktop images on Nutanix AHV.

Nutanix Service Provider Central (SP Central), currently in early access, introduces new multitenancy capabilities that allow service providers to deliver hosted infrastructure and AI services on NCP with logical isolation between tenants. It is expected to be generally available in the second half of 2026 and underpins the multitenancy framework for Nutanix Agentic AI.

To support cloud sovereignty, Nutanix is expanding Nutanix Cloud Clusters to additional hyperscaler environments, including AWS GovCloud, which is generally available, and AWS European Sovereign Cloud, expected later this year. Future support for Hyperdisk and C3 bare‑metal instances with NC2 on Google Cloud (GOOGL) in the second half of 2026 is planned to give customers more options for scaling storage and compute independently.

Nutanix Cloud Manager 2.0 is generally available with a new architecture for multisite, multidomain management across large deployments. It introduces a secure onboarding workflow for multiple Prism Central instances and brings Cost Governance on‑premises, unifying AIOps, self‑service and cost management in a single interface.

Nutanix said it is undertaking the broadest expansion of infrastructure support in its history, strengthening integrations across partners including Cisco (CSCO), Dell, Everpure, HPE, Lenovo (0992.HK), AMD, Intel (INTC), NetApp and others. The new Foundation Central appliance is designed to simplify deployment of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and AHV on servers from major OEMs and the NX platform.

Available and planned integrations include synchronous disaster recovery support for Dell PowerFlex, expanded Everpure support, additional AMD CPU and planned GPU‑accelerated systems, expanded Cisco (CSCO) collaborations including Unified Edge and AI Pod, forthcoming Dell PowerStore and PowerFlex Ultra5 support, Lenovo (0992.HK) ThinkSystem storage and XC One automation, and planned support for NetApp ONTAP external storage later this year.