Nutanix announced Acropolis in June 2015 that is based on Linux KVM. Along with that, they added Prism to simplify management of their hyperconverged infrastructure and VMs. For a long time Nutanix was only built as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This makes it hard to justify replacing VMware if you just made a capital expense purchase in servers or storage. However, as of December 2025, Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage have been added as supported storage integration, this was a great move to open those that have made a recent storage investment to be able to consider Nutanix for workloads. They also have some server alliance partnerships to run their hypervisor on other supported compute platforms. Nutanix is a publicly traded company with over 7,000 employees globally.
From a use case perspective, I feel it fits for small remote offices and large enterprise or IaaS hosting environments. Nutanix also has multi-tenant isolation capabilities built in including self-service VM, App, and S3 object storage, along with integrated database and Kubernetes management inside a single UI. Nutanix also had built in replication for DR as part of their Prism Central platform, which is a great option for customers who are looking for a second site copy.
From a Veeam perspective, Nutanix is the third longest supported hypervisor with initial availability released in June 2018. Feature parity is close to VMware, with application aware processing, support for restoring from Nutanix snapshots within the Veeam UI, support for backups from Nutanix secondary replicated snapshots, instant VM recovery, mount disks in read only mode for threat scanning. Additionally, Veeam recently added support for Nutanix Projects and will continue to improve functionality and features around this for service providers.
I feel Nutanix is a good fit for most use cases and customers, especially with the current move to support some external storage. Add to the only other hypervisor that Veeam has storage snapshot integration for recovery inside the Veeam UI and Nutanix working on development for IaaS multi-tenant hosting and it is worth looking into. They also have global support and dedicated sales team, combined with the built-in replication and DR capabilities make it a viable option. And to add some thought for home lab and learning, they do offer a free CE (community edition) that can be used for those of us that learn by doing. There are a few community hub posts of building this out. Be aware, it does take a good amount of resources to run, but I think it is always beneficial to be able to lab tech out for better understanding and overall knowledge.
