Nutanix Is Navigating Migration Times, Cost To Meet VMware Opportunity

'We just continue to add those new feature sets and new (vendor) partners as we go forward,' Nutanix’s Jim de la Pena says.

The opportunity for solution providers to migrate VMware customers to alternatives is well understood by the channel–and one of those vendors positioning themselves as that best alternative, Nutanix, is at work navigating the costs and time needed for that migration to meet growing demand while continuing to innovate its platform.

Jim de la Pena, Nutanix’s director of Americas service providers, told a crowd of solution providers gathered Tuesday at XChange March 2025–which is hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company and held this week in Orlando–that VMware migrations have been getting easier for Nutanix partners.

More tools are available for automatically moving virtual machines (VMs), de la Pena said. Nutanix has seen a “flood” of requests over the past 18 months for native support of the San Jose, Calif.-based cloud technologies vendor’s Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

“Even where those were barriers before, companies are moving very quickly to become integrated within the hypervisor itself,” he said. “We just continue to add those new feature sets and new (vendor) partners as we go forward.”

Nutanix, VMware Migrations

CRN has reached out to VMware parent Broadcom for comment. Broadcom closed on its acquisition of VMware in November 2023.

Hermann Masser, CEO of Masser Technologies, an El Paso, Texas-based solution provider, told CRN in an interview that he is hunting for a VMware alternative. He said customers of his across a variety of industries are looking for migration options.

“It's going to be a change for everybody, but I felt that it was very important to make a quick move and try to capitalize on these opportunities because there's going to be a short period of time to make any changes,” he said.

The migration dilemma has been hitting his customers with annual renewals coming up, but Masser expects another wave of migrations for customers on three-year terms and even five-year ones.

“It's been like a grieving process where it was hard at the beginning, then you have to come to terms with the idea that you need to move forward,” he said. “Now we are starting to see opportunities.”

An account executive for a large national systems integrator, who did not want to be identified, praised Nutanix for stepping up to help customers and partners in the wake of the Broadcom VMware changes that include price increases of 100 to 300 percent.

“We’ve done a lot of joint engagements with the Nutanix team,” said the executive. “They have an A class sales team and have been great collaborators with us. They bring the right people to the table and are helping us move our deals (to get customers off VMware) forward. We are now at the point where we’re able to win business together. It’s been a great partnership.”

The account executive said the Broadcom-VMware changes have created a “trust” issue with customers that has opened up an opportunity to work with Nutanix. “Even if it makes sense from an ROI (return on investment) perspective to stay with VMware they are still looking to explore alternatives,” the executive said. “They have lost trust in the Broadcom-VMware support and their ability to access Broadcom resources. Nutanix has built a strong and trusted brand for customers.”

The VMware changes have also shined a spotlight on the danger of lock in with a single vendor. “VMware owned that market for so long that customers did not really understand how dependent they were on that technology,” the executive said. “It has kind of opened up a whole new conversation with how customers look at their infrastructure.”

Nutanix Platform, Partner Program Investments

To meet the increased demand for migrations from VMware, Nutanix has invested in online training and certification for its technology and its partner program as well as hired engineers, de la Pena told the crowd. Nutanix will work with services providers on enabling products built on Nutanix, differentiating those products, sales team training, marketing and more.

Service providers are “a core rapid market for Nutanix,” he said. “It's not going to be an afterthought. It will be something that we're really doubling down investing in.”

Nutanix has also created a variety of product packages, with myriad software levels and types for partners to productize, and it has been looking at ways to help solution providers bridge the gap between licenses, such as short-term subscriptions. “It is one of the bigger challenges,” de la Pena said.

Nutanix offers term-based and consumption-based license models. The vendor also doesn’t penalize users for going over their commitment.

“Whatever your negotiated rate is is your negotiated rate,” he said. “If you go over your commit, you pay what's on your rate card. And you're able to raise that commit at any point during your contract so that you would reap the benefits of lower costs.”

Nutanix is also growing beyond infrastructure, with growth in its unified storage platform customers and adding capabilities around artificial intelligence and containers to its stack–although de la Pena said that the type of customers looking to containers tend to be larger enterprises leveraging hyperscalers such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

“Can you have a platform that will support both VMs and containers at the same time? That's Nutanix’s platform vision,” he said. “Our value would be, not that you're really going to get a ton of container business day one, but you will get the container business at some point in the future. They continue to build more and more apps that way. … We are moving very quickly to be able to support containers because Nutanix knows that's the next wave.”

Solution providers and customers are hunting for VMware alternatives, going to the public cloud and even looking to open-source opportunities–although de la Pena said that his team doesn’t run into open-source competition much.

Christian Goffi, Nutanix’s vice president of Americas ecosystem sales, told the crowd that containers appear to be the chosen method for AI. “It's going to ramp,” he said.

Asked during the talk about Nutanix’s potential of getting acquired and solution providers facing a VMware situation with a different vendor.

De la Pena said that “right now, all I can tell you is, we're not hearing any of that,” but “there's always the potential of acquisition, especially if you're a growing company that's profitable with a good product line.”