The Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) is in the limelight as CIOs and IT leaders across industries look for alternative webscale hypervisors and enterprise IT software following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware*. The ten-year-old server virtualization software is a viable path for IT teams eager to migrate away from or counterbalance their reliance on VMware products. For others, AHV has been a bedrock of their software-defined, hybrid multicloud IT operations, which allow them to run and manage applications and data almost anywhere between private data centers and public cloud services.
AHV was born of humble yet ambitious beginnings, just a few short years after startup Nutanix hit the scene with its pioneering hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The impetus for turning some bespoke operational code into a viable hypervisor product came from a simple customer question: “Where’s your user interface?”
That’s what a customer in Japan asked Mike Cui, then a senior engineer at Nutanix, when he traveled to the organization in 2013 to set up a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. Initially, Cui was confused by the question.
“I thought the customer made the purchase because they were already familiar with KVM,” recalled Cui, who left Nutanix in 2019 to become a principal software engineer at AWS before his current role as senior staff software engineer at Google. “But he said: No, they knew it was an alternative hypervisor, but thought we had a GUI for it.”