Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Modern virtualized environments demand superior datacenter architecture. Specifically, to handle the explosion of virtual machines (VMs) and the I/O needs of today’s enterprise, there is a growing need for converged architectures. Indeed, converged datacenter infrastructures are capable of offering services more economically and efficiently, with fewer dedicated resources. Such an infrastructure can combine disparate compute and storage resources into a single, unified system.

Nutanix, a provider of next-generation datacenter infrastructure solutions, recently announced that its Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform, a converged infrastructure solution, now supports Microsoft (News - Alert) Corp.’s Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V.

“By offering support for Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V, our customers can now run workloads on the hypervisor of their choice,” said Rajiv Mirani, vice president of engineering, Nutanix, in a statement.

 “Native Microsoft support provides feature parity for all datacenter capabilities so there is zero compromise of server or storage functionality regardless of the hypervisor deployed,” he explained.

Nutanix already supports VMware vSphere and KVM. By extending its support to Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 storage and virtualization protocols, Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform aims to offer wider range of hypervisor platforms and compatibility for a variety of enterprise workloads, including services such as Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange.

The new release is designed to offer a high-performance and storage-efficient infrastructure for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp running on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V. In line with this effort, Nutanix has also unveiled new reference architecture for assisting customers.

Mike Schutz, general manager of product marketing at Microsoft, believes that this new support for Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V will allow both companies to better deliver consistency, scalability, and flexibility in heterogeneous environments that use the Nutanix converged infrastructure platform.