One of the most important customer benefits of the alliance partnership between Citrix and Nutanix lies in our joint commitment to solution integration. In 2016, Nutanix announced its Citrix MCS Plugin for Acropolis. It was followed up in 2017 with integrated support for the Citrix XenServer hypervisor and earlier this month, Nutanix announced its Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) Plugin for Acropolis. Each of these solutions not only makes it easier for you to deploy and manage Citrix components directly from the Nutanix Prism console, but also each gives you peace of mind with the reassurance that these integrations are jointly developed and supported.
Flexibility is another key benefit, as Nutanix delivers choice of the physical infrastructure on which you can run Nutanix. Nutanix is already known for supporting deployments on a wide range of infrastructure platforms — including IBM and SuperMicro servers — and Nutanix goes even further with direct OEM partnerships with Lenovo and DellEMC. Nutanix has teamed with DellEMC and Lenovo to deliver hyperconverged appliances that natively integrate compute, storage and virtualization into turnkey systems — systems that leverage the integration capabilities with Citrix that I just described above.
In his recent blog post, Steve Blacklock, Citrix VP of Global Strategic Alliances, mentioned that Nutanix was the first of our strategic alliance partners to bring to market a verified Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance solution. Nutanix InstantOn for Citrix Cloud (Workspace) brings hybrid cloud to reality with a built-in feature that comes with Nutanix AOS versions 5.5+ that provides automated integration with the Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service. This enables the fastest path to deploy hybrid cloud for Citrix Workspaces — consuming the app and desktop delivery platform as a cloud service — while spinning up your workloads on your Nutanix infrastructure on-premises.
InstantOn for Citrix Cloud makes it possible to deploy a complete hybrid cloud virtual app and desktop deployment in as little as two hours. It moves the responsibility of managing and maintaining the Citrix components from the customer to Citrix. The Citrix control plane is managed as-a-service in the cloud and apps and data are kept on-premises. This strategy delivers what many Citrix customers have been asking for — a true hybrid cloud solution with increased assurance of data control, security and manageability.
Because automated connectivity to Citrix Cloud Services is a feature of Nutanix AOS, this means it’s now available to be deployed on Nutanix OEM partner infrastructure. If you prefer to deploy Nutanix on Lenovo infrastructure, you can do so on the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX series platform. If your choice is to deploy on Dell EMC, you can leverage the Dell XC Core platform.
Like Nutanix, Citrix is all about giving you choices — whether you want to keep everything on-premises; deploy hybrid cloud with the XenApp and XenDesktop Service and your apps and data on-premises; or implement a combination of your apps both on-premises and in one or more public IaaS cloud. All of these scenarios that give you flexibility and choice are supported by Citrix, Nutanix and OEM partners Lenovo and DellEMC. Most importantly, these solutions are Citrix Ready-validated and are available today. Come check them out at Synergy 2018, May 8-10 in Anahiem, CA or at Nutanix .NEXT, May 8-10 in New Orleans.
Regardless of which event you choose to attend, you won’t miss important joint messages relevant to the Citrix and Nutanix partnership. Each is a sponsor at the other partner’s event. You will have the chance to our respective key note presentations in our showcase booths. In addition, you can catch us at .NEXT at our breakout session: Citrix and Nutanix InstantON for Citrix Cloud, creates simplified Hybrid Cloud VDI, on Wednesday, May 9 at 4:40p.m. CT (presented by yours truly) and a Tech Talk Session: Citrix and Nutanix InstantOn — Workspaces for everyone, fast and reliably! on Thursday, May 10 at 12:00 p.m. CT, presented by Todd Smith, Citrix senior sales engineering manager.
