Today Ravello Systems and Nutanix have announced the availability of Nutanix CE on Ravello’s Smart Labs by means of a jointly developed blueprint.
For those not familiar with any of the two vendors, let me briefly recap for your convenience.
Ravello Systems has developed a product called HVX, which can be defined as a “nested hypervisor” capable of running on top of public clouds like Amazon AWS and/or Google Cloud Engine, together with a proprietary network overlay. This solution is designed to address specific use cases such as Labs, Demo/Sales environments, Dev/Test disposable infrastructures etc; this result is achieved leveraging commodity public clouds but at the same time allowing users to deploy workloads in the very same format they use on their own premises. Therefore the underlying AWS or Google Cloud Engine is completely hidden and not relevant when it comes to design and implement your infrastructure on Ravello’s platform. One interesting point is that VMware ESXi is already supported as a blueprint, so it is possible to deploy nested vSphere labs on top of Ravello’s HVX running inside AWS or Google Cloud Engine. It might sound confusing but it actually isn’t!