Strengthening the Cisco-Nutanix Partnership: Unlocking Innovation with Seamless Integration

In today’s fast-paced digital world, IT organizations face mounting pressure to deliver exceptional experiences that delight customers. Meeting these expectations not only enhances customer satisfaction and brand reputation but can also drive revenue growth and reduce operational costs. Complex IT environments and limited visibility can hinder swift decision-making, degrade performance, and expose organizations to security risks. To address these challenges, Cisco and Nutanix entered a partnership last year to combine our strengths in data center infrastructure. We’ve called it a 360-degree partnership, where “1 + 1 = 3,” with mutual collaboration across engineering, support, and go-to-market groups to help our customers adopt hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions.

Together, we’re delivering the industry’s most complete hybrid cloud solution to simplify customer operations, maximize resiliency, and accelerate IT transformation. Our partnership has facilitated Cisco Nutanix HCI solution deployment, upgrades, and expansion using Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism Central, and today we’ve achieved another milestone in this partnership by expanding into management, with foundational integration between the two. This exclusive integration lays the foundation for Cisco and Nutanix to continue to develop innovative features in our roadmaps. Our joint solution is more than just a collaboration—by simplifying operations and delivering unmatched value to customers, it’s a game-changer.

Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism Central integration enables new capabilities

At the core of the Intersight and Prism Central integration is the Cisco Intersight Device Connector app, which can be accessed from the Nutanix Marketplace. When installed in Prism Central, the app allows for a secure connection with Intersight, enabling enhanced collaboration and visibility. It starts by helping IT teams simplify their operations through detailed insights, proactive alert management, simplified license management, and future-ready integration.

Because of Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism Central integration, IT teams have access to the Intersight unified dashboard to monitor Cisco HCI solutions running Nutanix software from multiple Prism Central apps. This unified dashboard enables centralized management, which can help reduce downtime, improve performance, and minimize security vulnerabilities.

An exciting feature included in this integration is the ability for customers to access detailed HCI solution insights from the Intersight dashboard. This enhanced visibility includes HCI Nutanix cluster- and node-level information, such as hypervisor type, Acropolis Operating System (AOS) version, node and VM count, storage utilization, and device inventory. Nutanix cluster-level details (Figure 1) empower IT teams to make informed operational decisions faster.

IT teams now also have the ability to monitor and acknowledge alarms in Intersight, aggregated at cluster level. This proactive alert management accelerates time to resolution, minimizes downtime, and decreases security vulnerabilities.

Another important feature is a single view of the Intersight license tier and Nutanix license entitlement, compliance, and violations (Figure 2). Nutanix software license violations provide details about features used without a corresponding license, features used over the allowed capacity, and expired licenses. This simplifies license management for customers, as it brings together Cisco compute hardware view and Nutanix software view in a single management platform.

How customers access these new features

For customers already familiar with Intersight, this integration requires a minimal learning curve and delivers immediate productivity increases.

Key benefits include:

• Operational efficiency: Streamlined workflows, monitoring of multiple Prism Central instances
• Enhanced troubleshooting: Improved visibility into cluster alarms and acknowledgment of issues in Intersight
• Better resource management: Simplified license tracking and compliance monitoring
• Scalability and flexibility: Built for modern IT environments, with support for various hardware and software configurations

In the first release (Nutanix Prism Central 2024.3 or later), the integration supports each Prism Central instance with 25 registered clusters, 200 hosts, and up to 5000 alarms. It supports all Cisco HCI hardware, including:

• Cisco UCS M6: Featuring third-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors in a Cisco UCS rack server
• Cisco UCS M7: Featuring fourth and fifth-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors in both a Cisco UCS rack server and UCS X-Series modular system

Just as building a house starts with a solid foundation, the integration of Intersight and Prism Central lays the groundwork for building an ecosystem of advanced features and capabilities. During this exciting phase of customization, with APIs enabling rapid development, Cisco and Nutanix will focus on support for evolving customer needs, offering powerful tools for managing HCIs.

Stay tuned for more updates as this partnership continues to evolve, delivering even greater value and innovation for businesses everywhere.

Learn more

Discover how Cisco and Nutanix are transforming HCI management.

If you’re attending Cisco Live EMEA, visit a demo in the World of Solutions and attend one of the many sessions on the Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix solution.

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