Episode Details

In this Tech Barometer podcast, former Nutanix engineers Mike Cui and Greg Smith describe the genesis of the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and the confluence of industry changes feeding its growing success.

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Transcript:

Mike Cui: Well, this is where we have to go into the story.

Greg Smith: Maybe Mike, since you were there before me, you can provide some of the context and the lead up for what happened.

Mike Cui: I came up with an idea and I convinced a whole bunch of people we should do this. Not that we should do this, but we could actually do this. It’s possible.

Greg Smith: As I remember it, when I joined, I thought I was joining the Stargate team to work on storage and performance tuning, and Mike pulled me aside and said, well, we need this one change in Stargate, but then you should really go and work on making KVM a product.

Jason Lopez: Even in IT, life happens. Innovations often emerge when you don’t plan them, and that’s what happened to Mike Cui and Greg Smith. Today, Mike is a principle engineer at Annapurna Labs and Greg works at Foxglove Technologies. In 2013, they were at Nutanix and back then the market wasn’t expecting another hypervisor.

Kanchan Mirani: It was very much VMware who created that category.

Jason Lopez: Kanchan Murani is senior director of strategic marketing at Nutanix. She said VMware was a pioneer of the hypervisor and grew into an industry leader.

Kanchan Mirani: At some point, VMware was so far ahead. It was really the only hypervisor out there that any enterprise would seriously consider.

Jason Lopez: Until AHV.

[Related: IT Resiliency: Running Two Different Hypervisors]

Mike Cui: I had an idea for something like AHV.

Greg Smith: I guess we were the creators of AHV. Yeah.

Mike Cui: This is where it’s not like we had a grand plan. It is tied with the story of how we accidentally got our first customer and what we had to do to solve the problem for this customer, and then eventually evolving into a full-blown product.

Jason Lopez: Before delving into the story of how AHV came to be, let’s look at what it is. Nutanix AHV, or the Acropolis Hypervisor, is virtualization software that enables it to run VMs. It’s a core component of the Nutanix Cloud platform which is ever evolving. With the latest update, as of mid 2025, AHV is at version 10.0. Here’s how Kanchan describes it.

Kanchan Mirani: It’s a pretty core infrastructure software piece, which helps IT teams manage all their resources, essentially. Think of an IT team that’s getting requests from all different departments and lines of business who want to run their specific applications and they’re trying to manage all their resources. Now, imagine if they had to put in actual boxes for each request that each line of business came to them with, versus having a sort of bank of resources, which they’re able to allocate really easily without actually doing physical connections and so on and so forth. So virtualization helps you do that because it makes it software based. You can give somebody a machine, which is a fractional part of a server and say, here, go develop on this, and you can do that all with software through the hypervisor.

[Related: Legacy Health Turns from Broadcom VMware to Nutanix]

Jason Lopez: Back in 2011, AHV didn’t exist, but at the time, Mike was on a team pushing to get the company’s first version of its Power App out. P