Nutanix has announced that its Nutanix Cloud Platform will soon support Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop for hybrid environments. The announcement was made yesterday during Microsoft Ignite 2025.
The upcoming capability will allow organisations to run Azure Virtual Desktop on premises through the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. By doing so, IT teams will have more flexibility in managing distributed workforces and will be able to choose infrastructure that best aligns with their performance, security, and cost requirements.
Tarkan Maner, Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix, said the Nutanix Cloud Platform provides a strong foundation for virtual desktop infrastructure workloads that require resilience, strong performance and predictable costs. He added that the collaboration with Microsoft will help customers modernise on premises or extend into hybrid cloud setups.
Microsoft sees the move as a way to give customers more deployment freedom. Scott Manchester, Vice President of product for Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, said Azure Virtual Desktop is designed to offer a secure and scalable experience that integrates tightly with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. He noted that Nutanix support will offer customers more flexibility without sacrificing security or licensing benefits.
Azure Virtual Desktop for hybrid environments is valuable for sectors that operate under strict regulatory and data-residency requirements. These sectors include financial services, healthcare and government that can run virtual desktops locally on Nutanix AHV while relying on Azure Arc–enabled servers for brokering and management. This ensures all compliance needs are met, strong governance and secure connections to Azure.
Key benefits of the hybrid setup include:
- Hybrid flexibility through a combination of on-premises performance and Azure scalability that supports burst capacity and disaster recovery
- Native support for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Entra, and related security services
- Strong performance for graphics-heavy or latency-sensitive workloads
- Cost efficiencies that come from using existing Microsoft licensing and existing Nutanix infrastructure
Nutanix said its support for Azure Virtual Desktop is still under development. Once complete, the company expects it to broaden the options available to organisations seeking to modernise virtual desktop infrastructure without being tied to a single deployment model.
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