By Simon Sharwood
Publication Date: 2026-04-07 23:14:00
.NEXT Nutanix has teamed with Microsoft to bring cloudy desktops on-prem, using its extensive desktop virtualization (VDI) experience to make it work.
“VDI was one of our first workloads,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said on Monday in his keynote at the company’s .NEXT conference. The company long ago made it possible to serve virtual desktops from the cloud, but Microsoft has tried to paint all VDI as antiquated applications based on legacy three-tier architectures.
That’s a reasonable argument because VDI is tricky to deliver at scale. Vendors worked hard to cope with “boot storms” – the spike in demand for resources that came when workers sat down at their desks in the morning and started their virtual PCs. Delivering all those virtual desktops at speed without requiring massive infrastructure was no mean feat.
Microsoft suggested its own cloud-hosted Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) as the modern alternative.
On Tuesday, Ramaswami said he thinks hybrid operations for AVD “is going to be a game changer … because it delivers your desktops with much lower latency to meet the needs for high-end users.”
In other words, some cloudy desktops…
