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CHAPTER 5 Having Freedom to Choose without Compromise 43 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. This flexibility obviates the time-consuming and wasteful pro- cess of ripping and replacing ("forklift" upgrades) every three to five years, based on best guesses for long-term growth and use cases. Instead, you can plan for near- and mid-term needs and simply optimize as necessary over time by adding nodes that are an exact fit for the environment. With Nutanix you have the freedom to make purchase decisions based on desired business outcomes, rather than upgrade cycles. Choosing Your Hypervisor VMware vSphere revolutionized virtualization technology and showed the world what is possible in a software-centric world. Today, like your hardware and software options (discussed in the previous section), you also have hypervisor options, including Nutanix AHV and Microsoft Hyper-V, among others. Nutanix supports all of the leading hypervisors, including vir- tualization solutions from VMware, Microsoft, and the Nutanix hypervisor purpose-built for HCI, AHV. No matter which hyper- visor you choose, Nutanix Prism makes management and opera- tions a breeze, with seamless upgrades and automated virtual machine (VM) management. Nutanix hypervisor flexibility pro- vides numerous benefits including: » Multi-hypervisor management: Run a mixed environment, or easily switch hypervisors to meet your changing needs. » Cross-hypervisor disaster recovery (DR): Run different hypervisors in the datacenter and the edge. For example, run VMware in production and AHV for backup or storage- heavy use cases to reduce licensing costs. » Changed region tracking for backup: Nutanix uses the same application programming interface (API) for VMware ESXi and AHV. This functionality allows you to use a single backup tool, no matter the hypervisor. The API makes use of native snapshots, which eliminates the need for costly backup additions. » Security first: Thanks to security configuration baselines and self-healing remediation based on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs), administrators don't have to be security experts; all