Thanks Primzy,
So is it possible to run AHV without AOS? Where is the free hypervisor? CE?
In theory yes it is possible to have AHV without AOS, but AOS(is your OS in lamen’s terms). So it would make entire setup usless. If you want to try Nutanix for free yes CE is one option if you just want quick test they offer free demo aswell on commercial version.
If you want to test Nutanix real quick: https://www.nutanix.com/try
Know of any examples of AHV being run without AOS? What im finding is that while AHV is being flouted as a free hypervisor, AOS is where the real smarts are.
AOS (formerly NOS) is the Acropolis Operating System and is the base operating system that runs on each CVM.
About hypervisor, Nutanix support AHV (Acropolis HyperVisor), which is the Nutanix free hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere ESXi and Citrix XenServer.
I don’t think AHV without AOS would do anything for you. I haven’t heard of such setup yet.
Imagine AHV as driver that virtualizes and manages all disks and represents them to AOS.
I must say that the marketing team has done a brilliant job of selling AHV as a free hypervisor 
To provide some context for my question, we are taking a serious look at moving our NX clusters over from ESXi to AHV and was looking into cost savings and feature comparisons of AHV vs ESXi.
Thanks for the responses Primzy.
When they told you that its free, they (probably) meant that is already bundled with your hardware purchase.
We purchase Dell XC with Acropolis Pro and run VMware enterprise plus on them, if we convert to AHV, that just saves a ton of cash on vmware licensing, since Acropolis is already included with the hardware. (You can run up to twelve hosts cluster with the “free” acropolis starter license)
It's not free in the sense that it costs no money, but that its already “there” and you can’t get a nutanix server without it, so might as well use it and save some cash.
Thanks DenisF.
So if AOS is the smarts behind Nutanix for all the self healing, compression, dedupe, resiliency, HA etc... can it be run on any hypervisor? Or only AHV?
Yeah AOS is the brains behind the operation, realistically the hypervisor just passes storage to the CVM.
AFAIK they currently support AHV, ESXi and Hyper-V, i think XEN was also added recently.
(all of which are “less free” compared to AOS starter, due to their innate licensing costs)
