This fear of making a bad decision can keep IT decision makers from making a good decision or any decision at all. This hesitation is part of the research found in The JOLT Effect by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, calling it FOMU—the fear of messing up.  Another version of this expression is FOFU, but I'll leave it to the reader to guess its meaning.

The playing field for running enterprise cloud native workloads in production includes many public and private cloud options—there’s bound to be a fumble or poorly executed play with whatever lineup you choose. No one wants to be the one responsible for dropping the ball when something goes wrong. 

This could not be more relevant now as our account teams in the field interact with customers who want to make the right decisions for their cloud native VMs and containers running in production.

Why VMs Still Matter

First things first, “VMs will be with us for another decade,” according to Dan Ciruli, VP and GM for Cloud Native at Nutanix. He also writes about VMs and containers in his recent article in The New Stack. There has been lots of talk over the years about traditional VM workloads being refactored for containers. The reality is this is easier said than done. There are some cases where this has been accomplished, but for many enterprise businesses it makes financial sense to continue running legacy applications in VMs and to focus containerization efforts on new workloads. 

Most organizations will continue to run VMs as they develop new apps using a containerized, microservices architecture. The mainframe industry is basically similar, saying “hold my beer” to naysayers after 50 years and still running.

Strategy at the Top of the Agenda

Trying to figure out a suitable strategy is certainly top of mind for many organizations. In fact, maintaining the status quo is likely to undermine your competitive edge. Being able to deliver apps and digital value faster and more efficiently will be what drives new business and wins against the competition. CIO Dive recently highlighted how enterprises need to adopt containers to drive GenAI adoption, while ITPro Today reported that container adoption is nearly universal but scaling to production remains a challenge. But it’s doable with the right strategy in place. 

For a little background, some early cloud customers have found themselves with unexpected security concerns or sticker shock from a huge cloud cost bill. The shift from stateless to stateful cloud native applications also played a role. Cloud storage can be very expensive and the bills continue to grow month after month. One customer told me that developers have historically come up with their own public cloud plans, but now they want to bring them back to an on-prem solution where central IT can help manage security and provide visibility for the business. This repatriation effort is now just as relevant as ever, described in Why cloud repatriation is back on the CIO agenda.

Talk about timing, a few weeks ago I provided background for why our Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) offering is now a leading solution for customers: Understudy to Mainstage—Cloud Native at Nutanix Is Fierce. Expanding on that post, let’s examine how VMs and containers can run in together production and how Nutanix demonstrates our leadership in this area. 

Running Production VMs and Containers

Both containers and VMs will play a crucial role in app modernization efforts. That’s settled. For legacy VM-based workloads that will not be refactored for containers, one of the big questions is whether VMs should run in containers or alongside them? There are also considerations aside from the VMs themselves, such as whether containers should run in hypervisor environments (in VMs) or run directly on bare metal.

Here’s a breakdown of the different scenarios: 

Data Center Production VMs

• VMs running in traditional hypervisor environments
• VMs running in Kubernetes pods (Kubevirt)

Enterprise Production Containers

• Containers running in VMs in hypervisor environments
• Containers running on bare metal

Let’s do the checkboxes for a quick reference to get into conversations with customers. There are many caveats and nuances to quibble over but here’s a breakdown of how we compare to other leading solutions for running production VMs and containers:

VM and Container Deployment Scenarios by Vendor

Legend

●    ✅ = Full support
●    🟨 = Partial or less mature support
●    ❌ = Not supported
●    N/A = Not applicable / not enterprise-grade
 

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP)

When it comes to picking a winning lineup, here’s how the players stack up:

• Nutanix – NKP runs on AHV or ESX, supports both VMs and containers side by side.
• VMware – Covers most scenarios in vSphere but no option to run directly on bare metal.
• Red Hat OpenShift – Uses KubeVirt for VMs, relies on third-party hypervisors.
• SUSE Rancher – Pairs Kubernetes with KVM via Harvester, but maturity is still developing.

As you can see, Nutanix provides a compelling solution for running production VMs and containers. There are many other advantages for running NKP that are covered in other venues but when it comes to making a decision about whether to go with NKP vs other enterprise containerization solutions alongside production VMs, there should be no FOMO (see the beginning of this post).

If you would like to see a demo of how this all works, have a look at this short video posted on LinkedIn just last month here. 
 

Of course, this is not the only reason that the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) stands out. With recognition in the Forrester Wave 2025 and Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ 2025, Nutanix is a force in cloud native VMs and containerization and we’re playing to win.

To find out more check out the following: 

• Nutanix Cloud Native Community
• Nutanix University: NKP Playlist
• Simplify Cloud Native Kubernetes Management       
  • Nutanix Kubernetes Platform
  • Application-Level Data Services for Kubernetes

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