Amazon Web Services is adding support for the Nutanix AHV hypervisor within its Storage Gateway service. This allows organizations using Nutanix AHV to connect their on-premises infrastructure to AWS storage via S3 File, Tape, and Volume gateways.
The expansion applies to all AWS regions and makes it possible to implement Storage Gateway in environments running on AHV, in addition to existing options such as VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux KVM.
According to Amazon Web Services, Storage Gateway is intended as a hybrid cloud solution that gives local applications access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. The service supports multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and iSCSI-VTL, and is used for backup, archiving, and moving on-premises storage to cloud-based file shares. Storage Gateway can be deployed either as a virtual appliance on-premises or as an Amazon EC2 instance in the AWS cloud.
With the addition of AHV, AWS is further expanding the reach of Storage Gateway. Nutanix AHV, or Acropolis Hypervisor, is a KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) based hypervisor that is part of Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. AWS notes that AHV is based on KVM, which simplifies integration compared to completely proprietary hypervisor platforms.
Nutanix increasingly becoming an alternative to VMware
The Register places this announcement in a broader market context. According to the media outlet, Nutanix is a frequently mentioned alternative to VMware, especially among organizations that are rethinking their virtualization strategy since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Broadcom has focused on VMware Cloud Foundation as an integrated platform, which has led to concerns about costs and product choice among some customers. Gartner analysts expect that VMware could lose a significant portion of its workloads as a result within a few years.
The Register also points out that Nutanix has recently taken several steps to broaden its storage strategy. In 2025, the company announced integrations with external storage providers such as Pure Storage and Dell. In doing so, Nutanix acknowledges that many customers continue to work with existing storage arrays, in addition to its own software-defined storage.
The support of AHV within Storage Gateway is in line with these developments. AWS is making its hybrid storage service available to a broader spectrum of virtualization platforms, while Nutanix environments gain direct access to AWS S3-based storage.