Nutanix is adding new controls for enterprise AI agents with the launch of Nutanix Enterprise AI 2.8, giving organizations more oversight of what agents can access, what actions they can take, and how much they can spend. The update comes as businesses move AI agents closer to production systems and data, raising new governance and cost-management concerns.
The release also expands Nutanix’s broader AI infrastructure strategy, enabling organizations to run AI workloads alongside existing virtual machines and containers, all managed through the same environment.
Nutanix adds controls for AI agent access and spending
NAI 2.8 also gives companies more control over what their AI agents can access. A new MCP gateway lets them set which apps, tools and data an agent can access, while a separate MCP Server lets agents work with Nutanix infrastructure without giving them free rein.
It also tackles a way less glamorous AI problem: the bill.
Organizations can track token usage and set limits at the team, user, or individual agent level. Cornely said Nutanix has already seen agents burn through customer AI budgets much faster than expected.
“We’ve seen scenarios where customers had a budget for a month that was spent in a week,” he said.
Private inference expands as AI costs come into focus
NAI can also direct the right workloads to privately deployed open-weight models, where customers pay for the underlying infrastructure rather than individual tokens.
Private Inference gains additional capabilities, including LoRA fine-tuning for models under 8 billion parameters, multi-GPU inference, batch inference, and speculative decoding.
Nutanix says the latter can increase token-generation speed by up to 2.5 times, depending on the model and infrastructure configuration.
Nutanix extends Kubernetes across VMs and bare metal
NKP 2.19, which is expected soon, extends Kubernetes management across both virtualized and bare-metal environments. Basically, NKP Metal automates operating system, firmware and container deployment, while an AI applications catalog includes curated deployments of Kubeflow, Milvus and Slurm.
Nutanix is also making Service Provider Central generally available, providing a multitenant control plane for infrastructure, application, cloud-native and AI services.
VMware migrations create an infrastructure modernization play
Alongside it, the new Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services program provides partners with a range of onboarding resources, service delivery materials, and badging to build services around hybrid cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and VM migration.
And yes, in case you were wondering, VMware is very much part of the conversation. Nutanix clearly sees an opening as customers look elsewhere, but Cornely’s point is that replacing VMware with another version of the same setup doesn’t get you very far.
If companies are already going through the trouble of moving, there’s an opportunity to modernize some of that infrastructure along the way.
“You don’t just replace the VMware with the same old thing,” Cornely said.