Zero-Copy Migrations with Nutanix Move and Everpure FlashArray

At Nutanix .NEXT 2026 a few weeks ago, it was pretty clear from both the sessions and the hallway conversations that Nutanix is gaining real momentum. While talking with customers at our booth, one topic kept coming up: What is the best way to migrate existing workloads onto Nutanix without it becoming a long and disruptive process? 

For many customers, Nutanix Move has been the go-to tool for handling these migrations. During the Day 2 keynote, Nutanix introduced an enhancement that significantly expands Move’s value with native integration using array offload capabilities.

For zero-copy migrations, where a customer is moving workloads from, for example, VMware to Nutanix on the same Everpure™ FlashArray™ system, the traditional network-intensive transfer is replaced by a high-speed metadata operation that reduces migration time to minutes. Instead of moving data across the wire, the array-offload approach clones the source vDisks by updating metadata pointers to reference existing data blocks, avoiding any physical duplication. To finalize the transition, a new VM is provisioned on the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) and mapped to these cloned vDisks, allowing the original VM to be shut down and the target VM to boot up, completing the ESXi-to-AOS conversion in place with zero network congestion. 

The result is a fundamentally different migration experience. Rather than moving data, you are effectively repointing it.

While this integration is not yet generally available and details may evolve, it was exciting to see Everpure FlashArray featured on the .NEXT main stage as the example external storage platform supporting this capability. 

Figure 1: This shows how easy it is to select for Zero Copy Migration in Nutanix Move. Note this is a pre-release image and details are subject to change. 

Real-world performance will vary depending on environment and workload characteristics. That said, the demo shown during the keynote highlighted a migration of approximately 105TB completed in around four minutes. Even as an example, that is a meaningful improvement, especially for customers running large, data-intensive workloads. 

Figure 2: This screen shows that the VMware to Nutanix migration has completed in Nutanix Move. Note this is a pre-release image and details are subject to change. 

This approach brings several practical benefits:

• It dramatically reduces network utilization by avoiding bulk data transfer.
• It eliminates the risks typically associated with large-scale data copies.
• It minimizes virtual machine cutover time and associated downtime due to fast, storage-level operations.
• It preserves the original VMware virtual machine(s), allowing for a straightforward rollback if something unexpected happens, with no impact to the source environment.

Ultimately, this integration represents more than just a performance improvement. It’s a shift in how we think about migrations. By leveraging the capabilities already present in the FlashArray system, Nutanix Move remains a data migration engine, but can now dramatically reduce how much data actually needs to be transferred. For customers planning a transition to Nutanix, especially those already running on Everpure FlashArray, this can significantly simplify and accelerate the journey.

Learn more about Everpure and Nutanix.