Remember last year when Nutanix Inc. brought Diane Greene on stage at its .NEXT conference? A thumbs-up from Google Cloud Platform’s then chief executive officer is a pretty loud cloud signal for a hyperconverged infrastructure company. Concrete details on the fruits of the partnership were pretty scant, though. Was it an optical deal, or would some integrated, consumable services come out of it?

“We had to take the crawl-walk-run approach there just because we didn’t want to expose to public customers what we didn’t consume internally,” said Sunil Potti (pictured), chief product and development officer at Nutanix.

Potti spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer), technical pathfinder, cloud and infrastructure, at Jumbo Supermarkten and blogger at VirtualLifestyle.nl, during the .NEXT Conference in London. They discussed Nutanix’s evolving partnership with Google and its march into multicloud services. (* Disclosure below.)

Virtualization gets knee-deep in Google Cloud

Nutanix and Google began with a plan to collocate Nutanix Xi Cloud Services with Google data centers. Then they realized that the two can actually integrate their data centers for a common management and security interface.

“Rather than us run as a power-sucking alien on top of some Google hardware, the true integration comes with us actually integrating on a stack that runs [Acropolis Hypervisor] natively inside GCP,” Potti said.

All of its work integrating with Google has resulted in an announcement called Test Drive. “We’ve proven that AHV can run in a nested virtualization mode on GCP natively. It can collocate with the rest of GCP services. And we use it currently in our R&D environment for running thousands of nodes for pretty much everyday testing,” Potti stated.

The move furthers Nutanix’s efforts to simplify multicloud operations via integration and a common interface.

The company aims to do a lot more partnering to push Xi into more environments. “You’re going to see us create a Xi partner network, which essentially allows us to federate Xi as an OS into the service providers,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE