We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Oracle VM VirtualBox based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS makes it easy to use and manage projects and it has a good reputation."
"The dashboard of Nutanix Acropolis AOS allows for simple management. The dashboard has all the information online about what's going on at any given time."
"The level of statistical performance data that it can confirm in real-time is extremely useful. I can see what my VM’s hosts and guests are doing from a single pane of glass and identify issues before they would otherwise become apparent."
"Acropolis AOS's networking concept is excellent."
"I like NCI's dashboard. If there are any infrastructure issues, we'll get alerts inside the dashboard. NCI provides a single platform for managing all of our databases. We are running SQL and Linux databases."
"It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us."
"The flexibility of this system is very good. It's also faster than others, and has skilled technical support who showed more initiative than a competitor, e.g. VMware."
"One major thing that comes up again and again is stability. Our downtime is literally based on hardware upgrades that need to be done. Acropolis is very, very user friendly. You don't have to physically have a super IT guy to manage the system. You can actually give it to a younger guy to manage and there won't be problems. And if he makes a mistake, it's very, very easy to fall back and sort out the mistake."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The scalability of the solution is very good."
"The good thing is that it is multi-platform. Once you create a virtual machine in one particular environment, you can switch over to see if you can run it in other environments. For example, if you are on Windows and you create this virtual machine, you can actually go ahead and change the operating system. You can switch it over to Linux or Mac OS and see if you can run the VirtualBox on those particular machines. It even runs on some of the commercial operating systems that are not mainstream, such as Solaris and BSD. These kinds of operating systems are also supported by VirtualBox. The other thing that is good about VirtualBox is that it is open source. So, if you need to do any modifications for your own purposes, you can just download the source, modify it, and deploy it in your environment. It is pretty good and very versatile. You can create and manipulate virtual machines from the command line, which is also very important. It's something that some other products on the desktop side do not have. VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop don't have a good command-line interface to create and manipulate virtual machines, whereas VirtualBox has it out of the box, which is pretty good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"I like that Oracle VM is safe and stable. It is also very easy to administer. For example, opening a VM or adding a host adapter is extremely easy."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is easy to use."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"Technical support is good."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"In the next release, I would like better and more competitive pricing."
"I would like them to update their licensing to provide more features with their basic license."
"We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process."
"The One-Click Upgrade process could/should offer the ability to integrate with 3rd party drivers. For example, we use NVIDIA Grid graphics cards. It would be amazing if, during the One-Click Upgrade process, we could "slipstream" additional VIB drivers for ESXi into the upgrade process."
"One of the improvements I would like to have is related to naming. It is getting confusing because they are using three-letter acronyms, which are more or less misleading. What I do not like is that they changed names and reused names. They had a meaning in the past and they are still using the names for something similar."
"The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates."
"In terms of automation, I know there are ways to do it, but it's not very user-friendly. I've been working for the last three years with Nutanix and I've managed to automate certain things, but it's a somewhat more complex job than it should be. I would like to see more documentation or knowledge base articles."
"Storage utilization and optimization should be better."
"Oracle needs to improve its hot virtual machine migration. It didn't work as intended. It should allow us to migrate between virtual machines, without stopping the database."
"It's not as robust as server platforms, nor does it need to be."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"Oracle VMs don't have a solid web interface of their own. This is an area where Oracle is lagging behind. Now, we use headless servers, install Oracle VMs, and manage them remotely. We could use phpVirtual Box, but it is a third-party solution. A lot of people contribute to it, and it's not authenticated by Oracle. As a result, I don't find it to be a good option. Therefore, I would like to see Oracle offer an extension pack or a licensed version that fixes this problem."
"It has some issues when you have some weird device drivers. For instance, when you have a weird sound driver working on your machine, and the VirtualBox needs to output the sound of the virtual machine into the sound driver of the physical machine, the bare metal, it doesn't work too well. If you tweak lots of drivers and play around with the different kinds of drivers and machines, you will probably break something. I have not played with it too much and maybe it already supports it, but it would probably be good to have the ability to use a container from the virtual machine environment instead of spinning off a complete virtual machine. There are other tools for that. On Linux, you have a DXE, LXC framework, and you have Docker as well. Docker is good because it is multi-platform, and you can run Docker on pretty much anything, even different processors, but it would be good if we had a VirtualBox running on it while spinning off containers instead of full virtual machines. The other thing that will become important, and I'm pretty sure that they are thinking about it as well is that there's this new hardware platform that Apple is releasing, which is an ARM-based new chip. So, VirtualBox will probably have to work on ARM-based CPUs as well."
"The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"The solution should work to simplify the system. However, it should be flexible enough to allow for special cases."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "The solution is versatile, simple to use, and stable". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Dell PowerFlex, whereas Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Proxmox VE, KVM, Hyper-V and Oracle VM.
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