We performed a comparison between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Nutanix Acropolis is the clear winner in this comparison. In addition to being a powerful and reliable product, it is easy to deploy, has excellent customer support and a significant ROI.
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"In addition to the hyper-converged infrastructure, most of our clients are pleased with Acropolis' built-in replication in terms of the DR setup. Our clients also like Prism Central's advanced management and analytics, and many find Nutanix Flow and playbooks incredibly useful."
"It allows us to have a cloud-based ecosystem."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together."
"Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure."
"A great feature involves real-time hardware changes."
"Nutanix does a superb job with technical support."
"Single click actions is definitely the most important. They were not even aware that they wanted this."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, it is a great platform."
"The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so."
"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"vSAN can help customers save on storage system costs, and also save on the human cost."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high."
"The one note of improvement I have for Nutanix is that the installation should be easier."
"They could improve the graphical user interface."
"One of the very important things that I would like to see in Nutanix, but I'm not sure if it's in the roadmap or not, is to have some kind of caching optimization at remote sites, to build active-active data centers more easily."
"As far as what could be improved, they have some built-in backup functions already, but any built-in isolation features like vision security features and free LAN features become a security concern."
"If we can have certified compatibility with other companies, such as Oracle, then it would let us know that they function correctly together."
"Nutanix can be a bit complex to understand."
"The solution doesn't support older systems, which can be a problem for some organizations who wish to implement it. It became a problem for us due to the fact that some of our systems are older."
"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere, Dell PowerFlex and Hyper-V, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware vSAN report.
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Hello Edwin, I am posting this answer on behalf of Daniel Wetter, one of PeerSpot's community members: "Hello, Edwin, first, it would be good to receive more information about your needs and concerns. Would you like to use existing local storage equipped with your Hypervisor servers, it seems you maybe already running on ESXi? Do you already earn fibre channel switches? How fast is your current network? Would you like to easily expand your storage environment? How fast should your storage perform, GB/s , IO/s , average response time / ms (ns)? .. and so on…. Maybe also other HCI Storage vendors like DataCore could gain additional efforts. What is your environment like? Do you need a kind of block storage or maybe you already got S3 aware/ready applications like SAP, document management systems, structured unstructured file services, big data files, databases…. All these topics and a lot more … were needed to give you a good for your special needs a related answer. With such a globalized question, you will earn/receive suggestions and opinions, but not an answer which fits your needs. Maybe my above little questionnaire will help you a little bit. Best regards Daniel"
Both can get you the performance you might want, however, you should also consider what else you get with the solution. For Nutanix, you're stuck on Acropolis if you start with that. It would be best to run either VMware or Hyper-V on top of that so migration isn't a gym show, plus the renewal cost will be very high.
vSAN is a fine option, just ensure it is designed well with enough nodes to tolerate any amount of disk failure.
Both options have their unique value but the most important thing is the data. You'll need data protection solutions like Veeam, Nakivo, or Zerto.
For an all-in-one high-performance solution with built-in data protection consider HPE SimpliVity with VMware. You'll also likely buy fewer nodes than the others with SimpliVity.
In the early days, Nutanix had the better solution, by now especially when you use a vSphere hypervisor I would go with vSAN for better integration and with ReadyNodes no complex config anymore. Also, I had several customers who complained that Nutanix got very expensive on the first renewal vs. massive initial discounts, however, I can't judge if that is true.