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Hyper-V vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VMware vSphere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
Hyper-V reduces IT costs as a cost-effective virtualization option, often achieving significant ROI through server maintenance and energy savings.
Sentiment score
7.0
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers cost savings, efficiency, and scalability, reducing expenses by up to 30% annually for users.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere delivers substantial savings, faster deployment, increased efficiency, and high ROI through reduced hardware and operational costs.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
Hyper-V support experiences vary; first-level is inconsistent, second-level better, with documentation often helpful for troubleshooting.
Sentiment score
8.1
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's support is highly praised for quick, skilled, and effective assistance, deemed worth the cost by users.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere's customer service is praised for expertise but criticized for delayed responses and inconsistent lower-tier support quality.
Technical support from Microsoft is excellent, rated ten out of ten.
The technical support for Hyper-V is excellent
The technical support is very good
Priority one issues are usually addressed by engineers within one to two hours.
My team solves most tickets, needing support only about once or twice a year.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.4
Hyper-V is flexible and scalable, accommodating growth well, but effectiveness depends on infrastructure and has some VMware limitations.
Sentiment score
7.9
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers seamless scalability, easy expansion, and adaptability, making it ideal for enterprises despite cost considerations.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware vSphere excels in scalability, seamlessly integrating new resources for efficient, robust performance across diverse enterprise environments.
Hyper V can support over two hundred virtual processors and around 12 TB of memory.
The scalability of Hyper-V is great; I would rate it nine out of ten.
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Hyper-V is generally stable but less so than VMware, dependent on configuration and occasionally impacted by updates and resource limits.
Sentiment score
8.2
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is praised for its stability, reliability, minimal downtime, and efficient support, making it a dependable platform.
Sentiment score
8.0
VMware vSphere is praised for stability, with issues usually related to hardware and resolvable through patches and maintenance.
Automation is unavailable, and reporting is difficult.
Frequent Windows updates can impact stability compared to VMware ESXi.
Compared to VM, we find it most stable.
It is a very stable hypervisor solution.
 

Room For Improvement

Hyper-V requires improvements in cloning, licensing, features, performance, configuration, networking, storage, management, and integration compared to VMware.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure needs improvements in pricing transparency, setup, performance, integrations, automation, licensing, and system compatibility.
VMware vSphere faces criticism for high costs, unresponsive GUI, limited features, poor support, and inadequate security and integration.
Hyper-V could be improved by implementing the same set of features that other tools provide.
Hyper-V should ensure the features of VMware are covered within its platform.
I suggest improvements in platform support and performance considerations for Hyper-V.
We hope Nutanix can integrate inside our current license module.
Another area is the stability during upgrades from older versions to newer versions, where we face issues.
Sometimes, it is difficult to find documentation for specific tools and solutions.
The cost changed from perpetual to subscription, and there is a need for alternative solutions.
 

Setup Cost

Hyper-V is cost-effective with favorable licensing, though additional costs for features and support can impact the overall expense.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure provides cost-effective licensing options with free hypervisor, reducing TCO compared to traditional systems.
VMware vSphere offers stability and robust features but is costly, with complex licensing, especially challenging for smaller organizations.
Hyper-V is completely free and requires no licensing fee.
Hyper-V's licensing costs are lower compared to VMware, making it cost-effective for smaller workloads.
Until 2019, Hyper-V was a cost-effective solution because it was available as a free product.
The pricing is renewed every year, at almost $100,000 per year.
Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.
 

Valuable Features

Hyper-V provides cost savings, scalability, and seamless Windows integration, making it ideal for efficient business virtualization.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers high performance, ease of use, scalability, and cost efficiency, benefiting smaller IT teams.
VMware vSphere enhances virtualization with seamless VM movement, high availability, resource optimization, scalability, and efficient centralized management, reducing costs.
It is completely free, which is a significant advantage.
I find the quick provision feature in Hyper-V to be extremely helpful.
It offers the stability needed for non-enterprise data centers and has improved over time.
The replication method between Nutanix clusters is a valuable feature.
The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime.
With vCenter, we efficiently manage a vast number of hosts with just one management tool.
The high availability feature is significant.
 

Mindshare comparison

Server Virtualization Software
HCI
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ananth Narayana Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective and good for small workloads while addressing update-driven challenges is needed
I use Azure Monitor and other monitoring solutions to support clients in Accenture's managed services. We support multiple environments, primarily on cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, and also on-premises environments with operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Solaris, among others…
MahendraPanchotiya - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a unified platform, reduces downtime, and simple updates
Nutanix offers a unified platform for managing databases, virtual machines, and applications. This simplifies management by consolidating everything into a single interface. While Nutanix may have a higher upfront cost compared to other hypervisors, it can significantly reduce the resources needed for infrastructure management. With our previous hypervisor, we needed nearly ten IT personnel. Nutanix has allowed us to streamline our team to just three members. We use a combination of database technologies, including SQL databases and web servers such as IIS, BHP, and NGINX. Nutanix features helped our organization reduce downtime. I don't recall the last time we had downtime related to Nutanix because it is such a stable product. Nutanix, a reliable product, helps us streamline our processes, which in turn improves company revenue. We began to see the benefits after two years, with a 40 percent reduction in operational costs. We migrated 200 servers from AWS to Nutanix. Nutanix may not consolidate applications, but it helps us run them more efficiently on its platform. Updating is simple with one click. I would rate the updating processes 10 out of 10. Adding compute and storage on demand is not difficult. However, we need to factor in the existing and new firmware and software requirements.
Neeraj Mehra - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines virtualization and has features like high availability and vMotion
The primary use case is for virtualization, including the implementation of vSphere, vCloud Foundation, vCloud Director, and cloud automation with vSphere My customers, particularly SMBs, mainly utilize High Availability (HA), DRS, and vMotion features. The vMotion feature is beneficial for…
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Comparison Review

it_user234735 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 10, 2015
Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5
I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
38%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
36%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
31%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Hyper-V?
The initial setup is not difficult at all. It is very easy.
What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...
How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?
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Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...
What is IOMMU?
DEEPEN DHULLA did explain well IOMMU. IOMMU has to be activated at the bios level. It exists on Intel and AMD platfor...
Why KVM??? Help please!
We use VMware and KVM. We find that KVM is a lot simpler to use and it provides the virtualization we need for Linux...
Proxmox vs ESXi/vSphere: What is your experience?
For me the biggest impact is the cost of licensing in the case of VMware despite its overall intuitiveness and ease o...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Large customer base from all industries, all over the world. Two major Hyper-V customers are Telefonica and EmpireCLS.
St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.
Find out what your peers are saying about Proxmox, VMware, Microsoft and others in Server Virtualization Software. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.