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Nutanix AHV Virtualization vs VMware vSphere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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
6.3
Nutanix AHV dramatically cut costs and optimized efficiency, offering 45% savings, improved scalability, and reduced downtime within three years.
Sentiment score
7.2
VMware vSphere reduces costs and enhances efficiency with virtualization, offering savings, agility, and improved resource utilization and scalability.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.8
Nutanix AHV Virtualization support is efficient and knowledgeable, providing proactive solutions and quick issue resolution with high satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.0
VMware vSphere's customer service is efficient and knowledgeable, but response times and complex issue handling can be inconsistent.
Their engineers are excellent and provide great supportability.
They provide prompt and quality responses.
Priority one issues are usually addressed by engineers within one to two hours.
Recently, support has been less friendly and slower, especially after the company was acquired by Broadcom.
If we have issues, the support tends to be unreliable
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
Nutanix AHV Virtualization offers exceptional scalability, allowing easy node addition, minimal downtime, and flexible horizontal and vertical scaling.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware vSphere offers scalable, flexible environments with minimal downtime, seamless integration, and excellent performance across diverse hardware and business needs.
We can scale our systems easily without any downtime, making it a highly effective solution for dynamic environments.
Nutanix AHV Virtualization is very scalable; however, I might be underutilizing its capabilities.
Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture.
VMware vSphere is highly scalable in terms of the number of users and the number of servers it can handle.
It is a highly scalable solution.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
Nutanix AHV Virtualization is praised for stability, reliable performance, and seamless management, despite occasional patch delays affecting ratings.
Sentiment score
8.0
VMware vSphere is highly stable and reliable, with minimal outages and quick resolution of issues, ideal for critical applications.
The solution is very stable.
Issues such as patch delays and the OVF format challenge affect its stability rating.
I would give the stability a seven out of ten at the moment, primarily due to the issues I've had with updates.
It is a very stable hypervisor solution.
While they are generally stable, if outages occur, they tend to be due to brands like HP or Dell, not VMware vSphere itself.
I would rate the stability of VMware vSphere as eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Nutanix AHV needs enhancements in deployment, support, interface, and integration, with focus on stability, pricing, and documentation.
VMware vSphere needs pricing, interface, compatibility, management, integration, fault tolerance, performance, and technology support improvements due to user concerns.
This delay in patching creates risk, especially for government projects that require timely updates.
These menus often show options like host, memory, and disk, however, they fail to provide insight into what's happening.
Using Lenovo hardware seems problematic with Nutanix AHV Virtualization, which demands careful consideration during updates.
The cost changed from perpetual to subscription, and there is a need for alternative solutions.
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.
 

Setup Cost

Nutanix AHV provides cost-effective virtualization with no licensing fees, offering significant savings compared to competitors like VMware and Citrix.
VMware vSphere is costly but valued for advanced features and stability, especially in large-scale environments, warranting careful budgeting.
This has been advantageous as it does not require additional licensing costs for the hypervisor, contributing to overall cost savings.
Other solutions like Citrix and VMware have seen a significant price increase, whereas Nutanix hasn't increased as dramatically.
The pricing was reasonable compared to other competitors, though the storage was expensive.
Many customers are trying to avoid it due to its high cost.
Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.
The solution is too expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Nutanix AHV Virtualization is praised for its user-friendly interface, cost-effectiveness, automation, and robust disaster recovery features.
VMware vSphere offers centralized management and flexibility, enhancing data center efficiency with strong security and fast, efficient operations.
It is easier to manage than VMware in some ways, providing a good level of interaction.
The technology behind the backups is very efficient, enabling a reliable virtual environment.
The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime.
The tool is highly available, which is crucial for implementing critical applications requiring 24/7 availability.
The high availability feature is significant.
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix AHV Virtualization
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSphere
Ranking in Server Virtualization Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
454
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Server Virtualization Software category, the mindshare of Nutanix AHV Virtualization is 8.2%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 17.3%, down from 19.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Zack Baraci - PeerSpot reviewer
High availability and user-friendly interface enhance manageability
I primarily use the core features of Nutanix AHV Virtualization ( /products/nutanix-ahv-virtualization-reviews ) at the moment. The high availability (HA), replication, and site-to-site replication are quite useful. Additionally, the usual hypervisor management functionalities are beneficial. Nutanix AHV Virtualization delivers a system that is very manageable, with a well-designed user interface. It is easier to manage than VMware in some ways, providing a good level of interaction.
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
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Nutanix AHV compare with VMware vSphere?
To understand which is better - Nutanix AHV or VMware vSphere - you need to do a product comparison. Both products support hypervisors. However, Nutanix supports some of the most popular ones and m...
What do you like most about Nutanix AHV Virtualization?
Integration is the most valuable feature of the product.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix AHV Virtualization?
Compared to the competition, the pricing for Nutanix AHV Virtualization is reasonable. Other solutions like Citrix and VMware have seen a significant price increase, whereas Nutanix hasn't increase...
What is IOMMU?
DEEPEN DHULLA did explain well IOMMU. IOMMU has to be activated at the bios level. It exists on Intel and AMD platforms. It is used a lot inside virtualization platforms like VMware VSphere. It pr...
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 and Windows. For us, VMware does not offer any advantage. Moreover, KVM is free.
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 interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, SAIC Volkswagen
Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix AHV Virtualization vs. VMware vSphere and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.