Nutanix AHV Virtualization Reviews

Many customers use the solution. One of the customers, I think, uses 4,000 virtual machines. Virtual machines are used for administration, applications, and many other things. We can slide them into three environments, including the test environment, the pre-production environment and production environment.

The solution's most valuable features stem from the fact that I use many things, including NSX-T and NSX-P, which are new for virtualization. It started in 2022. NSX-T and NSX-P are different from NSX-v. NSX-v is dedicated to vCenter, and NSX-P is for Nutanix or VMware.

It is difficult to give an explanation about why I find NSX-P to be useful because VMware changed the category when Cisco bought it. I think Nutanix told its customers that the best way to go around it was based on the licensing system, and it is better than VMware's very expensive licenses.

For the moment, the graphic user interface is not good, and it needs to be improved.

In terms of the additional features or capabilities needed in the tool, we need some tricks in the tool for monitoring, and in areas like artificial intelligence and observability, we need to reduce the noise from the monitoring causes globally.

I have been using Nutanix AHV Virtualization since 2015, so it has been nine years. I am an integrator. I work as a part of our company's pre-sales department, so I explain the soluton's technicalities to our customers based on their needs. I use Nutanix AHV Virtualization Version 5.0.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability depends on if you install the tool on an on-premises or cloud model. In the cloud, it is a very scalable tool, and it is unlimited. On an on-premise model, the tool's scalability is always limited. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine or ten out of ten if it is deployed on the cloud. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution as one out of ten if it is deployed on an on-premises model, as the space is limited.

It is very difficult to say if the tool's on-premises customers would want the product to offer them high scalability because if you buy five TB, there is no option to expand unless you buy five TB terabytes again. Sometimes, we have to put some configuration, including deduplication or compression. There are some concerns about the tool's performance.

Currently, one of the customers that uses the solution has 25 users. Small, medium, or enterprise businesses use the tool.

I am a pre-sales person who hears what the customer wants, and I design the solution accordingly before proposing it to them.

I rate the product's initial setup phase as a seven out of ten if one is difficult and ten is an easy setup. For an IT person like myself, I can rate it as a ten, but for someone who does not know the tool, it's better to keep it at an average of seven.

The product's initial setup phase was much easier than that of VMware.

Depending on the customers, the solution can be deployed on the cloud or on an on-premises model. I have done both deployments on a 50-50 basis.

The solution can be deployed in six months if I include areas from design, discussion, and implementation.

It's really difficult to describe how to set up the tool. For example, you have to have physical servers of not less than three. You can have two physical servers, but the load balancing won't be good enough. After you create the data storage, you create the VMs, and after that, you configure the networks. You have to dedicate some amount of storage to the server.

Compared to the licensing methodology opted by VMware, Nutanix offers a better licensing model.

If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the price as two out of ten. There are no additional costs attached to the tool.

The most valuable aspects of managing virtual infrastructure are the tool's automation, artificial intelligence, and the hyperconverged system.

When it comes to the hyperconverged part, it is easier to configure in Nutanix than it is in VMware. The hyperconverged part is very friendly and configurable.

Others planning to use the tool should have good knowledge of the license that they need. If you know exactly the license that you will consume, it's easy to understand the price and get some advantages out of it.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

In cloud environments, where you do not know which hypervisor is used, Nutanix allows you to run a hypervisor from Microsoft and VMware, and they offer their hypervisor, which in some respects does have some benefits on the price level and the technology level. We use AHV because we get a broader integrated spectrum of functionality. More performance, less price, and functionalities going up. AHV hypervisor is based on KVM, which is an open-source product. Our clients are from small to enterprise-level customers.

The features I find valuable depending on the client's use cases. If the clients need high-performance storage, we can bypass some layers and be faster. With AHV, you can run micro-segmentation, which is, on the network security level, to have network virtualization across clouds. It's on a cloud data center. Most customers are interested in one aspect. Smaller customers are looking more at the price. Bigger customers are looking at network virtualization or micro-segmentation types of things. They're more attracted to functionalities.

Some companies do not support AHV. Similarly, AHV is not supported on Alibaba and other Chinese clouds.

I've used this solution since it was made available around five years ago.

The product is stable. It is on par with or even better than the hypervisor from VMware.

When discussing AHV, statements such as cloud deployment depend on AOS usage. In this case, AHV is not scalable.

The complete support from Nutanix is outstanding. It's much better than all the other vendors I know of. This might change in the future, but they're providing exceptional support. You're directly connected to a support engineer. The support engineer is working with you on the case. That depends on when you opened the case, and you still might end up in Bangalore with a few problems with Indian English, but these engineers are really good. You can move to another engineer if you'd like, you can escalate, and I've never had a problem with the SLA where they did not react within the agreed time. They're usually faster, good at what they do, and even help you solve problems with products they don't sell, for example, VMware. They know about VMware. Sometimes you have some flaws, but it depends on the people and the communication, which is a rare case.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment for a complete cluster, to hand it over to production, is one or two days.

If you just look at the hardware, you might think this is an expensive solution. Looking at the hardware and the software licenses, too, it might look expensive, but in the end, the return on investment is there. If you build it up on your own using different components, orchestrate the demo, and make the comparison correctly, you will find it is not expensive. The value AHV brings is great. We have received a return on investment with a lot of customers.

There is a benefit gained by nearly all customers in switching to AHV, as AHV offers different benefits. Every customer will find a sweet spot to justify moving away from the existing hypervisor. It is attractive for the client to move. All the customers we know of and have worked with didn't switch back from AHV.

Sometimes we have to run both hypervisors on different clusters because of the software vendor not supporting AHV. Still, you don't have a lot of companies whose software products do not support AHV as a hypervisor. Where they do not support AHV, these are older applications where the software developer tries to reduce complexity, focusing only on one hypervisor, the market leader. But this is changing, and even the cloud challenges software developers because the cloud does not tell you which hypervisor is running in the cloud. They have to move on.

You can deploy the solution on your infrastructure, or you can deploy it onto AWS or Azure. AHV is not supported on GCP. It probably will be in the future.

If your client's business is too small, Nutanix AHV Virtualization might be too expensive. For example, if there's an appliance in an agricultural machine, this might not be the right use case. The smallest use case might be in a small sales office, remote and branch offices, enterprise data centers, and even large companies running multiple SAP HANA enterprise resource planning applications. They're all supported. You can run them on the AHV platform. If your use case is small, and price tag and energy consumption is priority, this is not the solution for you.

There are applications you can't run on this. For example, if you need more than four CPU sockets, and no hardware is supported with more than four CPU sockets, you need a good reason to have your special hardware. There are extreme boundaries to the left and right, but a wide range of use cases can be covered.

AHV is not scalable in the context of AOS usage. I'm mixing the functionality of AOS, which is used in AHV, so I can't separate it. But if you do have enough knowledge, you can say, "Oh, this is based on the functionality that AOS brings and not the functionality that AHV brings." Therefore, it's still okay, but you argue if the statements only focus on AHV.

If you plan on purchasing AHV, you must understand that Nutanix is disruptive. It can't be compared with other solutions. You need to open your mind and look at it without comparing. If you compare it with the solutions you know, you will not move forward because though it is different, it has benefits. You have to have a closer look at it. Nutanix provides storage, an integrated solution, but only 10% of the functionality is storage. If you just reduce it to storage, you're missing 90% of the benefits.

I rate Nutanix AHV Virtualization a ten out of ten.

We use the Nutanix AHV Virtualization solution for production purposes only. We use other solutions for application servers, such as on-premises physical ESX servers.

The most valuable part of Nutanix is its centralized management of everything. You have the storage pool, network pool, storage controller, and processes running inside the Nutanix ZooKeeper, Stargate, and Medusa services. These processes are not inside ESXi, so they must be managed separately.

There is no issue in Nutanix. If one node goes down with any hardware failure, it has a hardware and software host.

Nutanix misses alerts sometimes. To improve this, Nutanix should integrate with Eskom, an existing monitoring tool. This would allow Nutanix to receive alerts from Eskom instead of having to install and configure its monitoring tool. This would be a great feature, as it would allow Nutanix to receive alerts for all physical devices and processes, even if Nutanix itself does not manage them.

I have been using Nutanix AHV Virtualization for three years. We are using the latest version of the solution.

The product's stability is good.

AHV virtualization is scalable, with enhanced security features. One thousand five hundred users are using this solution in our organization.

The customer support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. If you are unboxing Nutanix appliances from the storage and need to install the entire cluster, it will take at least two to three days to install, configure, and migrate virtual machines from ESXi to AHV.

The product is costly and comes with an annual subscription. There are other solutions like Cisco UCS, vSAN, and Azure Stack. Azure Stack is a particularly significant competitor, as it is cheaper than Nutanix.

Instead of creating a storage account and configuring other things, you should be able to create a cloud cluster, deploy it, remove it, and migrate VMs from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa, all within Prism Central in a user-friendly way. You should work more on AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes integration and services. You can deploy Kubernetes services inside the Nutanix AHV hypervisor.

Instead of creating a new system, I think improving the existing Nutanix AHV Virtualization KB document would be more helpful. The KB document has a lot of information, but finding specific solutions to problems can be difficult. For example, if you install a KB fix and an application stops working, you may have to read many documents to find the solution. This can be lengthy, and raising a ticket with Nutanix may be necessary. Finding the needed information would be easier if the KB document were better organized and structured.

If you need a protection database server, I recommend Nutanix. It is very fast. However, if you run applications, Nutanix is not the best choice. Other products in the market are better suited for applications.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for server virtualization. It is a good product. 

Nutanix AHV virtualization requires little disk size for a huge number of servers. We can do everything from a single dashboard, monitoring performance, and single-task boxes. It is a very good and excellent product in terms of manageability. We can replicate it to multiple devices at times.

I would like to see better decompression or degrouping of the VMs so that we can use a single number of SQLs with two servers. We don't need a huge number of DXSPs.

The decompression should be better. In my experience with the VMware product, they don't have this type of solution. But we can do it with Nutanix AHV.

In future releases, I would also like to see support for replication with the Centralized Data Reduction (CDR) application. This would allow us to replicate our data to a single dashboard without having to use ASRM or any other third-party solution. It would be a major improvement, and I hope that Nutanix will add this feature in the next version of AHV.

VMware has a decompression function that Nutanix doesn't have, and I would like to see that function added to Nutanix in the next version.

I have been using Nutanix AHV Virtualization for about three years.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

There's no limit, we can have it on multiple servers. Our whole company's employees are using this solution. 

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The support team is fantastic. We raise a ticket, and they can quickly define the issue and assign it a priority level of 0, 1, 2, or 3. If the issue is fairly high-priority, we get support with a deep view of the problem.

Positive

The initial setup is very simple. There's no complication.

Anyone can easily deploy the solution because it is easy to use. There is no huge learning curve required. 

However, we have about five people for maintenance. 

There is no licensing issue. It is a bundled product with Nutanix.

I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten.

We utilize alternative solutions such as VMware or Microsoft. Each of these products comes as a distinct offering, whereas Nutanix AHV comes as a bundled package. 

Upon acquiring a Nutanix system, all necessary components are readily available, eliminating the need for additional APN, networking, or application software like HRA. There's no requirement for supplementary bundled products. This aspect truly sets Nutanix AHV apart as a remarkable and comprehensive solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I use Nutanix AHV Virtualization for the servers in our bank, where we have a lot of applications. In general, my bank uses Nutanix AHV Virtualization to host our application servers.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that I have never had to face any security issues from the use of the solution. I haven't faced any issues like ransomware when using Nutanix AHV Virtualization.

When cleaning up my environment and server room during one of the projects, my bank wanted us to shut down the servers. To face no complications in our company, we had to switch off virtual machines one after the other before heading to Nutanix platform and going to edge services to switch off and turn off everything, making it a challenging process for me. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the solution.

I have been using Nutanix AHV Virtualization for six years. I am a user of Nutanix.

It is a stable solution. I haven't faced stability issues in the solution.

I haven't faced any problems with the solution's scalability.

I am the only administrator for the solution. My company's other branches located in Tanzania, Zambia, and Kenya are planning to move away from Nutanix AHV Virtualization. Still, I think we should try to standardize the platforms to get better future support.

I don't have any problem with the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten since I like the platform. You may find that you may go into the platform and call other people to discuss your issues with the platform, making it one area where I think that I should have a little bit of control.

Positive

The initial setup of Nutanix AHV Virtualization was simple because I understood the product, and I could go through a few tutorials since I was given access to the platform where I could see everything related to the product at once. In Nutanix AHV Virtualization, when I was working with edge devices off-site remotely, I saw that it had many layers since there were too many releases and logins, making it look very demanding.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I have been trying to determine if I need to opt for a single package or two packages to operate Nutanix and virtual machines. I would like to see some documentation from Nutanix providing clarity over the aforementioned statement.

My company chose Nutanix AHV Virtualization over other platforms in the market since it was a recommendation made by the main office of my company. My company mostly operates from South Africa, and from there, we get the direction to go ahead with our work, so today, they can suggest we use one platform, while tomorrow, they may recommend another.

I recommend Nutanix AHV Virtualization to others who plan to use it since I personally prefer the solution, especially in scenarios where I get absolute control over the product. Currently, my control over the product is limited since there are people between me and Nutanix AHV Virtualization.

Considering the solution's scalability, stability, and manageability options, I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.

Nutanix AHV works really well. It's much easier to administer and manage than VMware. Since we're not a large IT department within the finance sector, our team is relatively small. We don't have a huge team of IT professionals to manage all the other systems.

Everyone desires to maintain competitive AHV pricing. AI technology has made significant strides. However, AI also introduces complexities in terms of security. It seems to function but when considering security, it adds layers of management. Integrating AI involves managing IT processes and ensuring they don't compromise security or provide unauthorised access. Unforeseen events may occur due to AI implementation, which require careful consideration. While AI streamlines certain tasks, it doesn't offer a universal solution to improve everything instantly. Incorporating targeted AI solutions within competing products is advantageous. In terms of financial considerations and functionality, integrating AI and Microsoft components into half of the Nutanix AHV evaluation is beneficial. When it comes to the core networking infrastructure, stability and reliability are paramount.

I have been using Nutanix AHV Virtualization for four years.

The product is stable.

The solution’s scalability is very high.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

Nutanix AHV wasn't difficult to complete compared to VMware. VMware can be quite complex. Shifting from one account to another, or from one platform to another, but making a direct comparison is challenging. Nutanix has adopted a similar approach. However, Veeam operates differently. Their focus is on delivering a fast and comprehensive product, like Spectrum. They aim to provide an all-in-one solution.

Nutanix is made up of many different components. Our approach varies, especially with larger virtualization setups, depending on your requirements. If you're a large organisation with thousands of users and hundreds of offices, then, it will be a better fit depending on the requirements. For a small organisation with just a few offices, Nutanix AHV might be easier and simpler to deploy, administer, noticing that it works for larger deployments. 

The initial setup is super easy and takes a couple of hours to complete. We deploy the Nutanix AHV virtualization product on major data centres. We'll back up and replicate our data there.

Deploying the hardware only takes a couple of hours to plug it in. There are other factors to consider from a production. We can't simply download databases, client applications, or live trading functionalities. These aspects need to be carefully managed through change control procedures. The migration was conducted systematically and methodically over a certain time period. If you condense the actual time it took to perform the migration. You have to consider the number of virtual machines. It could take a couple of hours. Therefore, it's unfair to categorise it solely as an economic trend because it depends on several factors.

If I had to pay for it personally, I wouldn't be able to afford it. Considering how much business we generate and how it aligns with current trends, it's worth it for the company. If you're only going to deliver one package once a month, buying a big truck would be expensive for you. But if you're delivering fifty packages every day and making money from it, the cost of a one-minute delay on the truck isn't very significant. Nutanix offers enterprise-class hardware and software. It's a solution tailored for enterprises and while it might be quite expensive for smaller businesses, it's well worth the investment. In the market segment it operates in, it offers competitive features.

We've two Nutanix clusters that replicate between each other. One is production and another one is disaster recovery. It has higher availability clusters. We've three nodes on the side, and it's replicated between the two. One of the nodes goes down. The network capabilities of AHV is very good.

Everything would be connected. It's all on one singular platform, making management streamlined. There's no need for add-ons; everything you need comes with Nutanix. You won't find yourself constantly adding and using different add-ons, or dealing with the complexities of integrating with Linux.

The best implementation is to integrate the Nutanix AHV virtualization framework directly with the hardware and facility infrastructure. This allows you to quickly start using and building new virtual machines in just a couple of hours. It's a seamless process that significantly reduces deployment time.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The solution provides us with a platform to integrate all the hardware products. We can integrate the tool with VMware. Integration is the most valuable feature of the product.

The support must be improved. Other technologies like Dell have their own service centers and different types of SLAs. Nutanix’s support team is not very efficient compared to others.

I resell the solution.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability a nine out of ten.

The initial setup is easy and seamless. The deployment method depends on the customers’ requirements. We can deploy the solution both on the cloud and on-premise. The hardware is on-premise.

The solution’s pricing is relatively fair. It could be improved, though.

I will recommend the tool to others. It is hardware-agnostic and vendor-agnostic. We work with all technologies. The tool provides a platform to integrate all technologies together. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Regarding our clusters, we have deployed multiple AOS clusters with the virtualization hypervisor ASV on them, and we are running VMs on it. For the Veeam instances, we are backing up the VMs that are running on Nutanix infrastructure. For that, Veeam has a proxy called ASV proxy, especially for the Nutanix VMs. That's what you deploy on a cluster, and then you are able to take a backup of the VMs.

One of the most valuable aspects is that it is open source. Nutanix has a licensing cost, yet the hypervisor itself does not incur a cost. Additionally, on Nutanix, you have the capability to take snapshots, unlike on VMware. Also, there are the built-in Docker capabilities for replication between clusters, and you do not need different products to support functionalities such as snapshots on Nutanix.

There is an issue with the guest tools, which depend on the storage hypervisor IP. If the communication with NGT were IP-less, it would be more useful since enabling NGT can expose infrastructure details. Nutanix is aware of this and is working on it. Without resolving this, you cannot take application-consistent backups during VMs' snapshots, as NGT is not installed on a VM.

I have five years of experience with this product.

If you're using an LTS release, it's more stable than the short-term support releases (SDS). The LTS is the enterprise release and is more stable.

Nutanix AHV virtualization is easy to scale, and it doesn't impact anything negatively. Scaling is straightforward whenever required.

Support is excellent. The response time is quick compared to other customer support from different vendors. AHV support is the best.

Positive

Before using Nutanix, the organization was using VMware. Cost was a factor in switching, as the licensing cost for VMware was higher. Nutanix provides an all-in-one solution for functionalities like snapshots, which previously required different products on VMware.

While the setup is not complex per se, it requires specific tools for deployment, and some training is necessary. It's not something a layperson can do; some tutorials are needed before deploying Nutanix.

I am not involved in the licensing terms, and I'm not aware of the exact costs associated with Nutanix AHV licensing. Overall, I understand it to be cost-effective compared to VMware.

I would definitely recommend Nutanix to others.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.