Nutanix AHV Virtualization Reviews

No one in our organization can ignore the value of Nutanix because of the cost reduction that it has afforded us compared to converged products from Cisco or HP.

The most valuable feature is the integration between storage and compute services. You can use these two resources together as one unit.

The monitoring and reports for all activities are integrated on one dashboard.

Support for more Red Hat solutions would be an improvement. As of now, Nutanix only officially supports three hypervisors. These are VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV. There is minimal support for Red Hat.

It is very important that in the future, Nutanix supports bare-metal implementation. This means that you can install the hypervisor directly to the hardware.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see support for containerization.

I have been using Nutanix AHV for three years.

This is a stable product.

This solution has endless scalability. You can scale up and scale out as much as you want. All you have to do to scale out is add nodes.

I have used several other solutions. With both Cisco and HP, there are limitations in terms of scalability. If you are using VMware then there is a limitation at the host-level.

Implementation and deployment is straightforward. Within half an hour it can be set up and running.

There are solutions by HP and NetApp, but you cannot compare them to Nutanix because it supports HP, Hyper-V, and VMware as well.

There are rumors around the globe that suggest Nutanix cannot be used for heavy software. However, I have tested it on all levels and it performs well. I have used it for big data and it works great.

The biggest lesson that I have learned when using this solution is related to the sizing of the system. If you define your requirements accurately then you will not see any issues in terms of performance. This means that it is very important to know what you want and what kind of applications will be hosted on Nutanix. You should also understand the use case for Nutanix, itself. When you understand all of this, it prepares you very well for calculating the resources that will be needed.

For me, this is the number one hyper-converged solution. I am a fan of VMware, but I can see that in Nutanix, the internal components combine very harmoniously. There is a huge development team behind Nutanix and they are working daily to develop the product and come out with new technologies.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a system integration company and we sell hyper-converged infrastructure as the new model data center technology.

This is one of the solutions that we provide to our customers.

This solution can be deployed on-premises or in a cloud-based environment, but the majority of deployments are on-premises.

This solution has very good feedback from our customers in terms of the benefits that it provides. They have lots of automation and orchestration policies and procedures in place so that they can create virtual machines within a few minutes. Overall, it improves productivity. In fact, you can do a lot of R&D for your most critical kind of applications without having to procure a proper dedicated infrastructure for that. It helps a lot.

The interface is very good, and quite user-friendly. You can learn how to use this solution in three to five days.

They have lots of easy ways to provision VMs with just two clicks, which is something you cannot easily do with VMware. It is possible but quite lengthy and complex.

The automation functionality is strong.

At the application level, if you wanted to change your hypervisor from VMware or another to AHV then there is a limitation in that you need to redeploy the whole application. For example, let's say that you are running Oracle ERP or Oracle Financial Business Suite, and it is on VMware. Then you switch to AHV and you migrate the virtual machine, it will be there, but all of the links that were created in the previous hypervisor will be broken. So, what Nutanix recommends is that you redeploy the application. This is quite a bit of work. For example, the ERP requires a lot of time to implement and get into synch and get running smoothly.

The technical support for this solution needs to be improved in terms of response time.

This solution should offer more orchestration and automation as we see in VMware. They can do more.

I would like to see more use cases from Nutanix on future trend technologies such as IoT, data analytics, big data, smart cities, and more. They need to do more R&D with respect to these new technologies. This would make it easy for us to understand whether they are capable of such functionality, or not.

This is the only true hyper-converged infrastructure in the market.

This solution is very scalable.

I have not dealt with technical support for this solution personally, but the people in my organization, as well as from other places, have told me that it needs to improve a lot.

From what I have been told, they are quite capable of resolving the issues, but the response time is simply too long.

In addition to this solution, I am using EMC VxRail, Hitachi HCP, and occasionally NetApp. I would rate the Nutanix solution as the top one. My second choice is the Dell EMC solution.

The customer's requirements, as well as the budget, are what decide the suitability of a particular solution.

The initial setup of this solution is pretty much straightforward. From unboxing to rack and mounting and cabling, I think that it requires no more than three to four hours to get it up and running, maximum.

Obviously, it will depend on the size of the implementation. If it is huge then you will have to increase the number of hours. I am talking about an SMB environment. You will be able to create virtual machines within four to five hours of unboxing.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that there is no licensing fee. This means that if you don't have any virtual environment in your organization and wanted to go virtualized, and on top of that you want to go more than the data center, you don't have to worry about the licensing for the virtual infrastructure. It comes free of cost. If you want to choose another hypervisor then you need to pay a lot of licensing fees upfront, and then a recurring cost over the years for support and upgrades. That's the big difference between AHV and the others.

Nutanix is the only player in the market who is actually providing you with the hyper-converged infrastructure. You can either choose their own AHV hypervisor, or you can have VMware on top of it as a hypervisor to base the operating system. This gives a benefit over others who don't offer the same kind of infrastructure for both hypervisors.

You cannot mix it, that's one thing that is true across the board. However, you do have a choice of hypervisor. For some customers, they have already invested in VMware and they want to move to hyper-converged infrastructure. So, Nutanix would be comparatively a better choice, which can impact your previous investment and you can build your virtual hyper-converged infrastructure on Nutanix.

This is the number one hyper-converged solution in the market. No doubt about it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The solution's most valuable feature is Prism Central. It has a feature which allows you to upload the firmware software with just one click, requiring no downtime.

Nutanix AHV Virtualization's price is very high. 

I have been working with the product for seven years. 

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. Its scalability features support our company's growth by making the platform very easy to access with no downtime and no prerequisites. It allows expansion, similar to expanding the cluster.

Nutanix AHV Virtualization is easy to install and takes only a few hours to complete. 

I rate Nutanix AHV Virtualization's pricing a five out of ten. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

The solution is used for virtualization.

The dashboard of the solution is one of its strongest points.

Pricing is an area that needs improvement. In future releases, I would like to see a better pricing policy. The solution's scalability needs to be improved.

I have been using Nutanix AHV Virtualization for eight-plus years. I am using the solution's latest version. Also, I am not using it, but my team does use it. My company has a partnership with Nutanix.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a six out of ten. There are some issues with the availability of the services, which we are trying to sort out.

Around 10 to 20 people, who are managers and developers, are currently using the solution in my organization.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a six out of ten. It's not a very scalable product.

The support team is helpful, and I rate the support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was easy. For maintenance, ten engineers are needed.

The pricing depends upon the licenses, considering the number of devices.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

The solution is being used for our internal purposes. 

The performance is the most valuable feature. 

The pricing must be made cheaper.

I have experience with Nutanix AHV Virtualization.

It is a highly stable solution. I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is highly scalable. Ten people are using the solution. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The initial setup is easy. One staff is required for deployment and maintenance.I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. 

The deployment is done in-house. 

The solution is expensive. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

We use AHV to manage our virtual environment. The AHV is the hypervisor that we use to create virtual machines. AHV has another layer called AOS, which means the Acropolis Operating System from Nutanix.

AHV is based on a well-known hypervisor called the KVM hypervisor. KVM hypervisor is an open source hypervisor from Red Hat. Nutanix took KVM and added many features on top of it that weren't available. For example, moving virtual machines from KVM to another KVM wasn't possible without many configurations.

We're using the most updated version of AHV. It's deployed on-premises.

There are some issues with the interface and integration. The AHV management console is a web-based console. Sometimes the interface doesn't capture the mouse or keyboard strokes from the managing console to integrate with the virtual machines. Sometimes the type strokes aren't captured from the interface. To fix the problem, we have to close the interface and rerun it.

There's another problem with the scaling. If the main operating system is low scale, we can't see some parts of the virtual environment. For example, the screen won't be displayed because the window isn't big enough, so it's outside the scope of the screen.

The solution is stable. When we have a number of nodes and run the AHV hypervisor, we create a cluster and can create a virtual machine anywhere. If we want to move the virtual machine from one host to another, it's simple, straightforward, and stable. There's no interruption of the virtual machine. For example, we can run a ping to the virtual machine continuously, move the virtual machine from one node to another, and the ping won't drop.

There's no interruption of services when we move from one host to another. I think it's because the environment doesn't have many virtual machines.

It's scalable.

Technical support is good.

Deployment took less than two days. 

We have three years of guaranteed support. When we need troubleshooting or help with maintenance, we call the company or the resellers will send the engineer that deployed the environment to solve the problem.

We purchased the solution with three years of support. It's a one-time purchase. After that, we will need to renew support. The licenses are perpetual, which means they don't expire. Even if we don't have support or don't renew the support service after three years, we will still be able to use the solution.

I have compared the solution with VMware and Hyper-V.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. 

For someone who is planning to implement this solution, my advice is that if you're interested in it, buy everything that's Nutanix. Don't try to mix up different solutions from different manufacturers because you'll lose many features. If you want an all-in-one solution, go for the Nutanix all-in-one environment. Don't try to buy from other manufacturers.

Nutanix AHV's most valuable feature is NetFlow. Its performance and speed are also very good. 

An improvement would be for Nutanix AHV to support VMDK, AOS, Hyper-V, and VMware.

I've been working with Nutanix AHV for three years.

Nutanix AHV is stable.

Nutanix AHV is scalable.

The initial setup was straightforward as we used Nutanix Foundation to deploy the AHV computing and solution orders.

Nutanix AHV is low cost.

I would rate Nutanix AHV as eight out of ten.

This is an HCI platform. You can use it in a physical environment that is not virtualized. Another use case can be as an application server in an application deployment. For instance, if I want to deploy a write-intensive application and I want to have a platform to implement this, the HCI solution has Nutanix can be a good solution for that.

The one-click upgrade is the solution's most valuable feature. It allows you to perform upgrades even when you are in production. Without having to wait for a maintenance window, you can perform your upgrade. It is a non-disruptive operation.

The initial setup is simple.

The solution scales very well. 

A lot of tasks cannot be performed using the GUI, the graphical interface. They need to make it so that if you want to perform a task, you can do it using the GUI. So far, there are a lot of tasks you have to perform using CLI. When you compare it with VMware, you can perform a lot of tasks using your vCenter GUI however, in the case of Nutanix, it is not something that is very easy to do. You have to do a lot of things using the CLI. This is one of the areas they have to improve on.

I've been using the solution for six years. 

The scalability is very fast. When you want to perform a scale-out, I mean having another server within your capacity, it's very simple. You just have to add a node, connect it to the network and that's all. Even when you want to perform a scale-out operation, you just have to migrate your VM, shut down the server, and do your upgrade. For instance, you can have additional node memory. After that, you will power your server again and that's all. You reconnect it on the network and that's all. It's very fast and simple if you want to scale. Customers find this very easy to do. 

I've never reached out to technical support. Therefore, I can't speak to how helpful they are. 

The solution offers a very easy initial setup. If it's a basic set of tasks,  it's very simple. However, for more advanced tasks, you must use the CLI. That can be uncomfortable for some users. 

The deployment is very, very fast. When you perform an installation, the basic installation takes generally two days. You can deploy a cluster, and, after that, you have some tasks to perform. That might involve migrating some existing VMs, some physical VMs, performing the network integration and so on. It takes a few days to implement your cluster.

I'm not sure of the exact pricing, however, it is my understanding that at this point, we just have to pay for the renewal for the support. It has a perpetual license. Normally, all the licenses in Nutanix are perpetual. We just renew the support after three years.

We are Nutanix partners. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.