Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We deployed Nutanix Acropolis for a school system in a recent use case. One of our clients uses Nutanix for three campus sites. They've implemented multi-site replication, so there is protection on the data center end. Another client is a hospital that uses Nutanix HCI for its medical systems, like PACS imaging servers. We also have clients in financial services and banking.

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.

Nutanix could streamline Acropolis' advanced management to keep pace with its competitors. For example, in VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor, you can directly put a host into maintenance mode via the GUI. However, it takes several steps to do this with Nutanix Acropolis, and you need to use the command-line interface for most of the steps.

We also faced another challenge in version 5.15. It wasn't easy to upgrade the firmware. You need to set permissions in your cluster to download it from the Nutanix repository and do it offline. After that, you need to create a dark-site web server and put all the repositories or installers to update there. However, I think they enabled upload mode in the new release, so you can download the firmware directly from the website and manually upload it. I haven't tried it yet, but that should be available in the latest version, according to the press release. 

I also think Nutanix Flow has some room for improvement. It currently only protects east-west traffic — like a mini firewall. You should be able to set a security policy that will let you disallow some ports and subnets. That's the only feature that Nutanix Flow lacks right now. Competing products like VMware NSX and Sangfor are more robust in security at the networking level. I think that's the crucial part, given the security concerns we face. It's not only on Layer 2 but down to Layer 3 and the routing aspects of networking.

We're a Nutanix partner in the Philippines, and we've been working with Acropolis for around five years. We started in 2017.

In terms of stability and performance, Acropolis is excellent. We've never gotten any negative feedback from our users. 

We've deployed Acropolis for clients of all sizes, but most are small or medium-sized businesses. Some are on the enterprise level. We have some major banks or financial service clients who also acquire Nutanix. 

We offer different levels of support to our clients. When they experience a problem, they go directly to us. If we can answer the question, it's all good. However, we sometimes face a hardware or software issue, so we need to open a case with Nutanix or the hardware vendor.

Nutanix support is excellent. Their support engineers are well trained. But the resolution speed often comes down to the communication between Nutanix and their OEM partner. For example, if Nutanix support finds a problem with the hardware, they need to report it to the OEM vendor, so that can take time. But in terms of experience and skills, the Nutanix support specialists are outstanding.

Deploying Acropolis is straightforward. I can implement it by myself in one day. 
After installation, we do some preventative maintenance, like checking the hardware and upgrading the firmware and software for the hypervisor as well as the OEM hardware, whether it's Dell, Supermicro, or Lenovo.

Acropolis is priced similarly to competing solutions. In my experience, as long as we have properly sized workloads on the Nutanix cluster, Nutanix's price can even be lower than other HCI brands. Some of the features are licensed separately from Nutanix Acropolis AOS. For example, Flow has a separate license. Nutanix Files and Objects are licensed per terabyte.

If you are thinking about implementing Acropolis, my advice would be to properly size your workload and forecast performance utilization so your sizing will be accurate and you can predict the cost.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS nine out of 10. 

We are a reseller and Nutanix Acropolis AOS is one of the products that I have experience with. I have three nodes, and I am very satisfied with it. I deploy my ERP and my CRM into this infrastructure.

This solution provides very good opportunities.

The most valuable feature is the one-click to update the firmware and software. This is a very good feature for me.

The access speed needs to be improved.

I would like to see official compatibility with Red Hat in the future. This is important because we have a lot of customers who are using Red Hat.

We have been working with this product for approximately a year and a half.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is wonderful, as it is very easy to increase scale.

Our clients are medium and large-sized companies.

Nutanix technical support is very good. The documentation and the community are also very good. There are a lot of blogs in the network and they respond very quickly when we have a problem.

The initial setup is very easy. The length of time required for deployment depends on the packages and functionality. In some instances, we have deployed in one minute, whereas in others, it has taken 30 minutes.

We have a team of developers and they are responsible for the deployment we use in the company.

Overall, this is a very good product. I would say that it is a Top of the World solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I used this for training the value-added reseller. I trained the technique on the console terms to be able to pass the NCP exam.

The fact that there is only one interface to deploy a complete solution for maximum storage is fantastic.

They have offered some new features that I have not deployed so I assume that these issues might have been addressed already, but there was a networking problem. This solution could use network improvements.

I think the next release should include a software improvement, like the ability to deploy with a cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft Azure. I believe that they are already working on this and I think that the best improvement would be to remove the storage configuration because you don't need to manage or to configure this. By default, it should take all the available storage to present the data. They should create network storage in which the administrator doesn't have to manage or configure this part. They should work on the deployment and storage. 

The stability is very good. It was actually the hardware that had some issues and that does not have to do with Nutanix. The hardware manufacturer is behind that. I don't remember having any issues with the stability of the software.

Scalability is very good, I have removed nodes with no problem. It works well when you follow all the best practices of course.

Sometimes during the most important trainings, there were 14 staff members on two internet clusters.

I have no idea how customer service is because I've never dealt with them. We managed to solve any problems by ourselves so we didn't call support.

I have used VMware solutions with server and storage on the same switch. It was the same product on the same architecture, so I cannot challenge those architectures. They are one and the same. I used to deploy HP 300 AP, which is the exact same solution from HP with the VSA solution. VMware was embedded, but from my point of view, it was a little bit too difficult compared to Nutanix.

I don't remember how complex the setup was. In terms of deployment time, it depends on the nodes. I bring solutions with ACP on HTTP and it takes about the 45 minutes and once I had the chance to deploy on an all-flash solution and it was very fast.

I did the setup by my self. I had to reimage each of the nodes to be able to produce a definite image.

Follow the best practices and check everything. The network is always the point of failure, and if you don't configure or manage the best ways for the network, it will remind you that you have an issue, or that you don't have well-prepared deployment.

I would rate Nutanix as nine out of ten because there is always room for improvement. From the beginning, they had a start-up position, but now it seems that they are going to move to the dark side of the market on the license end, like VMware. It seems like you will need a license for everything now. In the beginning, you could have everything with one license, but it looks like now you need a license for these features, another license for other features, and for everything that gives improvements to the solutions you have to buy another license for. That is not good from my point of view.

Our primary use case is to support technical applications for our IT team. We are not yet using it for production.

I think that the most interesting features are the replication and redundancy.

It is a good solution and it is easy to work on a Nutanix platform.

I think that there are several areas that they can improve slightly, including the mail servers, the application servers, and perhaps even the database servers.

If we can have certified compatibility with other companies, such as Oracle, then it would let us know that they function correctly together.

My impression of the stability is good. At the moment, we haven't had any issues.

I cannot comment about the scalability at this time because I don't know when we are going to generalize the solution. We may be able to say by next year, perhaps.

Our intention is to expand its usage beyond the IT team to other applications.

Nutanix technical support is very good.

Prior to this solution, we used VMware on Intel technology. We also have IBM IT Infrastructure with Power technology. We switched to Nutanix because it is easier to manage and administer the platform, compared to others.

The initial setup was easy, although we had one problem related to synchronization with the NT servers. We created a technical support ticket, and they helped us to fix the issue. It was very easy.

The deployment took not more than two or three weeks, including the migration of the servers. It is difficult to say because we acquired Nutanix with other solutions, but I think that Nutanix was faster. Not more than two weeks.

Our IT team will be maintaining the solution, and if we ever have an issue then we can call the integrator. If they cannot fix the problem then we will open a ticket to the Nutanix support.

We used an integrator to assist us with the deployment of this solution. They have done a good job.

We haven't measured our ROI for the moment, but the fact that everything is in the same solution will make life easier for our IT team. We won't have to call the storage specialist or the network specialist every time we have a problem. Everything is packaged in the same solution, and to update the platform is very easy. This will be our first ROI.

There are a lot of problems that occur. One example is when we update the firmware for a product, it can make life difficult for us. If we have a new disk that is not compatible with the storage then updating the firmware causes other things to malfunction. That is quite difficult for all of us. Overall, I think that we will be reducing the time in maintenance as compared to other platforms.

The licensing cost is on a yearly basis. There are a lot of features included with Nutanix that cost a lot with other companies.

We were given demonstrations of other solutions, but we were satisfied with all of the features that Nutanix offers.

We have recently acquired this solution and have done the training. We are going to be using it to support technical applications before we can generalize it, and use it on a much bigger scale.

Currently, it is not the number of users that we are focused on. It will be for technical applications used only by the IT team, which is approximately seventy people.

At this point, my advice for other people who are implementing this product is that they should trust Nutanix. It is a good solution and it is easy to work on their platform. It is compatible with VMware, and they have their own container, which is free. 

I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

I work for a reseller, a consultancy firm. We have successfully onboarded three customers to Nutanix. Nutanix is the solution that I prefer. I deploy the solution for customers and assist them when they encounter any issues. The feedback provided by our customers has been nothing but excellent. 

Some of our customers use Nutanix due to its ease of management across their data centers and also, the cloud experience it offers. The Business continuity functionality embedded in Nutanix is priceless. From putting your VMs in a protection domain to setting up an RPO which can be as low as 10mins for synchronous environments, you are able to seamlessly perform planned and unplanned failover in a time-efficient manner. 

The Nutanix Database as a service is another use case that our customers have found very interesting and useful in their environment. With their DBaaS solution, you are able to provision databases within minutes and patch databases faster without bothering about compatibilities issues as to how some environments are. 

Database as a service (ERA). The value of Nutanix AOS embedded in ERA can be seen In the course of doing some cumbersome  database operations, such as database provisioning, snapshots and patches. The solution gives our customers the ability to provision databases faster and perform patching. With Nutanix, I have seen a database instance that took less than 15 minutes to provision as compared to the normal one that actually takes 30 minutes or more.

For their Time machine which is also a great feature of their DBaaS Solution, you are able to recover DBs quickly even with less backups and hence, this saves you money from a storage perspective.  

In terms of scalability, customers can scale in/out utilizing a plug and play approach. When there's need for compute or/and storage, you can acquire a compute-only node or a storage-only node and insert it like you would in a blade chassis. 

I think nothing for now.. I and my clients are enjoying the services provided by Nutanix thus far.

I have been working with Nutanix Acropolis for two years.

We have never had an issue with the scalability of Nutanix Acropolis because it is plug and play. Their architecture utilizes that of a public cloud. If you already have a Nutanix cluster, and you get a new node, you can easily add it to the cluster 

I am the product manager for Nutanix in my company. Time to time, customers call to commend the support service from Nutanix and has been reported as the best support across all their other products in their organizations 

Nutanix has the simplest deployment no matter the type of environment you are setting up. 

If a customer has been using VMware, the difference in pricing is lower. However, Nutanix is not "cheap" as they would say in the news.

I would recommend this solution to other companies, they are the best. Nutanix has surpassed others when it comes to hyper-converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud infrastructure.  If customers are looking for a solution that is easy to learn, intuitive and not complicated, Nutanix is what you want. 

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a 9 out of 10.

I'm an IT manager

The product provides a complete and wonderful package. The best feature is the level of user-friendliness the solution offers, it's a class apart.

I'd like to see an improvement in the notifications because it's not very useful as it is now and it's quite difficult to find out what the problem is when something goes wrong.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

This solution is highly scalable. 

The customer support is very good. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We have over 100 users and their roles are in sales, operations, supply chain and production.

We haven't yet had a return on our investment, we're expecting that sometime this year.

Licensing is on an annual basis. 

I would definitely advise all my peers and anyone working in the same field to at least have a look at this product. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

The Nutanix Prism interface is the most beautiful interface I had ever used in any software. The simplicity and fluency of the HTML 5 interface gives a one-of-a-kind user experience. It provides full visibility into and management of my complete virtual infrastructure. The integration to VMware vCenter gives added value, so you don't have to rely on different interfaces for basic VM management.

As I have been using Nutanix since 2014, I have seen approximately five major release versions. Each release provided improvements in performance and new features enhancements. The best part of it is that you just update to get the new features and improvements.

I would definitely love to see single and two-node cluster setup, as well native network virtualization/micro-segmentation capabilities. These are already announced features and much anticipated. I would also love to get application visibility within the Prism management console with more RBAC capabilities.

Since July, 2014.

So far I have not faced any major issues with stability of the Nutanix platform.

Although I have not scaled my current cluster, as it is enough for my company, as Systems Integrators we have implemented dozens of clusters and scaled without any issues.

One of the best things about Nutanix as a company is it's best of class support. The support model has no support levels and the assigned engineer is an expert not only in Nutanix, but in hypervisors and other components as well. They are correctly called Systems Reliability Engineers (SRE), and deserve an NPS of 90-plus.

Yes, we were using traditional server plus storage infrastructure. As we partnered with Nutanix we decided to evaluate it ourselves before we recommended it to our customers. And it’s worth it.

Foundation of the system initialization is provided by Nutanix. They take care of the complete installation and initial configuration, while you take a sip of coffee.

Although Nutanix cannot be compared directly with any other products on market, it’s worth every penny spent. Most of the features are available in the starter version, and the license can be easily upgraded to activate or deactivate more advanced features without any downtime, cluster evacuation, or rebuild.

Yes, we evaluated a few other hyper-converged platforms, but Nutanix was the obvious choice because of its software-only structure with no dependence on hardware components.

I would highly recommend considering Nutanix for any kind of workload, whether VDI, server virtualization, databases, Exchange or Big Data. I will say Nutanix gives system administrators their lives back; no weekend upgrades or issues. The one-click feature is truly a single-click for any upgrade, including Nutanix AOS, hypervisor, firmware, etc.