Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

I primarily use Nutanix Acropolis for anything that I can't engineer in the environment, such as redundancy between the database servers and the clustering. 

This solution is deployed on-premises. 

Some of the most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis are that it's free from Nutanix and it's very stable. 

The one note of improvement I have for Nutanix is that the installation should be easier. 

I have been using this solution for five or six years. 

This solution is very stable. 

This solution is scalable. 

In our organization, there are around 1,400 users of this solution. 

Nutanix technical support is good. Whenever I contact Nutanix, they reply to me and solve my issue. I think that Nutanix support is better than the support of other companies—with a previous VMware solution, we were using it for three or four years, but when a problem came up, it took their support three months to resolve the issue. After that, we switched to Nutanix. 

Nutanix is the third virtualization solution that I have used. We previously used a VMware solution. In comparison, Nutanix support is much better, but the installation process for VMware was easier. 

The installation for Nutanix was not easy. We needed to do many interactive things in order to install it, and there were many controllers. You will need a technical engineer to help with installation. Installation takes about two days, maybe three days, maximum. 

We implemented this solution through an in-house team. 

We just have a support license for Nutanix. 

I rate Nutanix Acropolis a ten out of ten, and I would recommend Nutanix products to others. 

I use Nutanix Acropolis AOS to host all of our electronic services in the university, such as e-services, e-learning system, registration system, library system, finance system, HR system, and clinics.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has helped our organization run a lot better by allowing us to manage everything from one single location.

The best feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the central management of all of our resources. Additionally, it is easy to use

The solution has been more than enough at the moment to manage all of my services.

I have used Nutanix Acropolis AOS within the past 12 months.

The solution is very stable at the moment.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is highly scalable. This is the most important factor that we went to this technology.

Every cloud distributer went to hyper-converged because of the scalability.

All of our users have migrated to the new cloud, which is the new hosted at the university. We have approximately 2,000 students, 300 administrators employees, and 150 faculty members. The total is approximately 2,500 users using this solution. The university is still expanding, it is a young institute and we plan to increase usage of the solution.

We are still new at using this technology, and till the moment, we did not have any problems. I think you cannot tell if there are any issues with the product for a couple of years. When we start to upgrade our framework, upgrade the main OS, we will see if then we might have issues. At this point as an administrator, everything has been stable, we do not need any support.

We were using Citrix for our servers previously. However, it is hard to compare to Citrix because it is a different technology.

When comparing Nutanix Acropolis AOS installation to the traditional solution, you have to bring the servers, deploy the operating system, and then attach them to SAN storage. This newer solution was much easier than the old technique that we used, the installation is very straightforward.

Once you start it up from out of the box you can start creating virtual machines and migrate your servers. It is very straightforward. The virtual concept is simple, you create the virtual machines and book the resources.

The one disadvantage is relative, financially Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a little bit more expensive than the old solution.

Nutanix owns the hosting, servers, and licenses. You purchase the whole product as a bundle,  and you can have support for it.

We did our homework and we did study the technology in Nutanix Acropolis AOS before choosing it.

We have contacted more than one partner regarding the hyper-converged system. They sent us their solution from HP, for instance, they have their own hyper-converged system. They are using the DL Series DL380 and I went back to Gartner reports and other review sites, and then compared the specs to others. There is a hyper-converged solution from Dell but I think the leader in this technology right now is Nutanix. It is important to do a proof of concept.

The Patriarchate that owns the university is also in charge of multiple educational institutions. What we are thinking is to migrate all our services, to have our own private cloud, instead of being hosted separately into multiple hosts in our university. That's why we are planning to increase our nodes and to move all of the nodes, and all of the e-services related to our institute, inside our campus.

My advice to others is this solution is great and I highly recommend it. It's much better than the other technology or the deployed traditional solutions.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a ten out of ten.

We are using the hyperconverged Cloud software and I manage Nutanix. I was responsible for the planning, management and the architecture. It was then given to the structural team.

We updated the internet software so when we migrated the workload we could compare from previous examples.

To have internal stability, we needed to network the solution ourselves. Performance depends on the application. Performance could be the lack of IOPS, memory and CPU and configuration issues. 

We are not going to increase our usage of Nutanix Solutions. We are migrating to the Cloud because of the cost.

We have been using it for about one month.

Stability depends on the type of application you are running. If you are running complex applications you should run them one at a time.

We have a Nutanix vendor that provides maintenance. We escalate to support if it is beyond the control of our in-house support team.

Our company already had a license for Nutanix so we wanted to us Nutanix Acropolis Solutions before any licensing costs. 

It is not straightforward to install, you need to follow the installation steps. The installation took about one to two months to complete the entire process as it took workloads from our existing developer platform.

We have about 25 people managing the application deployment.

The maintenance software is straightforward because you do not need to do any configuration.

The installation was carried out by the vendor.

We did not require licenses because we already used Nutanix, so we only need to buy the software.

I recommend certain applications but not this solution. There are certain limitations due to the lack of storage. If you need high performance, heavy applications you need to consider hardware and storage.

I would rate this solution a 6 out of 10.

We are hosting many companies' IT. We provide IT services for our customers.

In terms of its version, I am not a system owner, so I don't know, but I guess we are regularly updating to the latest version.

Its low maintenance is a key feature. It is easy to install, upgrade, and scale by adding more blocks. 

Compute analysis is really easy. It takes hours instead of days.

The self-service side of the product needs to be improved. We should be able to add two-factor authentication and more security layers to it.

We would also like more tiering of the storage if that's possible.

The company has been using it for about two years.

Its stability and performance depend on what kind of hardware you put in the nodes. Its performance is average. It doesn't have high performance on the storage side, but it is good enough for mainstream users.

It is really scalable. It is too easy to scale. We have around three people who use it right now.

We didn't have any issues that we had to escalate to their technical support.

We are using Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct. I don't know if it can be called hyper-converged, but it is almost hyper-converged. VMware with vSAN is also hyper-converged, but we're using it without the NSX module, so it is not a software-defined network. It is semi hyper-converged for me. As compared to these two, Nutanix is easier to use and easier to manage. It is more complex to get VMware and Hyper-V up and running than Nutanix.

It was really straightforward. We were up and running in hours. It was really easy.

Its deployment was handled internally.

Its licensing model is easy, but the bad thing is that we need to pay for the whole capacity at once. With VMware vSAN, we only have to pay for the capacity that we are using, which is not the case with Nutanix. So, we have more overhead for the licensing cost with Nutanix.

I would advise talking to Nutanix to get the right hardware from the start and only buying certified hardware. You can use the Nutanix capacity planning information that exists to get the right sizing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

We use Nutanix Acropolis AOS for the high availability that we get with it. The platform's extremely stable and other nice things that we like about it is that if we have to move the server or anything, it's not a lot to move and power consumption is a big thing for us as well.

My primary use case of this solution is that it helped me solve all of my use cases. I can create an integrative private cloud in a data center, create a hybrid cloud, public cloud, and near-site data recording. For example, there are lots of sites that do not have the data there so I can create data because Nutanix also has got it stored on the nodes. It takes care of storage on the nodes. I can build storage on the nodes, compute them, give the clients who already have a small data center within themselves but they do not have it externally. By using storage on the nodes in Nutanix I can give them the external.

We primarily use Nutanix as our base environment where we host all our database servers. We also host our active directory on it, our mail servers, and all of our bare-metal systems combined into one unit. Then we use Inuvika for the VDI environment on top of Nutanix.

One of the benefits this solution has had for my organization is space consumption. Space consumption was reduced by approximately 40% because if I had gone with another kind of traditional, or open-world solution, then I would have not saved my floor space. Another way it has benefited my organization is because of the energy consumption.

I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software.

On-demand scaling is the most valuable feature, I can keep on scaling on-demand.

With Nutanix, if I do three or four nodes if I look at the traditional environment I have to really figure out the wave concept. Connect wave one, wave two, wave six, wave five. In Nutanix I don't have any of these issues. Lastly, deduplication. Deduplication and erasure coding

As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface that can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I can create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as parallel execution.

I would suggest that this could perhaps be switched. That is so far the only change I would like. I would like it if they could fix the instance where you double click on a VM and it opens the VM instead of the setup.

We've only been using Nutanix Acropolis for a short time now so we haven't gone into full production with the product yet.

This product is very scalable. We currently have 60 users. One of the things I like about it is that you can add extra nodes without any problem. Something we are currently looking at for the future is to put a smaller cluster on each side, where we can then, overnight, replicate the data from the site to the primary cluster. That's one of the other reasons why we looked at Nutanix instead of VMware and Citrix.

We had only one query so far, and the support team was excellent. They came back to us immediately and their service was excellent.

We've only been using Nutanix Acropolis for a short time now so we haven't gone into full production with the product yet.

The entire setup took us half a day. We used a consultant for the deployment. The service I received from them is unbelievable.

One of the major problems with IT in South Africa is that licensing fees are 14 times more expensive than anywhere in the world.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. If they develop the interoperability then it would make it a ten.

We looked at other options like VMware and Citrix, but Nutanix was the only solution that offered us scalability and the option to add extra notes without any problems.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We deliver a lot of different solutions on various platforms, including different HCI solutions and solutions like Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex and NetApps, later HCI mile. Most of them have been on Nutanix and on Cisco HyperFlex and as well as VxRack. Our primary use case has of Nutanix has been for virtualization consolidation. We are partners and resellers of Nutanix and I'm a consulting solutions architect.

Nutanix has several feature sets that we like. For example, everything's core centralized on the UI. You don't have multiple interfaces that you have to jump between like in some other solutions. It's more integrated for the overall management of the infrastructure. The other part too which is very attractive, is the fact they provide an option if you're not leveraging your OEM hypervisor like VMware or HyperV. That was a significant cost saver for us as well as enabling us to look at alternatives to the VMware tax. 

For now, I can't think of anything that can be improved. They've been pretty innovative and have provided a fairly comprehensive roadmap. I've worked directly with some of the backend TME guys and they're very responsive and have addressed anything that's come up. However, I would like to see better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators to have a full backup recovery from site to site and from site to cloud and cloud to cloud - the full range. The cloud ecosystem for public/private, site to site visibility with a single backup product.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

From a software perspective, it's incredibly stable and portable. The only caution I would give is that since it is a software-defined solution, be careful of the underlying hardware. It's nothing to do with Nutanix, it's a hardware issue. You may have a highly available, reliable software platform, but it's on commodity hardware so you might experience more failures on the hardware because you decided to go for commodity. You need to be careful how you're architecting your solution and your application factors as you build up your data center, and not sell yourself short and get the cheapest hardware on the market to save costs, because that can turn out to be an expensive decision. 

I haven't seen any issues with scalability. Most people I know for the most part are very sensitive about the fault domains. So they tend to go off from smaller clusters. You do have the ability to go pretty much as far as is humanly possible, it depends how much risk you want to take, but at the same time the scalability is definitely there. Most systems are capped at where you can scale out cluster-wise of VMware, 64 nodes and HyperV at 64. There are two factors to the scalability equation. There's the storage within each node, which is fine and then obviously the scalability as far as CPU and memory go. You can mix and match your platforms on your favorite vendor, but then you need the ability to go beyond 64 where necessary. We do have a couple of accounts that we've worked with where they have some fairly large clusters and I think that's a great option for people needing that level of scalability.

The biggest thing that I've seen has been the backup and recovery which has been challenging for them over the past couple of years. They partnered with Beam and with Rubrik and Cohesity. They had their OEM go-to's, but didn't initially deliver a very good story for application integration for backup and recovery where they had good copy data management. Most of the OEMs are very good at backing up single clusters for local backup and recovery. That said, whenever true disaster recovery was needed and you're leveraging multiple Nutanix missions site to site, there wasn't the visibility of being able to backup or being able to have the application integration.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Prepping my environment with Turbonomic before migrating made the transition quicker and easier by right-sizing my VMs. It continues to offer great features in my new environment. 

• The simplicity Prism (AHV) delivers over other hypervisor solutions has dramatically alleviated the workload, reducing the work pressure from the current workforce.

• It has helped us to distinctly improve our organization and proved to be an effective solution.

• The level of statistical performance data that it can confirm in real-time is extremely useful. I can see what my VM’s hosts and guests are doing from a single pane of glass and identify issues before they would otherwise become apparent.

• The informatics support for this graphical software is up-to-date with the latest infographic web trends.
  

• Site-to-site deduplication needs some work. It’s not as feature-rich for a disaster recovery implementation, but my understanding is that it is slated for improvement in near future releases. 

• DRS-like functionality is also a much-desired feature slated for a future release.
• Third-party solutions are few and far between right now since Nutanix is so new considering the production of the software. Improvements should be made to compensate for upcoming software and solutions. 
• Regarding third-party backup solutions, the only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex, and requires intensive vendor training. We opted to use the built-in snapshot replication options from Azure.

Consider purchasing Turbonomic with or before Nutanix. They pair and play well together.

If you do use Turbonomic before going with Nutanix, make sure the company knows you intend to move to Nutanix. This ensures you license the proper features.

Do not dismiss Nutanix too hastily over one little feature or another. They are advancing, and it is worth your patience. The value brought in from simplicity, support, and time savings is worth a consideration. 

The consolidated storage: no need to use central storage that has a performance penalty. For example, while using central storage that enables file-sharing NAS services & SAN services, when one VM had an IO overload, all the VMs in the same data store in the VMware environment on the same LUN suffered from I/O latency. Now, in the new consolidated storage, this does not happen.

We can deploy VM as a service & we can perform updates on the nodes without downtime in a very simple, direct way.

The improvement needed is for elastic clusters, meaning the ability to depart and join nodes in an automatic way. We have a laboratory that needs to perform bare metal tests and therefore needs to unjoin the nodes from the cluster and later on join them back.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, but we are about to add another node to the cluster and it should be a very simple task .

Technical support is very good, and good with responsive time.

We were using central storage and suffered from bad performance latency.

Initial setup was straightforward.

At the time we checked, this solution was unique.

Perform resizing. Check the needs and deploy only what is needed. Check the memory DIMMs and make sure for the price you get, you have free DIMMs.

We Added a dedicated switch for this cluster so that all layer 2 networking will be in this switch and separate from the main routers.