Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We are a managed service provider (MSP) using Acropolis AOS to host our customers' servers and data.

Acropolis has a great interface and lots of management features packaged with it at an affordable price.

We ran into an issue as a managed service provider because Acropolis isn't designed to be used the way we are running it. For example, if we want to deploy a Kubernetes service, the customer networks need to reach our protected cluster network. We have isolated our customers in separate VLANs. However, our customers' networks must access our cluster network to get features like iSCSI or Kubernetes to run. It's challenging.

I've been looking forward to Layer 3 networking, which Nutanix is expected to add to Acropolis soon. When I think of a feature I would like to implement, I check the Nutanix site to see if it's coming. Layer 3 networking is a release candidate right now. It's on the roadmap already. They're working on all of the features that I want.

Acropolis is stable.

Acropolis is scalable. We are increasing the usage every day, and we are planning to purchase a couple of nodes more soon. We have maybe 300 virtual machines and 30 customers.

Nutanix support is good. We contact support when we have any problems, and they quickly put us in touch with the senior technicians.

We switched to Acropolis from an older Hyper-V cluster. It was old — not outdated per se — but it lagged in terms of feature sets like hosting containerized solutions and things like that. Acropolis gave us a solution that improved a lot of areas. 

For example, they have built-in firewalls for the services if we want to use them. We use a different solution for firewalling our customer environment, but I would say that the feature sets are developing rapidly. They come out with new features every year, and it feels like they are on top of developing new things to implement in Acropolis.

Deploying Acropolis was quite easy. It took a little bit of light tinkering to get everything to work with the VLANs and isolate all the networks in the beginning. I and my colleague went into our data center and put everything into place then configured everything, so it was straightforward. Also, you only need one person to maintain these nodes. 

I rate Acropolis AOS eight out of 10. If someone is thinking of implementing Acropolis, it's essential to read the documentation and use any technical resources you can use with Nutanix before deploying it. They need to know what they're doing before deploying a Nutanix solution. Before deploying, I would suggest reading all the documentation and talking to a Nutanix expert. Everything needs to be correct when deploying it because it's harder to adjust everything after.

I am using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for virtualization.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS makes it easy to use and manage projects and it has a good reputation.

The compatibility and integration of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be improved. For example, we have a WAF application firewall and it does not work on this solution. Not all the OS's run on AOS. You need to have a newer version of an operating system if you want Nutanix to perfectly run all the different options.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately four months.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable.

I have contacted the support during the installation. I did receive a quick and informative response. However, I don't use the support very often. 

I would advise others this is a good product for virtualization.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight out of ten.

My major use case is the Nutanix distributed file system based on the NDFS file system, which allows customers to consolidate and reposition.

The most valuable features are the user-friendly dashboard and that we don't need to move resources manually when adding new nodes into running clusters.

In the future, I would like Acropolis to add support for publishing external storage.

Acropolis is pretty stable - it works perfectly within the production environment.

This solution is scalable - I can go up to a 64 node cluster from a 3 node cluster. In one organization, I configured around 316 nodes, distributed across file locations, the biggest implementation even in Asia-Pacific.

The setup was straightforward, taking between 15 days and a month.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV.

I've been using this solution for three years.

The stability of this solution is good.

I have no issues with the scalability of this solution.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup was a little difficult - I used Foundation VM to image the nodes, and it was difficult to use this feature.

Licensing is available on a monthly basis with no additional fees.

I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

The Cloud version of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is not available in Estonia. We used it for a simple bookkeeping system.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has improved my organization because it has a fast delivery speed.

The solution is well integrated with other vendors.

The process of migrating from old hardware to new could improve.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately six years.

The solution is stable. On the customer's side, it was perfect, it was running very smooth without any issues.

The solution is being used in a large company and there are approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

I have had some interactions with the technical support from India remotely, and they were quite good and understood what they are doing. It is online support and it was good.

We have used other hyper-converged systems previously but there were some technical issues and the vendor did not take care of the solution well.

The initial setup was not complex. We built it for a five-year period and we will need to replace it with something similar when it is ten years old. It takes approximately one day to implement the solution and then you can use it.

We have one person from the seller side and a second person from the customer side for the deployment and maintenance of the solution. It's covered by Nutanix support too.

The price of the solution is expensive. However, the price to performance is good. The cost for development and installation is very low.

It is very good to have an on-premise cloud system, it works well.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a ten out of ten.

A majority of my clients are those who are looking to either move away from VMware or clients who are looking for maybe a little more out of HyperV. Naturally, they look towards the top of the list. We have seen a lot of customers drop VMware due to the cost. 

We're also seeing a lot of customers who want a couple of features, similar to VMware with the capacity of a cloud, et cetera. They want that, however, they don't have it to their HyperV. Instead of moving to VMware, they work with Nutanix.

There's a mix of multiple features that I like. A lot of our clients like the fact that it is easy to update and upgrade their clusters via an interface using LCM. 

The initial setup is quite simple. 

The solution remains stable across versions. 

Technical support is great.

We haven't come across any issues. Our clients haven't seen any issues with Nutanix at all.

There should be a little more access to Nutanix files. As it is right now you have one type of Nutanix file at no additional cost. Most customers have a little more than a one-byte file server. An initial byte size could be a little more than one terabyte.

I've been using the solution for maybe five or six years. 

Even when we do initial deployments, before we run the update for the newest versions, even the older version is quite stable for us. When we move to a new version, of course, it becomes even better.

The scalability is quite good. With the introduction of some smaller branch office nodes, it has given a lot of our customers the ability to scale from a small setup and then to grow up accordingly. For instance, we have some customers who may start off with some of the larger clusters and then scale by adding small branch office nodes. It's very flexible. 

At this time, we have about 35 deployments of the product.

We have plans to increase usage. We have customers who are in a cycle right now of increasing the capacities via the expansion of nodes. We also have clients who are adding on or upgrading from other Nutanix options.

We've never had any issue in terms of getting Nutanix support. We have a team of trained Nutanix engineers at hand, however, we do, from time, reach out to Nutanix directly both for our work cluster, as well as on behalf of our customers. 

We've never had any instances of a long waiting time. They're always responsive and get back to us on anything that has to be escalated. It's quite a smooth and simple process.

The implementation process is extremely straightforward. It's no more than two to three days to do entire migrations for VMware. We utilize the Nutanix move tool to help us with our processes as well.

We are partners and we partner directly with Nutanix. We're also resellers.

I'd advise the solution is definitely something that a company should go for. One of the major things is that Nutanix allows you to move from VMware to Acropolis and it also allows you to move back. There is no harm in actually trying out Nutanix Acropolis and seeing how it works out.

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

We can troubleshoot customer issues (e.g. crashes, performance issues etc.) very quickly and efficiently since we know exactly how the infrastructure should behave and what performance values are to be expected.

Nutanix delivers full visibility down to a single virtual disk (e.g. a VMDK file) and every single hardware component. Predefined health checks are executed during a support case which will in most cases already narrow down the root cause considerably if not point it out directly.

Most of our customers actually don’t manage their Nutanix environment at all since common tasks such as LUN provisioning, zoning, permission settings etc. don’t apply any longer.

• Very easy management (e.g. daily tasks and also major upgrades)
• Simple and fast to implement as a partner
• Very mature and stable with outstanding Nutanix support if needed (we are a L1 and L2 support partner as well)
• Potential to replace 80-90% of all customer use cases we see in Switzerland

We've been partners for nearly three years, and have been building Nutanix based customer solutions during that time.

Customer Service:

The Nutanix customer service is outstanding and easily the best from all vendors we work with. Usually an answer is provided within the first 10 minutes and the staff is very skilled. thanks to the high degree of standardization we are able to quickly resolve most issues (we know the whole stack).

Technical Support:

Outstanding! We get an answer usually within 30 minutes often this solves the issue or at least show progress.

Positive

Our company is fully committed to new technologies and ways to build data centers using hyper convergence, software defined networking etc. We did not (and have no plans) to sell traditional solutions.

It used to be more work about one and a half years ago. Today, the whole installation process is fully automated and orchestrated. Since NOS 4.5 everything needed is pre-installed at the factory and only the desired hypervisor image (ISO files) need to be uploaded. Then, the cluster will stage itself automatically. The size of the cluster is secondary to the implementation time except for rack and stack of course.

Since we are a Nutanix partner we implement and give support ourselves for customers directly and for other partners as well.

I don’t have any figures available at the moment. Nutanix is most attractive when comparing the full cost (TCO) including CAPEX and also OPEX. Regarding licensing, we most commonly sell the pro license which covers the vast majority of customer user cases.

It is especially interesting to see the development of customers starting to see the included KVM based hypervisor (Acropolis) which results in significant cost savings for hypervisor licensing (e.g. vSphere or Hyper-V) depending on the customer use case.

As a VMware partner we also evaluate VSAN in our lab as a possible alternative but this solution lacks many of the Nutanix advantages. I compared VSAN to Nutanix some years ago when Nutanix was purely a storage layer.

Today, Nutanix offers end to end management, visibility and standardization which offers maybe the biggest benefit. I am personally also not a big fan of the VSAN object storage approach (as opposed to the Nutanix or EMC ScaleIO block based implementations) which causes many bottlenecks and architecture limitations.

This is the Nutanix management web interface.

We migrated over our AD finance applications, HR applications, DFS, et cetera. We used the product for a whole lot of different purposes. 

One of the nicest features was the migration tool. Being able to take any application and migrate it over even while it was in use, and then cut it over without any downtime was very helpful.

Everything ran pretty smoothly, from what I recall.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. 

The solution was very stable. 

I found the pricing to be very reasonable.

I'd always like to see a bit of a drop in pricing. Everyone would. 

I only worked with the product for roughly a year, and it worked well. I don't have any thoughts on improvements at the moment.

We did have some integration issues. We did have a problem with a Veeam integration. We ended up using Wasabi instead.

I used the solution at my previous job, less than a year ago. I only worked with it for about a year.

We found the stability to be quite good. Any performance issues were tied to our network and bandwidth, however, we resolved all of that. It was never an issue with the product itself.

We never hit the edge of the scalability potential. My understanding is that the product is plug-and-play. We could add more modules if we needed to. The expansion was never an issue. 

We had around 200 users at our organization using the product.

We did use technical support when we needed help with a couple of questions regarding our forest environment. We were a little outdated in some areas. They were a very useful resource.

They had used VMware and it became outdated and we couldn't get it to the latest version. The pricing was also a little high, which was why they wanted to switch.

The initial setup was not overly complex or difficult. It was a straightforward process and easy to manage. 

The pricing is very reasonable. In contrast, VMware's Smartnet contract is rather expensive.

I was just a customer and an end-user. I used it at my previous organization.

We were using the latest version of the solution at the time, however, I am unsure of the exact version number. It was a brand new install. The included new servers and a new environment. Everything was new. 

I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others. It worked well. Installation was quick or very helpful. Management was pretty streamlined. And most importantly, that migration tool was very impressive.