Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

The three-tier architecture is not that flexible and quick. Now, I can update or upgrade my whole datacenter with one click, the rest is done by Nutanix. No more reading and studying the HCL lists of controllers or disks. Each performance test with SQL, Exchange, Oracle, or SAP is better than on a three-tier architecture. I have one GUI for everything: for my VMs, my storage and my network.

Scaling is very easy and no limitations are set.

The file services that they also provide need some more features, like on the Windows file server.

I have not encountered any stability issues at all.

I have not encountered any scalability issues at all. It is easier than any other product I know.

The technical support is the best I have ever seen. They act quick and directly via Web session. No more first-level support and so on.

We previously used VMware for virtualization and NetApp for storage. We switched because we need to expand and that is not easy with NetApp. VMware only has the best features in the biggest license, which is expensive.

The setup of Nutanix is done in one hour. They say: “Start small, start quick, and pay as you grow”. That is really very easy.

Pricing is nearly the same, but don´t forget in this price I have included my storage and virtualization costs. And it will be much cheaper in the future.

We checked other options, too, such as EMC, EqualLogic, and Nexenta. But the easiest and the one with the most scalability was Nutanix.

If you have an old three-tier architecture that is more than three years old, check your contracts. Check your applications like Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SAP, or VDI, and if you have problems or you need better performance, then go to Nutanix and start a test with your application. I recommend a try-and-buy solution or go directly into a proof of concept. They will help you out.

It is the most flexible product for the datacenter.

• Ease of installing the hyper-visor
• Out of the box High Availability

• Decreased Rack space/power consumption
• No need for SAN
• IOPs has increased as new nodes are added

None, as I like that Nutanix listen to their customers, and implement new features to improve the kit.

I've used it for six months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

We previously used a huge blade chassis with a SAN. We switched because of a bottleneck in the SAN, and it didn't scale well, as we hit queue depth limits. Some advantages Nutanix has over our old solution are:

• Decreased the datacenter foot print
• No need for hypervisor purchase with the addition of Acropolis
• Reduce costs with regards to virtualisation technologies (i.e. VMware)
• Features are at no extra cost
• Ability to scale virtual hosts fast

It's straightforward.

We did it in-house.

Pricing is a little high but if you really look into what the product provides, the cost saving on setting up infrastructure and maintaining it is greatly reduced. Unlike VMware, features are provided at no extra cost. The support for the product is exceptional! Nutanix are keen to make sure their product excels in all areas.

When you get over the initial shock of the price, and think about what you get you will never go back to the old way of implementing infrastructure.

Our primary use case of Acropolis was for pre-sales on architecting the solution. The company was partners with Nutanix and I'm a business development consultant. 

I found the most important feature to be the flexibility that the solution offers in adding nodes to the clusters. Nutanix provides a level of scalability and flexibility that you don't get with any other solution on the market. 

I'd like to see more integration with other vendors and integration with public clouds. The feature is there but it could be improved. 

I worked with this solution up until a couple of months ago and I used it for three years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable, it's a key feature. 

The technical support is not great, but it's good. The main problem is the time it takes to connect with the person you need to speak to.

The initial setup is quite easy. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We use Nutanix Acropolis AOS for compute virtualization. The main purpose was to replace FlexPod. The important problem we were trying to solve was to replicate between the two data centers. However, we encountered some issues.

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

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has very good stability.

The scalability of the solution had some issues because there were many VMs and the replication ran into some bottlenecks. It was an issue that was known to Nutanix and it was not disclosed to the customer.

The support is very good, responsive, and helpful. Even with the issue we had,  where they did not disclose beforehand, they were very quick and helpful with fixing it.

I have used HPE SimpliVity previously and Nutanix Acropolis AOS is better.

We had a service provider do the implementation of the solution for us. They were able to do it quickly.

The amount of people needed for the deployment and maintenance depends on the size of the implementation. We had 30 or 40 hardware systems and they're servicing them with a team of six people.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is affordable, it has good value. The final price depends a lot on the hardware used, it's an appliance in the end. Whether you use HPE as the hardware vendor or Supermicro as the hardware vendor, it really depends on what hardware is used which is the main cost.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a seven out of ten.

The features that I have found most valuable are the user-friendliness of that hypervisor. Also, people who are not agnostic about the hardware can go with Nutanix. It has a user-friendly dashboard and interface.

Pros, it's an OEM kind of a hypervisor. It can fit to any size. Pros are that any enterprise company can fit in with it, and that budgets are also not heavy on their pockets. So, these are the pros of Nutanix.

In terms of what can be improved, their local people in this region are not good, to be frank. They don't support any inquiry. They don't support anything we need, especially for projects. So either we need to bypass them or we need to get support from the other regions.

I would say that applies from the sales cycle to the support.

The sales cycles is a very closed group kind of thing. Cons, region-wise, sometimes it's a monopoly. And the pricing factor is there. Plus, they are not open and transparent.

Procurement can be an issue as well.

Plus I don't see any updates happening in this region in terms of what's cooking in the head offices. It should be updated and alerted to the partners. For example, recently Nutanix has done many things in its acquisitions. What new features are going to be added? Certainly partners and other people should have a right to know. And they may gain advantage, an edge, over the other products when they are pitching this.

As for what I would like to see in future releases, maybe the cloud things which were very recently added. What is the roadmap for the cloud and what are there exactly? These things are very new to Nutanix now. That should be more transparent. What is their good part, like Azure or AWS? I would like to know these things. They just need better documentation in general.

I began using Nutanix Acropolis AOS about five or six years ago.

Their stability depends on how agnostic they are. It depends on if I'm using super micro hardware or it depends on if I'm using HPE. So, it's stable. I don't think we are having any issues. It is mostly a stable product. The main issue with stability would be related to the hardware, not to the actual solution.

Scalability depends on the customer. If the customer is savvy they can just add maybe SSDs or something which the KC doesn't support, or something which is out of the box from the hardware which was procured previously. Then we would face issues in the scalability. Or maybe a limit to that addition which was purchased some time back.

We don't require support, as we have in house expertise.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have worked on many products, including VMware and others. It is not complex. I would even say the portal is not so complex.

I would say that it's a simple to use product. It fits all sizes and it is budget-friendly.

One thing to keep in mind is that only experts can use it. It has to be in the proper hands, instead of going to XYZ people just for some cost savings. So lift-and-shift and migrations might be tricky, because it is not like a VMware.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Nutanix Acropolis AOS a nine.

• Prism 
• One-Click

Now, we can worry less about the technology and focus on other business value initiatives.

A fantastic product that could spend a bit more time in QA between releases.

Five years.

None.

Compatibility issue with Nutanix and Zerto.

None.

Customer Service:

10 out of 10.

Technical Support:

10 out of 10.

We switched from a legacy 3-2-1 solution to HCI due to its ease of use and scalability.

Very straightforward; no issues.

We implemented through a vendor team, although the setup was so easy that we could have handled the process in-house.

We have realized a 3:1 ROI.

The upfront cost can be higher than traditional solutions, but the ROI can be quickly realized for most organizations.

SimpliVity and Dell EqualLogic.

A great product from a great company with world class support.

• One-click updates
• Auto-/self-healing

We had a real disaster back in 2014. Our customer data centre was hit by a flood that was about two meters. When the water level approached the data centre, we triggered the DR features. Once DR completely had taken place, we unmounted the production unit from the rack server and kept the 2U unit in a safe place.

They need to add features for software-defined networking and network security. The multi-tenant features need to add charge back/metering.

I have been using it since 2013.

We are currently maintaining Nutanix 2 cluster NX3350, 1 cluster 2 NX6235, 1 cluster NX 1460 and NX 3450; NOS Version 4.3 and AOS 4.6.

We encountered stability issues during NOS 3.0, but it was not a big issue as we get support from Nutanix.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

I previously used a three-tier design for virtualization. Managing three types of hardware vendors (server, SAN switch & SAN Storage) is troublesome.

Initial setup was complex. Our costumer has multiple clusters for production, development & testing. Each of them were use a different network segment. They also use multitenancy features to serve other departments.

Nutanix licensing and pricing is premium compared to other hyperconverged infrastructure vendors.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated VMware vSAN.

Leveraging the Nutanix Acropolis would save on hypervisor licensing.

With Nutanix, you can't mix up the OEM hardware with other vendors such as Dell or Lenovo. There are more issues on the commercial side. When it comes to support, a mixed cluster will create haywire between those hardware vendors.

My rating reflects comparing the experience of managing a three-tier architecture for visualization with a hyperconverged solution.

AOS is one of the most important parts of the Nutanix HCI solution. AOS provides a few main features - managing VMs (Hypervisor), one managing interface (Prism), distributed storage fabric with software-defined features instead of hardware implementations such as RAID.

Over the years, the Nutanix Platform capability set and services have grown substantially. Over the years, this has evolved to simplify and abstract virtualization, automated upgrades and operations, and much more.

We deployed Nutanix three years ago and now we see all benefits of AOS. It doesn't require a lot of engineers for managing the virtualization environment. We see a nice reduction of using storage resources. AOS can run any workloads such as business-critical DBs. Also, AOS provides great features for backup and DR.

AOS optimizes capacity utilization without hurting performance or resiliency by dynamically compressing, deduplicating, and erasure coding blocks of data based on potential capacity savings as well as application access patterns.

Building a beautiful, empathetic and intuitive product is core to the Nutanix platform and something we take very seriously.

• DSF with reduction techniques - more storage resources.
• Resiliency - self-healing, handling a failure.
• One manage interface - Prism. It's easy to use and monitor your workloads.

Monitoring:

• Anomaly Detection
• In the world of IT operations, there is a lot of noise. Traditionally, systems would generate a great deal of alerts, events, and notifications, often leading to the operator either a) not seeing critical alerts since they are lost in the noise or b) disregarding the alerts/events.

Nutanix Software Upgrade:

• Performing a Nutanix software upgrade is a very simple and non-disruptive process.

Nutanix should improve AHV to support migration VMs between clusters and storage containers. Migration between containers is possible, but it requires shutting down the VM. The procedure is long and there is no migration between clusters at all.

By and large, I have nothing more to add, but if we talk about what I have listed, then these functions would greatly facilitate the operation of Nutanix HCI.

I hope they will fix this soon, although I have been waiting for this for a long time.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for three years.

VMware. 

VMware vSAN.