Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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. 

We primarily use the solution for our clients. 

The solution has a strong foundation.

The support of the infrastructure is very good.

It offers very useful data protection. It's one of the best features. 

We've had very few problems converting this solution with the iOS or virtual iOS. 

The stability is pretty good.

When we have issues with the solution, they tend to be around networking. 

When we tried to upgrade the LCM, we had issues around the process. When we refreshed the CVM of VM and restart the upgrade, the CVM would not start again. We needed to see the logs to see if we could figure out what happened and if there was something we could do.

We'd like to see a bit more integration with certain products, for example, Qlik, among others. 

I've been using this solution for five years now. 

I like the level of stability we get. It's a good product in that sense. 

In some cases, the setup could be more simple. However, it's important to view the network process surrounding the customers as this is the first problem we face when we try to implement for the first time. Once you've gotten past the initial process, the other processes are simpler. 

We have two to four people that can implement the solution.

While all versions start as on-premises, and we mostly use on=premises, we do have one deployment on the cloud.

I'd advise potential new users to get a little bit of training before starting.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten. It's been very good so far in terms of the level of capabilities on offer.

I advise my customers to have a unique management operation center for the three layers. The primary reason is to convert the storage, computation, and hypervisor into one frame. Of course, you have to replicate the data between all the nodes to have redundancy, so you have two or three nodes in case of failure, depending on the resilience you want. I advise my customers to use this kind of technology when they want to focus on their business and don't want to talk about the layers of the subsequent infrastructure that is matched to their business.

The technology has a lot of room for improvement. For example, when they want to segment applications in conjunction with NSX, which VMware uses, Acropolis is not compatible with the competitors. The integration in the security layer is not compatible with NSX for the application segmentation that uses VMware. And the licensing has a lot of room for improvement also.

I've been using Acropolis AOS for about four years.

Acropolis AOS is stable.

This solution works in small companies with 10 users and large enterprises with 100,000. Acropolis can scale vertically and horizontally by adding more CPUs or nodes. It's quite easy to scale, and you have the option to have distributed nodes everywhere around the world that work as one. You can also have a solution for small branch offices with only two nodes for redundancy, and that's good enough to start. You could even deploy it on a ship or a car or whatever unit.

It's quite technical, so IT departments are the main driver of expanding usage. However, it's an easy sell to decision-makers because it tries to abstract the technical things to the business. When a managing director of a company knows about the benefits of this kind of solution, they give the green light and focus their IT department on the technical business requirements, solutions, and innovations layers, instead of managing the technical layers, like network, storage, and computations. 

We have a contract with Nutanix for 24/7 support, and it's excellent. They contact the customers directly when there is a failure or they need to replace a disk. You only take action when you need to evolve the platform, like installing a new model or a patch because you need preventive action. If we need to patch to the latest firmware of the solution, then they call us. However, that's something that is scheduled well ahead of time. For example, we schedule with the customer to install the latest firmware every six months.

I don't have a lot of hands-on experience with Acropolis because I'm a sales executive, but I can say Nutanix solutions are easy to deploy. The only hang-up is compatibility with other solutions like OM, Lenovo, HP, Supermicro, etc., because sometimes the drivers change.

For example, sometimes you could have a different release of the driver that isn't compatible with the latest release of the software, so you need to match the release with the nodes that support the Nutanix software. You could also have problems with the support and matching all the nodes to the software release that makes the work correctly. I've had a lot of problems with customers trying to match the software with the hardware layer. You have to choose the right vendor for the hardware to avoid problems. Otherwise, the setup is straightforward. 

However, you always need someone with technical expertise. We usually handle the deployment ourselves, but we occasionally ask for support when we have to deploy an uncommon configuration, like Oracle. For example, Acropolis has different ways to support Oracle databases, so we sometimes need Nutanix support to configure the Oracle rack.

We only need a small team of around 10 people to deploy and maintain because 

Return on investment happens when the customer realizes relative value. For example, if the customer is comparing cloud computing to an on-premise server, on-premise Nutanix is always going to be more expensive compared to AWS or Azure if you use it in a typical way. You have to consider the hours that the technicians spend maintaining the solution. Also, if the technicians are spending less time, they could start doing things that create more value for the company.

It's not easy to see a return on investment for this kind of solution, but you need to solve this problem at a higher level of management because the IT department is not involved in innovation at the company, so they might feel the solution is doing the job for them.

Also, they might have a personal stake in keeping the solution because they could see a risk to their livelihood if the company decides to switch to the cloud. It's something to sell to the upper management because even the CIO might not see it because they think their position is at risk. These solutions are like a robot that makes everything by themselves. The return on investment is a reduction in the time spent managing the infrastructure, and you could start seeing that time savings in six months to a year.

Many of my customers have issues with Acropolis' licensing model because they are charging the customers based on two things— the CPUs and the capacity in the solid stack disk — and that's a problem. Nutanix's competitors are not licensing that layer, so this is something that they should change. They should abandon this licensing model because it's too complex. Technical support is bundled with the subscription.

I rate Acropolis AOS seven out of 10. 

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.

For our company, basically, we run all of our production VMs on it. Also, we have two demo networks that we do a lot of testing and whatnot for.

From an operator's perspective, we released from two to one person managing it, and pretty much the main benefit is the ease of use, ease of install, and ease of protecting, et cetera. 

From a grander view, it's allowed our customers to actually reduce the amount of software that they have to purchase. Not only do they have to purchase the hypervisor, and if they're in VMware, in most cases, they're purchasing disaster recovery tools and a whole bunch of other things. However, Nutanix has it all built-in so that users have one area to manage and maintain.

There are lots of different pieces. From a Disaster Recovery perspective, it is very valuable. Some of my customers are getting into Flow. We don't use Flow, however, we're testing it. Flow is their micro-segmentation, which is very useful for protecting your VMs and the traffic that goes to them. From an automation perspective around deploying virtual machines, Calm is pretty good as well.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution is very stable. 

The product scales very well.

Everything has room for improvement.

I could probably name quite a few things from a Nutanix perspective. The area of improvement that they're working on now is more of the files index and more of the API integration into those. From on-prem to public cloud, they already have AWS Nutanix clusters, however, a lot of customers are going to be utilizing a public cloud at some point and they're basically deploying Azure Nutanix clusters as well soon. That's an improvement that they're working on. That said, from an administration perspective, the software's pretty big. It would be great if they could add more features and API integrations to the higher-level products.

I'd like it to be more API-based. They need more additional features around their APIs and additional integration in some of the automation platforms that are out there. Nutanix is a solution where the hyper-converged portion of it is mature. They're working towards the cloud integration portion. 

I would like to see more improvement in that area of being easier to manage, or easy to implement, and easy to orchestrate in an AWS or an Azure type scenario.

I've been using the solution for about three years. 

It's probably the most stable, hyper-conversion environment I've seen on the market. I base that on the storage portion of the hyper-conversion environment.

The solution scales well.

To expand the clusters, you don't really have limits as you would in other products from a scalability perspective. There are still best practices around how big you want to scale it. However, the expansion process is pretty simple and straightforward.

I have probably about 10 people utilizing it within my company and their roles range from infrastructure admins to solution architects that do testing as well as some engineers that we do consulting with. If you look at our customers quite, it ranges. It depends on the products they deploy, however, they might have infrastructure admins, DBAs, or automation engineers. It just depends on how big the deployment is and what products they're using.

We have four clusters. For customers that have 250 to 300 hosts that are running, it's pretty much one person to manage and maintain that system. You can pretty much maintain it with one FTE.

Internally, we will likely expand usage. We have plans to actually spin up on clusters within public cloud infrastructure to protect our systems. From an expansion perspective that just depends on where our business goes and how many more resources we need. From a customer perspective, expansion is going to be more when they start utilizing more of the cloudlike features such as Kubernetes or databases service through Era, or even Calm. That's where things will expand.

Technical support is very good. It's probably one of the best.

I see a lot of technical support. I see a lot of the people or older legacy companies that have been around for a while, and technical support will usually go downhill.  There's probably a handful of them that are really good. 

If you look at their scores online, they're always rated pretty high and it's hard to do that.

We were on VMware, prior to this product. It was getting to the point of being a hassle to maintain, and this solution simplified things considerably.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's straightforward and takes about two hours to deploy.

The deployment for my company, and we're a smaller company, with a total of 60 VMs at most, took about a week total. That involved moving off of VMware to HV including the migration of the virtual machines. That was just done due to the timeframes. You could do those at night. Ultimately, the cluster and everything was set up within a day and ready to go. Then, the move process for those VMs just took a little bit of time to move into. I have other customers who are running migrations that take a little bit longer, however, you're talking 2,500 to 3000 VMs. That's more of a two to three-month process to get those moved. That said, the migration goes pretty quickly and that's pretty small from a migration perspective with a whole new platform.

I cannot speak to the exact pricing of the product. However, as a partner, we do have access to reduced costs.

There are additional costs. Nutanix is a software-driven company. They do sell hardware, however, in most cases, you bring your own hardware. The cost of the solution might be a little bit higher than what you would look at from just a straight out VMware, however, you're getting a lot more and you're reducing the fact that you don't need VMware in that mix. 

The hypervisor that's provided with Nutanix is free. As the costs roll-out, Nutanix is actually a better TCO than any of the other solutions in the market that are even comparable.

We actually evaluated quite a few different hyper-converged infrastructures prior to bringing on Nutanix as a partner and they are the best in the market from that perspective.

I'm a partner of Nutanix. I'm a user, however, I'm also a seller of Nutanix.

We are on version five. I can't remember the exact version number. We have both five and six. I have multiple clusters that are running within our infrastructure and then I have multiple clusters that are running within my customers' infrastructure.

While we currently use Azure for our cloud, we will likely use both Azure and AWS in the future.

I'd advise potential new users to do their homework and make sure that they don't necessarily listen to what the manufacturers are saying. Go find out for yourself.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I wouldn't say it's a ten. I'm a pretty hard scorer. There are features and functionality where VMware makes things easier. Other solutions make things a little bit easier from a deployment perspective or something along those lines, however, that's just due to the fact that they've been in the market for a long period of time and their solution set has built or has grown from that perspective. They are highly ranked as they reduce the amount of maintenance and administration that you have to keep it running.

We primarily use it based on the VMware vSAN. I use it with EMC VxRail.

The solution offers impressive performance.

We don't have to pay for extras.

The interface of the solution is good. I like the UI.

The stability of the solution is quite decent.

The solution doesn't support older systems, which can be a problem for some organizations who wish to implement it. It became a problem for us due to the fact that some of our systems are older.

I'm fairly new to the product. I've only been working with it for about two months now.

The stability of the solution is very good. We haven't run into bugs or glitches. There haven't been crashes. So far, in the little experience we've had, I'd say the solution is quite dependable.

We're finding that scaling is acceptable. If an organization needs to expand Nutanix, they should be able to do so with no problems whatsoever.

To be honest, we don't actually contact Nutanix for technical support or troubleshooting issues. Therefore, it would be hard to rate them or describe any recent experiences. We find that our system integrator vendor is good at helping with support-related enquiries if we have them or need help. They've been well trained on Nutanix and understand how the system works. For now, we're satisfied going through them to get the support we need.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, mostly because we didn't handle it ourselves.

Our implementation only took about a week.

We hired a system integrator to handle the implementation of the product. They were great. We trust them and find their work to be very dependable. They also are able to provide support.

The solution is very cost-effective.

We're just a Nutanix customer. We don't have any partnership or other type of relationship with the organization.

The solution is a good product. It works great on newer systems, however, if a company has an older system they might run into issues.  

The performance is great and the pricing is very reasonable, which is why we like it and why we would recommend it to others.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten. If it worked better with older systems, I might rank it a bit higher.

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.