Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

• 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.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately three years. However, I believe Nutanix Acropolis AOS is used in combination with Oracle solutions.

I have used Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately four years.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability.

The solution is scalable, we can scale it up when needed.

The technical support from Nutanix Acropolis AOS is very good.

The initial setup of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is simple.

We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process.

The return on investment of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is better than other solutions. Other solutions have higher overall costs, such as support or renewals.

Our customers are on three years license to use Nutanix Acropolis AOS. The price of the solution includes all features and support.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a ten out of ten.

We use Nutanix Acropolis AOS for delivering applications, e.g. our billing system.

The challenge we are facing with Nutanix Acropolis AOS is its scalability.

We've been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for more than a year.

I find this solution stable.

The scalability of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be better.

The initial setup for this solution was straightforward.

We implemented Nutanix Acropolis AOS with the help of a consultant or integrator.

We evaluated HPE Hyper Converged and VMware.

I'm satisfied with Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

The implementation of this solution, particularly migrating our all workers to it, took one week.

We have 50,000 users of this solution in our company. We don't have plans of increasing usage for it.

We have 25 engineers who are responsible for the deployment and maintenance of Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

I have never contacted their technical support team.

We are satisfied with this solution.

I'm recommending Nutanix Acropolis AOS to people who want to pay for and use it because from my experience, everything's okay with this solution.

We might be paying for the license fee monthly, but I'm not sure.

I'm rating Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight over ten.

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.

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. 

Processes that used to take hours to complete have been drastically improved due to the nature of Nutanix. Data locality means things complete faster and our users now have more time to complete their work rather than having to wait for a certain job to finish before they can continue on.

• One-Click upgrades
• Software defined storage
• The capacity savings

One click upgrades are an absolute godsend. Being able to upgrade our entire cluster with the click of a button during business hours with zero downtime has made managing our infrastructure so easy. Previously, we had to schedule downtime to perform upgrades on our infrastructure and that quickly becomes painful and time consuming.

Because the entire Nutanix system is contained in a VM, we don't have to reboot physical hosts to apply patches. It's just a restart of a guest VM and we're off. This also brings amazing space saving capabilities (given that it's software-defined) across the hot and cold tiers by way of compression, deduplication, and erasure coding.

Given all the amazing features, there is room for improvement around the support ability of different hypervisors. Sure, Nutanix now supports four hypervisors but they are not all at feature parity. If you want all the benefits of Nutanix, you need to be on AHV. For some businesses, that's just not an option. I find we miss out on some of the great features due to being on ESX.

No issues at all with stability.

No.

Customer Service:

This is where my experience varies. Previously, I had deployed Nutanix with Dell hardware, and currently, I have deployed Nutanix on Nutanix hardware.

Customer support through Nutanix is excellent. Regardless of the level of priority, I usually hear back from Nutanix support in less than three hours from when I submit a support request.

With Dell kits, you have to call Dell support first who then liaise with Nutanix support. So, there is a bit of a breakdown and resolution that takes a little longer because you don't have direct access to Nutanix support.

Technical Support:

Again, my experience varies.

Nutanix support, amazing. I can't fault them. They know the product and can resolve your issues fast.

Dell support, not as great. Mainly because they aren't Nutanix employees. It's because of this that they aren't as knowledgeable and have to hand off to Nutanix support for more complex issues.

In both organisations where I worked, which migrated to Nutanix, we were on traditional 3-tier architecture. We switched over to Nutanix for the ease of management, scalability, and performance gains. In both organisations, we were on aging hardware and it needed to be refreshed.

It is very straightforward. The deployment process is extremely easy thanks to the 'foundation' process. A simple WebUI that guides you through the deployment process and imaging of your new nodes.

Both implementations were done by me. With the ease of deployment, I didn't feel it necessary to engage a vendor.

I haven't calculated it yet.

While cost may seem higher than your traditional 3-tier architecture, you need to look at the bigger picture. You're not just buying hardware here. You're buying a complete environment that not only is super-fast to deploy, it's amazingly easy to manage. I find that I'm spending less time managing my infrastructure and more time listening to the businesses needs and tailoring our infrastructure to their needs.

We looked at SimpliVity and VMware vSAN.

I use it to host all the servers and the storage. It's a replacement for the Vblock.

The customer is happier now with the services. It's much faster for storage with the server connection.

The solution is much faster. The performance is very good - much better than VMware. It's much easier and faster even when you want to create a server from a template or clone. 

The licensing gave us trouble. The licenses for Nutanix are very complicated. Everything had a separate license, and we are having some trouble with that. Some of the licenses are expiring, and when we purchased the solution, we didn't know everything would be all over the place. It's not like there's one server license. Every node has a license, and a person has a license of their own too. They should just group everything together instead of forcing users to worry about separate licenses and various renewal dates. We actually have had some meetings about this and have tickets open about the licensing. 

I don't have a full picture of all the features just yet.

I've used the solution for seven or eight months. it hasn't been a long period of time. 

The performance, the stability, are good. My only concern is about the licensing process and the difficulties involved with licensing. It's much too complicated. That said, overall, we have not worried about bugs, glitches, or freezing.

The scalability is good.

We have roughly 2,000 users on the solution. We use it quite extensively.     

Support is great. We contacted them to help us with the initial implementation.

They are, in general, very helpful and supportive.

It was migrated from Vblock.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's not overly complex.

The migration from Vblock to Nutanix took two days. I remember that didn't take a long time in regards to setting up the hardware or changing the configuration from Vblock to Nutanix. The migration is easy. There is a tool from Nutanix to migrate the servers from Vblock to Nutanix which simplified everything.

We have three people that handled the deployment and maintenance tasks. 

We couldn't do it by ourselves. The implementation was with the help of Nutanix support. They did the job for us.

We have not noted an ROI.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution.

It's not a very common solution in Saudi Arabia. Not all companies use it. My advice is to, even for the large organizations, is it's better for them to move to Nutanix solution, even though they may not recognize it as a brand in this region.

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

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.