Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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 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. 

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.

It is primarily used as our data management application. It is for data management and storage.

It has greatly reduced our footprint because it is all-in-one. It is a hyper-converged technology. So, in a way, it reduces our server room footprint and provides ease of management.

It is all-in-one. The compute processing, storage, and network altogether make it convenient. We don't have to have different modules for expansion.

They have improved over the years. They can probably improve more of their software offerings or their innovative upcoming technology.

I would like to see them utilize the spare storage that they use as a redundant space. I feel that now a lot of resources are wasted just for standby purposes because we are using data protection. Instead of utilizing those resources only when something happens, they can have an alternative so that we can utilize these resources all the time.

I have been using this solution for the past two to three years.

It is stable.

I believe there is no limit to scalability. The only weak point is that Nutanix is basically a software company. They are very dependent on the hardware and vendor, and because the hardware is always moving ahead quite fast, they are having difficulty in catching up with the technology. If I'm going to scale my current Nutanix cluster, I may have an issue with the newer hardware because it may not be compatible with the older hardware that I already have. That is one of the issues we encountered, but we still manage to sort out the licensing and the hardware requirements with our partners and Nutanix.

In terms of usage, basically, our whole company uses it because it is our central data storage. It is being used quite extensively. We upgraded just recently.

Their technical support is good. Their communication is good, and their technical knowledge is good. The time they take to get back to us is also good.

We were using another solution. I believe we switched because Nutanix provides the failover capability for RPO and RTO. It means RPO and RTO are close to zero because we have the failover data protection from Nutanix as well.

I have support from vendors, so it was not too complex for us. We actually enjoy a good supporting and working relationship with Nutanix.

It was actually quite a straightforward implementation because it was a brand new setup. The migrations were done by our application team and infra team. The complex portion was that they are very dependent on how the network was being set up. Prior to that, our network infrastructure was quite old, so some of the requirements were not met in the first place, but we managed to sort things out.

We used an integrator. We work with a partner. They help us to deploy it.

We have internal staff for its deployment and maintenance. We need two people.

We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved.

The only comparison was VMware site replication. 

I would advise having a good and stable network base. Mine is on-prem, and I'm not sure what is the requirement for the cloud solution, but for on-prem, make sure that the network infrastructure is very stable, and there are no hops or drops from the network. It needs a very stable network.

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight out of 10.

We have multiple verticals in our company and each has its own ERP applications that are business critical and mission critical. Our company is based in India, we are customers of Nutanix and I'm the executive vice president. 

Nutanix has given me an opportunity to create multiple VMs and it's really very resilient for failures. Even if there is a single node failure, the VM gets migrated automatically to the healthy node. I can also take any number of snapshots and restore them at any point in time. The solution offers cloning and it's very simple to create a clone of any server. These are the great features of Nutanix. In addition, it's user-friendly, and in contrast with some solutions, you don't need to know about the technology. Anyone knowing the basics of VMware or hypervisor can start creating VMware, adding the server, and deploying it on the go within a few hours.

The problem with Nutanix is you cannot have or attach external storage so there are some limitations when it comes to increasing space. If you have a three-node cluster and want to increase storage, you have to add one more cluster. I can't attach an iSCSI drive as a solution. I'm hoping that the AOS 6 version will have plenty of improvements.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. 

There is a limitation on scalability. If you have four nodes and want to expand you can't. You have to buy another 3-node Nutanix box.

Technical support is excellent. If there is a critical issue, they get back to you within an hour.

Deployment is pretty easy because once the hypervisor is loaded, the Nutanix team carries out the deployment. Once you have the prism of the queue, then it becomes very easy to work on the Nutanix box.

Pricing could be improved especially with the effects of the pandemic, where the IT sector is not doing so well. Nutanix is relatively new to the industry and if they want to promote it they will need to reduce the cost.

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

The main reason we decided to implement the Nutanix solution was the ease of use of the environment. More than anything, it's a completely robust software environment. We not only migrated our servers from VMware, but we also moved from vSphere to AHV and Acropolis. The change was incredible in every aspect.

Our team managed to complete this migration in just three days and all of our workloads will start to run amazingly after the migration. It is a robust environment that runs smoothly. For example, our SQL Servers increased their performance dramatically after migration.

The biggest change we had was the time it took for our IT team to perform all the tasks of administering and automating the environment. Although everything worked before, with Nutanix, things work even better, almost without administration, since it is a software that allows you to analyze down to the last detail. Tasks that were previously performed manually can be automated.

On the other hand, our development team can consume its customized resources from our datacenter without our intervention, and the Acropolis integrations via API with other environments turn the software into a complete and flexible solution.

One of the most valuable features that can be found, is the inclusion of a hypervisor for free. This allowed us to direct the investments and the budget towards other types of aspects, generating a lot of added value.

With the cost we saved on hypervisor licenses, we were able to invest in more nodes and blocks for our platform. In this way, our environment is now prepared to grow much more without having to re-invest in hardware. On the other hand, automation managed to redirect the time of IT staff to other projects, thus increasing productivity.

There are few areas in which I think this Nutanix product should be improved, but to name a few I can decide that there should be support for more languages natively. This could apply to the main AOS and Prism environment, as well as the help channels that Nutanix offers.

Except for these points, I don't think there is much more to improve.

We have used this solution in our company for three years.

While the customer support is truly incredible, for Spanish speakers it would be appropriate to have support in their native language to further improve problem-solving conditions.

We did a full migration from VMware vSphere and vCenter to AHX and Acropolis.

AHV is free! This is a great feature that should be taken advantage of.

Beforehand, we evaluated using vXRail as a hyper-converged solution, but the cost and usage issues made us opt for Nutanix.

It is a robust solution that also has integrations and a complete suite of solutions for multi-cloud environments.

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.