Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We are looking at Acropolis only as a comparison to VMware. We want to determine what it offers better than VMware, in terms of features, as well as how we can position it to integrate to a VMware environment.

I haven't been there to test everything, but I have been to the Nutanix presentation two weeks back on Nutanix cloud. The cloud features an in-site offering, which I found to be very interesting.

There could be better support for high power ESX and other cross-platform applications. A major feature in Nutanix is that it should be able to move from AHV to BFX.

I would like to see an improved interface. I think Dell EMC is going to launch ClarityNow to address this.

In terms of stability, Nutanix is a good product.

In terms of scalability, I think that it is good that it works with many clusters, which is not the same as other vendors, for which there is a limitation in terms of the clusters.

For the time being, we don't have many users. We're still in development; we did not put it on the production environment yet. We are still busy in the testing phase. Once they are all done with the test, they will be concerned with what the stakeholders want in any condition. The process will be quick and we'll have about 100 people using it for internal purposes first. Then we will back up our server to the cloud. At that point, we can expand to 1,000 or so users.

We only need one or two people to deploy and maintain this solution.

I didn't contact technical support much, but what I hear is good.

The initial setup was straightforward, not complex. We followed all their guides, and you just have to go through them and install them. The initial deployment took less than half a day.

I don't think I know. I think it's cheaper than VMware in terms of cost.

VMware is already in the market and we have been using VMware first. Now Nutanix just emerged as the leader. That's why we are comparing them.

My advice is to go for Nutanix because it is the way the market is going. Nutanix is becoming the leader in the market. Also, Nutanix offers far more software features than other products. You will not need much effort to understand the product. It's very simple to work with.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. I can't give it a full ten yet since we are not fully inside.

System stability and performance to ensure a 24/7 operation with fantastic pro-active support. The 1 to many solution will fulfil your DR requirements.

We increased stability and availability to 99.999%, and increased performance on our software platforms and databases drastically.

• Availability
• Scalability
• Performance
• Redundancy
• Excellent Monitoring and Admin Portal

There is a hard coded IP in the 192.168.5.x range which comes with Nutanix. This needs to be a variable, not hard coded, as this may clash with customers current IP range.

No.

No.

Customer Service:

A nine out of 10.

Technical Support:

A 10 out of 10.

Xen.

It was complex, as we needed to move from a Xen environment to Acropolis. The migration process was not easy.

We implemented through an in-house team and a vendor team. The vendor's expertise was a two out of 10.

This is still to be determined.

Even though Nutanix is expensive, it is well worth it!

Yes, we did look at your traditional hyper-converged solutions.

• Storage snapshots and replication
• One-Click upgrades

I can now do upgrades during work hours with One-Click upgrades. I click an upgrade and walk away. I have never had an issue.

Lowering the replication window.

Two years.

Deployment was less than half a day for eight nodes.

Yes, there was a bug with the new Intel chipset, but working with support, they quickly were able to issue an updated BIOS. Even with this issue, we had no downtime

None, scaling up is easy with Nutanix.

10 out of 10. We have been impressed with their level of service during any case we have had to open.

10 out of 10. We have been impressed with their level of service during any case we have had to open.

I have used UCS with NetApp in the past. Nutanix makes keeping things up-to-date much easier.

It is very straightforward, two clusters in four hours.

We used a vendor team. Even though it was their first deployment in production at the time, they were on point!

Pricing is above average, but it is worth it.

IBM, UCS, and NetApp.

The consolidated storage: no need to use central storage that has a performance penalty. For example, while using central storage that enables file-sharing NAS services & SAN services, when one VM had an IO overload, all the VMs in the same data store in the VMware environment on the same LUN suffered from I/O latency. Now, in the new consolidated storage, this does not happen.

We can deploy VM as a service & we can perform updates on the nodes without downtime in a very simple, direct way.

The improvement needed is for elastic clusters, meaning the ability to depart and join nodes in an automatic way. We have a laboratory that needs to perform bare metal tests and therefore needs to unjoin the nodes from the cluster and later on join them back.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, but we are about to add another node to the cluster and it should be a very simple task .

Technical support is very good, and good with responsive time.

We were using central storage and suffered from bad performance latency.

Initial setup was straightforward.

At the time we checked, this solution was unique.

Perform resizing. Check the needs and deploy only what is needed. Check the memory DIMMs and make sure for the price you get, you have free DIMMs.

We Added a dedicated switch for this cluster so that all layer 2 networking will be in this switch and separate from the main routers.

We are a cloud provider and we are giving cloud services via Nutanix Acropolis AOS, such as core virtual services. This is why we implemented Nutanix Acropolis AOS into our data center.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has improved our organization because of the ease of management. We don't have to deal with any other solutions besides Nutanix Acropolis AOS. If it was a three-tiered architecture, we would have to struggle with the HBA cards from the upgrade, storage area, networks, switches, and other hardware. We only need to deal with the physical servers and the Nutanix on top of it. This is why it's very easy to manage, and that is saving us a lot of time for our technical operations.

The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are ease of management, hyper-convergence platform, and it has robust operations.

There are other services that Nutanix has that could be improved, but I'm not very familiar with the other services of Nutanix, such as Era and Flow. However, they seem a bit hard for us to implement and integrate with the Nutanix Acropolis AOS and other Nutanix tools. We would not dare to implement those other Nutanix solutions into Nutanix Acropolis AOS right now. The implementation of that tool could be the problem, I am a bit hesitant to implement the other tools into Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

Nutanix could integrate all of its solutions into one package to allow one implementation, such as Nutanix Acropolis AOS and the other related ecosystem solutions. You should be able to integrate them all in one step. The current method is to first install Nutanix Acropolis AOS then you need to install Prism, Era, and Flow. I would like to see a setup that implements all of those Nutanix tools at once.

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

The stability of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is very high. We have only had one or two problems in our cluster over the past two years. The problems that we did have were solved very quickly by Nutanix and by our technical service engineers together. I would say that it's robust and problem-free.

In our cluster, we have more than 50 servers and as the cluster gets larger, there are some stability issues sometimes, but they are not critical. They can improve on the scalability because when one or two servers are down in our cluster, Nutanix Acropolis AOS struggles to balance the load to the other server clusters and it can take some time. In the time it is attempting to balance the clusters some of our customers are affected by the delay problem. It is not critical, but it could be made better to avoid this in the future.

We have approximately 16 people that are using this solution in my company on a daily basis.

The technical support is very good, they solved some problems we had and they worked with our team well.

The team from Nutanix focuses on the problem and they don't let us go before the problem has been solved. They are very interested in problematic cases and their resolutions.

I have used VMware and Hyper-V. We have different customers using these other solutions.

The initial setup of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is straightforward. The whole process took no more than one day.

We have added a couple of servers each month onto our platform and it's very straightforward.

We have a department in my company that handles the implementation and maintenance of Nutanix Acropolis AOS. We have 15 technicians but we only have two that handle this solution.

We have seen a return on investment because it's a robust platform. We do not have to deal with Nutanix Acropolis AOS related problems every day or from time to time. It gives a return on investment within a year or two.

When we purchase a new physical server or a couple of physical servers into our cluster, we always purchase it with Nutanix licensing. We are receiving the license from Nutanix directly and not from the vendor. In the way we're dealing, with the licenses it is a bit costly for us but as the company is getting larger, day by day or year by year, those licensing costs become lower each time for us. We are purchasing the licenses for three years for some of our clusters and for some others for five-year licenses and the licenses are still costly. We have good discounts for the licenses, but it is still expensive.

My advice to those wanting to implement Nutanix Acropolis AOS is to know the solution well before they do the implementation. They will have to receive some training about Nutanix Acropolis AOS. It's not easy to implement, but once you get used to it, it is very easy to do the implementation in the later phases. I would recommend people to get the training it is important.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight out of ten.

We mainly use SAP S/4HANA as well as the domain controller and file servers.

I have used this solution for two years.

This is a very stable solution. 

The support for this solution is really good. 

The initial setup was straightforward and we completed it with a Nutanix partner. The installation took four hours.

The standard version of this solution is free but we are using a paid version which is billed annually. Previously with another soltion, we needed to purchase SAN storage to accommodate the storage needs which was expensive. With Nutanix, we saved a lot of money due to that new technology.

I would rate this solution a nine 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.

We are hosting many companies' IT. We provide IT services for our customers.

In terms of its version, I am not a system owner, so I don't know, but I guess we are regularly updating to the latest version.

Its low maintenance is a key feature. It is easy to install, upgrade, and scale by adding more blocks. 

Compute analysis is really easy. It takes hours instead of days.

The self-service side of the product needs to be improved. We should be able to add two-factor authentication and more security layers to it.

We would also like more tiering of the storage if that's possible.

The company has been using it for about two years.

Its stability and performance depend on what kind of hardware you put in the nodes. Its performance is average. It doesn't have high performance on the storage side, but it is good enough for mainstream users.

It is really scalable. It is too easy to scale. We have around three people who use it right now.

We didn't have any issues that we had to escalate to their technical support.

We are using Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct. I don't know if it can be called hyper-converged, but it is almost hyper-converged. VMware with vSAN is also hyper-converged, but we're using it without the NSX module, so it is not a software-defined network. It is semi hyper-converged for me. As compared to these two, Nutanix is easier to use and easier to manage. It is more complex to get VMware and Hyper-V up and running than Nutanix.

It was really straightforward. We were up and running in hours. It was really easy.

Its deployment was handled internally.

Its licensing model is easy, but the bad thing is that we need to pay for the whole capacity at once. With VMware vSAN, we only have to pay for the capacity that we are using, which is not the case with Nutanix. So, we have more overhead for the licensing cost with Nutanix.

I would advise talking to Nutanix to get the right hardware from the start and only buying certified hardware. You can use the Nutanix capacity planning information that exists to get the right sizing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.