Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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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 work for a reseller, a consultancy firm. We have successfully onboarded three customers to Nutanix. Nutanix is the solution that I prefer. I deploy the solution for customers and assist them when they encounter any issues. The feedback provided by our customers has been nothing but excellent. 

Some of our customers use Nutanix due to its ease of management across their data centers and also, the cloud experience it offers. The Business continuity functionality embedded in Nutanix is priceless. From putting your VMs in a protection domain to setting up an RPO which can be as low as 10mins for synchronous environments, you are able to seamlessly perform planned and unplanned failover in a time-efficient manner. 

The Nutanix Database as a service is another use case that our customers have found very interesting and useful in their environment. With their DBaaS solution, you are able to provision databases within minutes and patch databases faster without bothering about compatibilities issues as to how some environments are. 

Database as a service (ERA). The value of Nutanix AOS embedded in ERA can be seen In the course of doing some cumbersome  database operations, such as database provisioning, snapshots and patches. The solution gives our customers the ability to provision databases faster and perform patching. With Nutanix, I have seen a database instance that took less than 15 minutes to provision as compared to the normal one that actually takes 30 minutes or more.

For their Time machine which is also a great feature of their DBaaS Solution, you are able to recover DBs quickly even with less backups and hence, this saves you money from a storage perspective.  

In terms of scalability, customers can scale in/out utilizing a plug and play approach. When there's need for compute or/and storage, you can acquire a compute-only node or a storage-only node and insert it like you would in a blade chassis. 

I think nothing for now.. I and my clients are enjoying the services provided by Nutanix thus far.

I have been working with Nutanix Acropolis for two years.

We have never had an issue with the scalability of Nutanix Acropolis because it is plug and play. Their architecture utilizes that of a public cloud. If you already have a Nutanix cluster, and you get a new node, you can easily add it to the cluster 

I am the product manager for Nutanix in my company. Time to time, customers call to commend the support service from Nutanix and has been reported as the best support across all their other products in their organizations 

Nutanix has the simplest deployment no matter the type of environment you are setting up. 

If a customer has been using VMware, the difference in pricing is lower. However, Nutanix is not "cheap" as they would say in the news.

I would recommend this solution to other companies, they are the best. Nutanix has surpassed others when it comes to hyper-converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud infrastructure.  If customers are looking for a solution that is easy to learn, intuitive and not complicated, Nutanix is what you want. 

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a 9 out of 10.

We are the service partners. Generally, we are taking care of the Nutanix systems for the customer.

One customer, for example, uses it widely in a hospital environment. 

The support is quite good.

We have found the solution to be stable. It offers good performance. 

The scalability is great.

The product offers a general easy configuration of disaster recovery. That's the major thing. Disaster recovery and business continuity are very good.

Frankly speaking, there are some issues. For example in the newer version could be better. If there could be good documentation in some instances. While their overall Nutanix Bible is good, they are lacking good descriptions for particular scenarios that might be helpful to many users. 

In the next release, I would like to have a multi-tenant environment. That way, you could set up a special VM for a special group of people and the other group will not be able to see certain things. It would make the solution better. 

I've used the solution for about three years at this point. We've used it for a while. 

The hypervisor is very stable. Overall, the performance is good. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and it doesn't have bugs or glitches.

The product is absolutely scalable. A company can expand it if it needs to. It's not a problem.

We have three people currently using the solution.

The technical support on offer is the best part of the product. They are excellent. We are extremely satisfied with their level of service. 

I've found the product to be absolutely easy to install.

However, for this particular system, it's hard. It takes longer to do the hardware. Physically it may take about three hours.

You do not need a lot of people for the deployment or maintenance. It's a one-man show. The person also does not need to be overly technical or specialized in Nutanix to be able to handle the implementation or maintenance. 

ROI is hard to calculate, as we are in Eastern Europe, where the pricing may be different or higher than in other places, however, we do expect an ROI with this product within three years or so.

I'm a technical person. I don't directly deal with licensing costs or arrangements, and therefore cannot speak to pricing. 

We did look at other solutions before ultimately deciding on Nutanix. We choose Nutanix due to the fact that it's easier to operate and maintain.

We are a partner of Nutanix.

I'd recommend the solution to others as its stability is so reliable. Companies should strive towards finding a good management system. It's far worse without this.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

HQ datacenter workload plus branch offices local datacenter (including small file sharing on Windows VM).

Nutanix simplified administration efforts dramatically and increased the performances of some mission-critical applications.

• One-click upgrade
• Data locality for performances
• Prism central administration console
• Metro availbility.

• Price politics sometimes is not very transparent for the worldwide organization. 
• Better value for money about file share feature
• We feel that the cost for capacity is still more expensive compared to other solutions.

• Compression, deduplication, and erasure coding
• Central management using prism
• Capacity management and planning using prism central
• One click upgrade to the Nutanix OS as well as for hypervisor
• Easily scalable with no downtime
• Provides WAN optimization for replication to remote sites

• Centralized monitoring of infrastructure
• Easy and quick deployment of VMs
• Single SME for all domains like storage, OS, and hypervisor
• Compression deduplication and erasure coding have improved storage usage by almost three times
• Protection domain allows you to compress data and transfer over WAN and helps you to move a VM to DR with a single click
• Centralized management helps you monitor storage and compute resources at the cluster and VM level in a single plane

I would like to see improvements in monitoring parameters, RTO, and access control. Currently, memory utilization does not show as per the actual. This is in pipeline for the next release. The current RPO for DC-DR is high due to the limitation of the replication strategy which will be fixed by next quarter.

We have used this solution for three months.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

As of now, we haven’t required support, but it is good.

The installation is simple. You can more or less plug and play.

Depends upon what OEM you factor for hardware and the relationship between them. The software license seems to be pretty simple.

We evaluated Cisco HyperFlex and SimpliVity.

You can have optimal results from ROI and the infrastructure deployment perspective if the solution is designed properly. I would suggest that you spell out your requirements clearly before Nutanix starts building the solution.

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.