Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

I am using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for virtualization.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS makes it easy to use and manage projects and it has a good reputation.

The compatibility and integration of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be improved. For example, we have a WAF application firewall and it does not work on this solution. Not all the OS's run on AOS. You need to have a newer version of an operating system if you want Nutanix to perfectly run all the different options.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately four months.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable.

I have contacted the support during the installation. I did receive a quick and informative response. However, I don't use the support very often. 

I would advise others this is a good product for virtualization.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight out of ten.

A majority of my clients are those who are looking to either move away from VMware or clients who are looking for maybe a little more out of HyperV. Naturally, they look towards the top of the list. We have seen a lot of customers drop VMware due to the cost. 

We're also seeing a lot of customers who want a couple of features, similar to VMware with the capacity of a cloud, et cetera. They want that, however, they don't have it to their HyperV. Instead of moving to VMware, they work with Nutanix.

There's a mix of multiple features that I like. A lot of our clients like the fact that it is easy to update and upgrade their clusters via an interface using LCM. 

The initial setup is quite simple. 

The solution remains stable across versions. 

Technical support is great.

We haven't come across any issues. Our clients haven't seen any issues with Nutanix at all.

There should be a little more access to Nutanix files. As it is right now you have one type of Nutanix file at no additional cost. Most customers have a little more than a one-byte file server. An initial byte size could be a little more than one terabyte.

I've been using the solution for maybe five or six years. 

Even when we do initial deployments, before we run the update for the newest versions, even the older version is quite stable for us. When we move to a new version, of course, it becomes even better.

The scalability is quite good. With the introduction of some smaller branch office nodes, it has given a lot of our customers the ability to scale from a small setup and then to grow up accordingly. For instance, we have some customers who may start off with some of the larger clusters and then scale by adding small branch office nodes. It's very flexible. 

At this time, we have about 35 deployments of the product.

We have plans to increase usage. We have customers who are in a cycle right now of increasing the capacities via the expansion of nodes. We also have clients who are adding on or upgrading from other Nutanix options.

We've never had any issue in terms of getting Nutanix support. We have a team of trained Nutanix engineers at hand, however, we do, from time, reach out to Nutanix directly both for our work cluster, as well as on behalf of our customers. 

We've never had any instances of a long waiting time. They're always responsive and get back to us on anything that has to be escalated. It's quite a smooth and simple process.

The implementation process is extremely straightforward. It's no more than two to three days to do entire migrations for VMware. We utilize the Nutanix move tool to help us with our processes as well.

We are partners and we partner directly with Nutanix. We're also resellers.

I'd advise the solution is definitely something that a company should go for. One of the major things is that Nutanix allows you to move from VMware to Acropolis and it also allows you to move back. There is no harm in actually trying out Nutanix Acropolis and seeing how it works out.

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

We use Nutanix on a daily basis and mainly for virtual server utilization and some VDI.

Nutanix Acropolis allows us to manage our company with a smaller team of IT technicians. It doubles the number of servers that we manage without having to increase the number of IT personnel managing it. It allows us to build more with less. This would be a great example of why we use Nutanix. 

Also, every time we have a new stack or when we need to expand the cluster, it is no hassle. It takes less than five minutes. When we have to upgrade, everything runs automatically, so my team can basically just start an upgrade, go and have a coffee, and three hours later come back to see that everything is finished and upgraded automatically.

We use Nutanix hardware, so we have a single vendor and a single stack for everything, which makes the life cycle management very simple and very forward.

The management interface of this solution is great. We really enjoy not being locked into VMware as the app adviser vendor. The latest version of Acropolis has a very handy micro-segmentation feature, which we use very often. Overall, I think the most significant upside is the great support provided by Nutanix.

I believe the only things that may need to improve is that the Nutanix Controller VM consumes quite a lot of resources. If that could be reduced, it would be great. Secondly, I would have liked it if Nutanix were a hardware as well as a software platform. I think they are currently progressing into a software only path. I think that, in the near future, their own hardware will be discontinued. I can understand why they're doing it, but I would have preferred them to continue being a one-stop shop for hardware and software alike.
However, so far, for our company, the wish list is completely covered.

Nutanix Acropolis is super stable.

We currently have about 900 clusters/users using this program, with only four admins running this environment on a part-time basis. I would say that each Nutanix cluster does not require more than three to four hours of maintenance per month. We plan to increase our usage.

I was absolutely amazed by the linear growth and scalability of this solution and it is the best I've ever seen. Every time we need to grow, we simply add another node and in less than two hours, the storage volume gets increased. 

The technical support is great and that is why we have chosen Nutanix. We have actually chosen Nutanix because of their very high J.D. score, and it's proven to be exactly that: the best support I've ever seen.

We have not used any other solutions before. We have tested many other vendors, such as SimpliVity, but we haven't used anything before.

The initial setup was amazingly fast and very straightforward. The deployment didn't take long because we are currently running four different clusters. Less than a day after the box containing the program was delivered to our offices, the first cluster was up and running. 

Our company provide integration services for Nutanix, so we do our own installation, setup, and deployment.

My first advice to others considering using this solution would be to always use the support because they are great. The second advice would be to read the Nutanix Bible, which is quite good. It's an online resource allowing you to understand what Nutanix is all about. The third thing is to always follow the best practices that Nutanix provides. If you follow the correct practices, you are on the fast track.

I rate this a nine and a half out of ten because nothing is ever perfect. But Nutanix comes very close. 

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.

The solution's performance and high density are most valuable.

It was a PoC, so we did not test it in a production system. Rather, we prepared a near identical environment and compared its performance to the customer's old SAN solution (NetApp Fas 3220 with full magnetic disks). This comparison showed us how far this technology went: same storage of the half rack old system and many times faster in response.

The hybrid solution we tested showed a big performance reduction after intensive work on the system, due to the caching mechanism that fills the SSDs (typical of low level Hyperconverged appliances).

We used this solution for three months.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We have not had the opportunity to test its scalability.

We did not test the technical support in a real situation, but only to ask some configuration questions without an SLA.

That was the first Hyperconverged system we tested, so we did not switch to this solution from a different solution.

Setup was simple, but we did not prepared the appliance (it was configured by our partner).

Licensing is good if you choose to use the proprietary OS (which is free).
Pricing is good if your enviroment can take advantage of the Hyperconvergence paradigm.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

Hyperconvergence gives a faster implementation than the "standard" solutions, and a high density architecture.

Others should see if their requirements can be fulfilled by this technology. I think it is good in enviroments like business intelligence (data mining and big data analytics).

The most valuable features are Prism and Acropolis, as they simplified our jobs and give us the opportunity to lower operational costs without reducing the current day-to-day operation performance.

We are using VMware 3-TIER architecture since 2006. Up until this day we’re still using the architecture until we could not expand the cluster anymore. Thus, we need to find a way to migrate our VM servers before it’s too late. The architecture using old traditional SANS storage and AMD processors platform. We’re stuck with VMware version 5.1 and can’t be upgrade to latest version due to the hardware limitation. Maintaining this architecture is not cheap also, as we need to pay annual maintenance to hardware vendors and VMware. It keeps increasing every year.

Our customers demand more processing power and more storage, and then we came across Nutanix, which could solve all burden that we have.

1. We hosting a lot of SAP wintel apps, and this kind of apps is storage and processor hungry. We keep facing downtime when we hosting the VM servers on our old architecture. When we decide to migrate the VM servers to Nutanix , we no longer facing the issue and no more complaint from our customers.

2. The maintenance contract is lower compared to annual maintenance/support contract that we must pay to VMware and hardware vendors. We will get the ROI back in short time if we move to Nutanix.

3. Can be manage through one single console (PRISM) oppose to SAN switches , SAN , VMware , Hardware consoles on old architecture.

4. We experienced a nightmare in term of support on old architecture, where we need to gather VMware engineer and Hardware vendor to solve an issue, and it takes a long time to solve. Nutanix assure us that they can solve Hypervisor and hardware issues within a single call log.

5. Nutanix offer features like data deduplication on its storage, which are not available on our old SANS storage.

6. We hosted our DC on 3rd party DC (leasing based on square feet), we can decom a lot of old servers (which can fill up the space and increase the rental) when we moved to Nutanix. 3 racks of old servers with SAN storage can be consolidate to one rack (still have a lot of spaces to put Nutanix boxes).

As opposed to before, the Nutanix platform allows us to pay as we grow instead starting with a large scale. Management seems to like this idea, as it will save us from overspending the budget. We can improve IT utilization and reduce costs by consolidating application infrastructure.

We're thinking about hosting SAP HANA on the Nutanix platform, but we are still unsure about the path as SAP still has not certified Nutanix to host SAP HANA yet. Nutanix should make SAP a close partner and certify their product with SAP so that the consumer has a choice to migrate their existing platform to Nutanix platform.

As far as I'm concerned, and we already ran the test on an actual Nutanix box, Nutanix can host the HANA without issue. However, without certification from SAP, it looks like we don’t have a guarantee from SAP itself. That will cause us to question whether we should go with the Nutanix platform.

I have been using it for about five months, and we just got approval from our management to expand the cluster and buy additional hardware from Nutanix.

So far, the operation has gone smoothly without any big issues, although there was a small bug when we tried the one-click update to upgrade all nodes’ firmware. Some nodes did not finish the update. We are resolving it with Nutanix support, so it's fine. It did not impact system uptime.

I have not encountered any scalability issues at all. We can easily scale this platform as we need.

Technical support is 9/10; only one call to local support and then if it hasn’t been resolved, a Nutanix engineer will help to resolve either hardware or hypervisor issues. It gives us really good assurance and we can sleep peacefully at night.

Previously, we used three-tier architecture, which has lots of points for failure and a lot of consoles need to be attended. It's so tiring and most of the time, we are firefighting to make sure the operation can continue as business as usual. It required a lot of skills and a large sum of money to maintain and to scale, which were painful for us.

Initial setup was straightforward. It takes only one day or less to build up the cluster and provision the virtual machines.

The pricing is good for us and just what we are looking for. We can cut off the VMware license and maintenance support, and migrate to Acropolis instead.

We evaluated SimpliVity and HPE solutions. Both failed us in term of economical cost and did not offer features that Nutanix has.

You have an option to start small instead of going big at first, which will capitalize your budget. You can ask for a loaner unit from Nutanix to play with; to check and verify their performance and match it to your requirements.

Nutanix treats us well. We can say we are happy with the Nutanix offering.

We provide server consultations and help customers reduce their footprint and begin their FTDC journeys with this solution.

Nutanix has the best virtual desktop infrastructure.

I believe that improvements could be made in regards to the DR in addition to deduplication and integration with others platforms. They also do not offer opportunities for network virtualization so it would be nice to see that in the future.

I have been working with Nutanix for three years.

I think this solution is stable.

Scalability opportunities are great with this solution.

I have not yet required technical support.

I do not have experience with the installation process with Nutanix, but I believe that it would be pretty easy - similar to VMware or SimpliVity.

Nutanix price is high because it bundles all the components into single deals rather than allowing you to select the features that you want/will use.

I live in Sri Lanka, which is a developing country, so the cost is especially high for us.

I would rate this a five out of ten.

Acropolis' main advantages are high performance and availability.

I would like to see Acropolis add the ability to migrate VMs between storage containers. I don't know if they've added this in the latest versions, but I haven't seen it yet. It's mainly about AHV. When we use VMware, we can move between storage containers. In VMware, it's just like regular storage, and we can move it.

I've been using Acropolis for more than five years.

I haven't seen any stability issues.

Setting up Acropolis is straightforward.

SonicWall is more expensive than some competing solutions like VxRail and vSAN. That's its main disadvantage

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS 10 out of 10. I think it's a perfect solution. I can't think of any improvements that could be implemented or disadvantages. My advice is to buy Acropolis, not vSan.