Nutanix Acropolis AOS is used for server virtualization. It replaces the three-tier traditional architecture.
Technical Presales - Server & Storage at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Beneficial centralized management, straightforward implementation, but GUI could improve
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it has centralized management."
- "The GUI of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be improved that can be done from the OEM side. It's a very basic stable web browser that they're using. It is not very inclusive."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it has centralized management.
What needs improvement?
The GUI of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be improved that can be done from the OEM side. It's a very basic stable web browser that they're using. It is not very inclusive.
Nutanix should provide its customers with the documents for predictive workload analysis and other performance metrics, such as compression. This would be a great benefit.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately one year.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have found Nutanix Acropolis AOS to be scalable.
We have two to three clients using this solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. The time for the process depends on the size of the cluster.
I rate the initial setup of Nutanix Acropolis AOS a three out of five.
What about the implementation team?
Our customers typically do the implementation of the solution themselves. They have the trained resources. I personally have not had the opportunity to do the implementation.
One engineer and one architect are required to do the implementation.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price of the license for Nutanix Acropolis AOS is less expensive than the competition. There is a favorable cost saving. Having only the need to deal with a single vendor, the management of the customer's entire stack is cost-effective.
I believe Nutanix has started a subscription-based model. We will need to pay separately for parts of Nutanix. However, I have not explored it and it could still only be a non-subscription-based model at this time.
I would rate the price of Nutanix Acropolis AOS a three out of five.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated other solutions before choosing Nutanix Acropolis AOS, such as VMware VxRail.
When comparing Nutanix Acropolis AOS to VMware VxRail, in terms of features, VMware VxRail provides a lot of options, such as integration with block storage and other products. The GUI for the browsing product or the console for the VMware VxRailis very simple.
A lot of people have VMware expertise, they don't feel many challenges while using the VxRail platform, it's quite easy. However, the cons with VMware is that you need to buy a license for every feature that you add on. It's not a full-fledge bundle license. Many features have extra costs and licenses.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution to others.
My advice to others is to do some kind of POC, try and test it themselves before selecting any HCI solution. They should not purchase anything until they have confidence in their abilities. I would suggest they use a demo to receive some hands-on experience, evaluate, and compare both the technologies simultaneously, and then decide which is best suited for purchase.
I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Director of Information Technology at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Stable with streamlined management and an impressive migration tool
Pros and Cons
- "The initial setup was quite straightforward."
- "We did have some integration issues."
Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
February 2025
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AGM IT Delivery at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Centralized management helps you monitor storage and compute resources at the cluster and VM level in a single plane.
Hyperconverged specialist with Nutanix & CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It provides a distributed storage fabric and setup was simple.
Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/
I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned and congruent to the organization’s data architecture and business plans.
The announcement of Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant on Integrated Systems (read hyper convergence) has put Nutanix as the leader of the pack as of August 2015. Clearly, many of us get caught up because it is the “greatest feeling in the world”. However, this faux feeling is not reality because there are many factors that made the pack leaders in the Magic Quadrant (MQ).
First of all, the MQ is about market perception. There is no doubt that the pack leaders in the Leaders Quadrant have earned their right to be there. Each company’s revenue, market share, gross margin, company’s profitability have helped put each as leaders in the pack. However, it is also measured by branding, marketing, market perception and acceptance and other intangible factors.
Secondly, VMware EVO: Rail has split the market when EMC has 3 HC solutions in VCE, ScaleIO and EVO: Rail. Cisco wanted to do their own HC piece in Whiptail (between the 2014 MQ and 2015 MQ reports), and closed down Whiptail when their new CEO came on board. NetApp chose EVO: Rail and also has the ever popular FlexPod. That is why you see that in this latest MQ report, NetApp and Cisco are interpreted independently whereas in last year’s report, it was Cisco/NetApp. Market forces changed, and perception changed.
The most glaring gap of the Gartner MQ is, it does not measure how good each technology is against the competitors, and therefore, boxes like Nutanix and Simplivity, and also the motley crew of so-called EVO:Rail partners, are simply betting on how good they pitch to get into the MQ Leaders Quadrant as part of their agenda.
It is not common that a vendor would do a bake-off against a competitor because one might fall flat on his/her face if they lose the bake-off. Recently we witnessed the big shouting match between Nutanix and VMware, each trying to out-boast the other with claims and counter claims of how good their performance was. Here is VMware’s Chuck Hollis’ piece and here is Nutanix’s piece (part 4 anyway). It was hounding the blogosphere with so much *bleep* that it felt like a game of Kabaddi. (Look up the game of Kabaddi).
The dare, double-dare and triple-dare went on for a few weeks between VMware and Nutanix until Storage Review, an online “independent” storage articles and news aggregator, probably got sick of this undignified spat. Storage Review ran the Nutanix’s tests (and blogged about it) and came up with some unexpected results. Nutanix got disillusioned and started to dictate what should be in the performance tests and went through some “innocent” and “hilarious” acts to justify the results. You can read about them here. Page 2 of that article started the “We ask you not to …” comments to Storage Review, which I thought was really funny.
That’s just it. The Hyper Converged vendors spend a lot of the resource and marketing on hypping up performance, and little of everything else. It is true that storage performance is needed for 25-30% of the active data. However, in any organization, we know very well that 70-75% of the data in the entire data lifecycle is non-active, Tier-3 or archived data. Hyper Converged systems and platforms ignore this passive data space. They do not play with inactive data landscape because the $/GB or $/TB is too expensive.
Furthermore, if we look at the entire HC thingy more close, it is just Software-Defined because it is just a wonderful piece of proprietary software running on an ODM (original design manufacturer) x86 platform. EMC VSPEX is rumoured to be running on the Quanta systems and Nutanix on Supermicro. Why do we need to pay a premium price for a piece of whitebox hardware?
We must overcome the hype and read beyond the messages that vendors, partners who tend to oversell their technology. We must look at what is required in our business, in our operations and look at our data requirements. I constantly share that we must look at our data landscape and use the 7 points that I always use to consider a technology – Availability, Performance, Protection, Accessibility, Management, Security and Compliance. Is the HC technology and the solution relevant to your organization’s business?
So, if you want to Hyper Converged, please Hyper Converge responsibly. Your data landscape architecture will thank you for it.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Practice Manager - Cloud, Automation & DevOps at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
May 17, 2015
I like the linear scaling of performance.
Originally posted at vcdx133.com.
This post provides a Tech101 breakdown of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. If you have heard the buzz-words “Nutanix”, “Web-Scale” and “Hyper-Convergence” and want to learn more about it, this post is for you.
The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform (VCP) is a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution. Termed the “iPhone” of infrastructure, what is the big deal?
Short answer: Ease of use, fast deployment, linear scaling of performance with capacity and richness of product features.
Why should you care? If you live in the world of monolithic and vertically scaled storage, you may have experienced the initial, massive cost of purchasing your storage solution with a 5 year ROI. Then comes the honey-moon period where you experience amazing performance as workloads are moved to the new array. Well before the 5 year ROI mark, you will probably experience performance degradation as the capacity of the array is consumed. Which then initiates discussions with your storage vendor about how you need to spend another boatload of money adding additional controllers, SSDs and disks to the array.
Furthermore, think about how long it takes for the storage team, the server team and the network team to agree on a particular design for a project and the time it takes to order, deliver, install, configure and test that solution. Have you ever asked yourself, “There must be an easier way to do this?”
Enter Hyper-Convergence, where you can now buy individual blocks of infrastructure at an entry price and quickly scale-out your solution (performance and capacity) one unit at a time as you grow.
What is it? Nutanix has taken the “Web-Scale” infrastructure model of Google and Facebook and made it available to the Enterprise. You buy a Nutanix Block (rack mounted chassis) that contains Nutanix Nodes (hosts), storage, power and cooling. This creates a Nutanix Cluster (Software-Defined Storage), which are comprised of Controller Virtual Machines (CVM).
How does it work? The Controller Virtual Machines connect directly to the physical SCSI Controllers on each node (Pass-Through mode) and the CVMs are configured to create a “Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) Cluster” (storage pool) via the 10GbE network. All of the pooled storage is classified as local or remote from the point of view of each CVM and VM data is protected based upon a Replication Factor (RF) policy of two or three, which replaces the concept of RAID. RF-2 means a local and remote copy is maintained and RF-3, a local and two remote copies of said data.
Where is the magic? Since each node has its own Controller VM, SSDs and HDDs, NDFS can provide linear scaling of capacity and performance for locally stored data. When a CVM goes down, a remote CVM will takeover serving data I/O to the local hypervisor. When the local CVM comes online, it resumes service. This fundamental concept is what allows Nutanix to provide a “rolling upgrade” of the Nutanix Operating System (NOS). What is the caveat? During periods of CVM failure, local workloads that access remotely stored data will experience degraded performance until the local CVM is restored.
The major components of the Nutanix VCP solution are:
- Nutanix Node – a single host with CPU, RAM, SCSI Controller and Network that resides in a Nutanix Block
- Nutanix Block – rack mounted chassis that contains nodes, storage, power and fans
- Prism – User Interface and APIs
- Prism Central – aggregator of separate Prism Clusters to a single UI
- Cluster Virtual Machine – Software-Defined Storage that supports NFS, iSCSI or SMB3
- CVM operating system is known as “NOS” – Nutanix Operating System
- CVM file system is known as “NDFS” – Nutanix Distributed File System
- Hypervisor – VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM supported
- OEM Hardware – Supermicro and Dell with PCIe SSD and HDD
- Licencing – Starter, Pro & Ultimate
It comes in a number of OEM Hardware flavours (Dell and Supermicro) with the following uses:
- ROBO, Test & Development – NX-1000, Dell XC 720xd A5
- EUC/VDI – NX-3000, NX-7000 (GPU & PCoIP Offload), Dell XC 720xd B5/B7
- Compute Intensive – NX-3000, Dell XC 720xd B7
- Data Intensive – NX-8000, Dell XC 720xd C5/C7
- Business Critical & Mission Critical Apps – NX-9000 (All Flash)
The major features of the Nutanix Operating System (current version NOS 4.1):
- One-Click Upgrades of NOS and Hypervisor (rolling upgrade)
- Data Protection Cloud Connect (to AWS)
- Data At Rest Encryption
- Metro Availability (<5ms RTT)
- Deduplication
- Compression
- Data Tiering
- Snapshots and Clones
- Advanced Data Protection
Alternatives
- Server-Side Flash-Cache Acceleration – VMware vFRC, PernixData FVP, EMC XtremSF/XtremCache, etc.
- Converged Infrastructure Solutions – NetApp FlexPod, VCE vBlock, HP ConvergedSystem, Dell, etc.
- Other Hyper-Converged solutions – VMware EVO:Rail, Maxta, SimpliVity OmniCube, Scale Computing, Pivot3, etc.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Brian - I think your analogy of buying a car is perfect..... for the average driver. I run all season tires on 2 of my 3 vehicles - they perform *adequately* in *most* conditions. However, when I want to drive in harsh conditions, or at a higher performance level, I equip my car with tires that are designed for the conditions. Thus while I happily drive in the blizzard, I pass the GLKs, the Jeeps, etc., because my winter tires are designed for the cold and the snow, while they are sitting in the ditch spinning with their OEM tires.
I'd like to thank you for pointing out that Nutanix is geared to the "get in and drive" consumer, rather than those who know and understand their processing needs. For those of us who still need a higher performing system, we will continue to assess, design, and implement systems that meet and exceed those needs.