Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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 primarily use Nutanix for virtualization and Kubernetes.

Simplifying storage is a huge benefit, but the real gain is complete integration. Nutanix gives you the ability to benefit from the clustering system. For example, you can "clusterize" your file-sharing VM. 

Karbon is a must-have as it drastically simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes.

In the licensing, it needs to be clear about features because it is not clear whether Flow is integrated or not.

We have been using Nutanix for one year.

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization.

It consolidates our servers and improves our electricity consumption and cooling as well.

The most valuable feature is the analytics. It gives us a projection of our usage and we can easily justify any request that we have for improvements.

The GUI for this solution needs improvement.

Hyper-convergence makes the whole datacenter simpler. I don’t need anymore to manage servers, SAN, and storage as I used to, but instead, manage everything from one simple and complete dashboard. I can manage my resources to I get any information I need to monitor and scale.

Hypervisor agnostic. I can use VMware or Hyper-V license, if I already have. But if I use a similar solution as Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) that comes embedded in Nutanix solution, I can manage all my virtual environments with everything I need without spending more money on licenses.

AHV is a great hypervisor but still limited compared to VMware. AHV is the one product they must improve.

I’ve implemented and operated Nutanix in several different situations. Never had an issue in all those cases.

I’ve just scaled such a solution twice and never had a problem. Sometimes I don’t find the new appliances through the web console, but I use CLI for that situation without a problem.

Never used it before.

I work either with Dell EMC VxRail, but this product is tied with VMware ESXi which requires expensive licenses. It is also a great solution if you have already those licenses. VxRail has a limit in scalability (64) in the 3.5 version.

Sometimes I had to install it twice to put on the solution. Errors in the middle of installation require you retry, then it goes well. Other than that, it is very simple and does not requires deep knowledge.

I know Nutanix and VxRail have similar prices and licenses. Nutanix is a go-ahead if AHV is used as hypervisor because it is already embedded in the price.

I have some customers who tried Cisco HyperFlex and HPE HC380 besides VMware vSAN. None of these were so attractive as Nutanix when they compared hypervisor flexibility, scalability, and support.

Nutanix is the first and the biggest hyper-convergence company in the world. VxRail is also a great solution as well as HPE SimpliVity, but regarding to scalability and TCO, I think Nutanix is unbeatable at this moment.

Regarding Dell EMC having a main hyper-convergence solution VCE as VxRail, Nutanix is the best seller.

There was a 30% reduction in CAPEX spending when we moved towards the Nutanix platform and we had a high ROI.

• Management is simple
• There is easy configuration
• The solution is scalable
• The product has a compact size that greatly reduces the HW/Datacenter footprint.

The product needs improvement in the areas of SAN attachment for high capacity and high I/O profile workloads.

I have not yet encountered any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical team was instrumental in resolving issues to our satisfaction.

We did not previously use a different solution on the hyper-converged platform. Apart from this solution, we converged infrastructures from EMC/HDS vendors.

The initial setup was very easy.

Pricing and licensing are easy if:

• You know which solution you are choosing the product for
• You provide the correct sizing

I did not evaluate other options.

I recommend this product for its easy implementation and its elimination of the silo approach.

We have a bunch of data warehousing servers that we have planned to migrate to the Nutanix environment, but the limitation is on the amount of capacity that is currently in the DW environment and its all traditional SAN attached. We couldn’t put the amount of data that is currently in our existing production (instead need to rework on the 10G copper connections with additional funding). That is the huge drawback, considering the infrastructure we have.

Most of the authentication processors/servers have a minimum transaction of 15k requests per second. For these types of workloads, we realized the solution doesn’t seem to fit well, leaving many of the requests either being dropped or transmission lost.

• Data protection in its various flavours.
• Overall performance of the platform.
• Scalability.
• Ease of implementation.
• Great GUI.

We can test even the most storage-performance-hungry workloads on our Nutanix blocks.

Pricing transparency: Software and hardware should be separate items.

I have used it for 12 months.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is a perfect 10.

Technical support is a perfect 10.

We currently use several HCI solutions.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

• Metro availability
• Fingerprinting
  

Metro availability with synchronous replication is most appreciable for my customer. Its benefit is high avaibility in production.

Maybe more functions for Prism with VMmware, for example, cloning VMs in Prism, exactly like Acropolis.

I've used them for almost three years.

One time, with IPMI not reachable for CVM. I troubleshot this problem with Nutanix US support.

It's at a high level.

No previous solution was used.

It is small but complex. Howerver, if you have a good skills with virtualization solutions, and Linux systems, you can install it without any problems.

I installed the solution alone. My advice is to read the Nutanix documents before your installation.

I have am immediately gain, as it has lower hardware maintenance costs, and lower electricity consumption.

I have evaluated SimpliVity OmniCube.