Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We primarily use Nutanix as our base environment where we host all our database servers. We also host our active directory on it, our mail servers and all our bare metal systems combined to one unit. Then we use Inuvika for the VDI environment on top of Nutanix.

The main reason why we liked it is because of the high availability that we get with it. The platform's extremely stable and other nice things that we like about it is that if we have to move the server or anything, it's not a lot to move and power consumption is a big thing for us as well.

We are not fully in production yet and we are still busy testing Nutanix. A couple of things that it makes a huge difference in is our company's power consumption because we don't have to use computers for all our employees. We can simply put down a Raspberry Pi or a little nook, and in the Inuvika environment, everything is up and running immediately. It gives the users a lot more freedom in connection with what they usually have in a standard setup. With everything operating in the cluster, the chances of losing data is reduced by about 90%. We use this move from one site because we've got about seven sites that we are running from the one Nutanix cluster.
We can move a user from one site to another site without having to move hardware. It is very user-friendly. Another thing I like a lot about Inuvika is the deduplication that you can do on different containers. You don't have to do everything on one container or on one VM itself. 

I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software. We have found that it is a lot more responsive using VMware compared to Citrix.

One thing I've noticed is that, when you do a shift from VMware to Nutanix, it opens the setup of the VM that's currently running. If people from another site double click on it, it opens the VM instead of the setup of the unit. So I would suggest that this could perhaps be switched. That is so far the only change I would like. I would like it if they could fix the instance where you double click on a VM and it opens the VM instead of the setup. That's the only thing that's a major bother to me.

The easiest way to explain the stability of Nutanix is to start it up and forget about it. We haven't had any problems with this solution. We've done a couple of tests and restarts and we've moved VMs from one machine to another machine. We tested the availability and we didn't have any problems with that either. The performance and stability of Nutanix is so good, it is almost unbelievable. 

This product is very scalable. We currently have 60 users. One of the things I like about it is that you can add extra nodes without any problem. Something we are currently looking at for the future is to put a smaller cluster on each side, where we can then, overnight, replicate the data from the site to the primary cluster. That's one of the other reasons why we looked at Nutanix instead of VMware and Citrix.
At this stage, we haven't transferred our SQL database as of yet. We're waiting for the software providers to come in and do the transfer from the old server to the new server. All our documents and all our data must be transferred. 

We had only one query so far, and the support team was excellent. They came back to us immediately and their service was excellent.

We used a different solution before we started using Nutanix. We ran three sites on EXSi from VMware. After doing some research, I saw the feasibility of Nutanix. Not only on costs, but on scalability as well. Although I'm a big VMware fan, I've found that one only has a certain amount of time to build your setup with VMware, and if you don't do it in that time, you must start again. One of the main things I liked of Nutanix, is that I can add an extra node or four extra or nodes if needed within a period of two years.

The initial setup was really straightforward. We had a little trouble with the nicks. Also, under the software setup, it doesn't give you the version of the software. It only shows as 'unknown'. So we had to dive into the setup to find out which version it was to update correctly. The entire setup took us half a day. We used a consultant for the deployment. The service I received from them is unbelievable.

One of the major problems with IT in South Africa is that licensing fees are 14 times more expensive than anywhere in the world. This is due to the rand/dollar exchange rate. If I remember correctly, our licensing fee on the total setup was about R900,000. 
There are no additional costs. The only additional things we added to the system was Commvault for additional backup services for the cluster.

We looked at other options like VMware and Citrix, but Nutanix was the only solution that offered us scalability and the option to add extra notes without any problems. 

Nutanix is an extremely cost effective product for the stability that you get without having to install additional hardware to get everything up and running. No other product out there can compare with Nutanix. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Our company is a partner with Nutranix. We propose solutions like Nutanix Acropolis AOS to our customers.

We replace and patch HP servers at one of the biggest telecom providers in Sri Lanka.

The technology of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the most valuable feature. You don't need multiple screens to manage.

This solution is better than its competitors.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is new technology in a competitive market. Pricing is too high for a new product and requires better discounts to be able to compete with IBM, Dell EMC, and HP.

Nutanix is a stable product.

Customer support at Nutanix is good, we have no complaints.

The initial setup of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is quite easy it takes about three days.

We used local people that were trained by Nutanix. Once deployed it takes two or three people to maintain the solution.

VMware licenses are quite expensive. Customers are getting cost benefits while using Nutanix. The licenses are billed annually.

We also work with SimpliVity and VMware.

If you are looking for flexibility, space-saving, power-saving, and the best ROI, this is the solution to use.

The solution is new in our market so there are no local representatives here.

Because this is a new product it is not yet certified with a lot of ERP vendors in this region.

I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

Our primary use case is for moving to HCI architecture. We have plenty of applications which are mainly homegrown in a LAMP environment. We were looking into restructuring our DC and DR environment and moving from the Spark architecture to an Intel-based platform. We started with a sort of POC for some of those applications in the LAMP environment and moved them to HCI architecture, where they have been running for almost two years now. Now we want to move the rest of the applications into similar architecture so it can be auto-scaled. Since we are from a UPT industry, there are certain state-based and country-based regulations that limit our ability to move our data to the cloud. This is why we want an on-premises solution like Nutanix. Right now, Nutanix handles our virtualization and we use Dell for our servers. 

This solution has helped my company move to HCI architecture. 

One of the most valuable features is how well this solution performs. It's stable, aside from some patch issues, but it's great from a virtualization and scalability perspective. 

The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates. 

We have been using Nutanix Acropolis for almost one and a half years. 

This solution is stable, which is one of the reasons why we are looking to move our entire set of applications into this architecture. There are a couple of issues in terms of patch updates, but overall, the performance is good. Our IT deployment and infrastructure management team is comprised of five or six people, one manager and mostly engineers. 

Since this solution is an HCI platform, it automatically scales. The only problem we are running into is that there is a significant amount of software licensing involved. There are approximately 500 to 1,000 people using this solution because one of our key CRM applications is running on it. 

Technical support is quite good. They are proactive and take initiative when it comes to resolving issues. In India, things like these are handled through local channel partners, so I believe that Nutanix support works hand-in-hand with the local channel partner to resolve our day-to-day issues. 

Installation is pretty straightforward. It was initially done by the vendor, but now we are adding more code and our in-house team handles those installations. 

We initially implemented through a vendor team. 

Our Nutanix license is for five years. There is a support arrangement there, but that aspect is more or less taken care of during the initial installation. 

With HCI architecture, whenever we do any kind of auto scaling or scaling of servers and resources, there is a significant amount of software licensing involved. This is getting a bit problematic for us, so we are looking into some sort of private cloud appliance of Oracle PCA architecture. A lot of applications that we have—ERP as well as custom developed software—have Oracle as the back end. This means that, for HCI, the number of server codes we are using increases each time we add new applications. Oracle licenses are based on code, so the scaling we do significantly impacts our overall TCO. 

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I recommend this solution to others, however, if you have Oracle Database or Oracle licensing in general, then you need to think about how many licenses will be required—based on that, your overall TCO may increase significantly. Otherwise, in terms of virtualization, scaling, etc., everything is fine. 

We've implemented Nutanix as part of a hardware refresh project. We've replaced two chassis with 28 Server blades, two storage devices, and four SAN switches by 12 Nutanix nodes.

First, we had moved some development and test workloads before sending production workloads. The first wave was successful and we couldn't wait until moving more workloads to Nutanix. We were anxious because this HCI was something we have never experimented with before and at the end of the day, it was the best thing we've done in our infrastructure.

We couldn't have chosen better, as we were able to reduce our data center footprint by two-thirds, reduced the management tools and teams, eliminated the SAN complexity, increased the IOPS metrics, and increased the overall performance by 40%.

We were also able to reduce our support contract with a third-party vendor that manages our environment due to the footprint reduction and also the SAN and Storage decommissioning.

The virtualization environment is now much easier to manage and maintain, there is only one vendor to call in case of issues and one single console to manage everything.

There are lots of great built-in features such as the one-click upgrade, data protection, data locality, very fast and non-disruptive snapshots, single pane of glass, etc.

We are applying patches and upgrades every quarter using the one-click upgrade feature and we have never run into an issue. The updates go smoothly with no outages at all, and we do everything including firmware updates, AOS updates, foundation updates, hypervisor updates, all at once and it goes perfectly fine.

The data protection is also a great feature that is very easy to set up and includes lots of options for snapshot retention. The consistent snapshots are great for Windows application and database servers.

I think some of the tasks that must be done using CLI could be added to the web interface.

I think it is kind of frustrating, opening a CLI session going through all the CLI commands you have to run to accomplish that task and then get back to the web console to continue doing what you were doing. It would be much easier to have that same setup option available on the web console.

Also, I believe that running several different commands through a CLI can increase the chance of typos/mistakes, resulting in a bigger issue.

We have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for one year.

We used a different product before this one, and we moved to reduce complexity.

The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are very competitive and TCO is very low compared to three-tier solutions.

We evaluated VMware vSphere with VSAN and NSX, as well as Azure Stack.

We love the idea of having one box capable of doing a lot of work.

With the whole rack becoming a 2U Box, we had a smaller data center footprint and power consumption. Compute and storage became one, so it became easier to manage. There was no need to worry about SLAs, as it had great resiliency

• Nutanix Distributed File System
• Multi-hypervisor support
• Erasure coding
• Protection domain
• Acropolis File Sharing
• Acropolis Block Service
• Strong support

Our challenge has been to simplify our data center, reduce OPEX, easily scale out, and improve agility. Here are some improvements that we would like to see:

• Reduce our data center footprint.
• Reduce its power consumption.
• Make it easier to manage.
• Have an agile data center.

Power supply and memory will affect stability, same as any other hardware vendor.

Not at all. Scalability is within minutes.

They have one of the best technical supports in my experience.

Previously, we used three-tier architecture.

Initial setup is very straightforward.

We did the implementation in-house.

Estimated around four to five years, compared with three-tier deployment.

Work close with your InfraTeam and discuss with Nutanix the best way to achieve sizing and  price that are right for you. 

Licensing depends on the features needed.

We evaluated HPE SimpliVity.

Soon, it will be only software. Therefore, you can provide preferred hardware. You can inject it with Nutanix software as long as the hardware compatibility meets Nutanix requirements.

We utilize Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for customers who intend to replace their VMware environment infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a user-friendly unified platform for managing our databases. Prism Central enables us to oversee multiple systems through a single interface, making it convenient for administrators to learn.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's clustering features aid in minimizing downtime by incorporating redundancy factors, such as the capacity to accommodate a certain number of node failures.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has helped improve our customers' organizations by reducing the cost of ownership in cases where a customer does not want to depend on a VMware environment due to having non-VMware environments that are not supported.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has helped our clients consolidate their applications by migrating from VMware to their platform, which is beneficial. Additionally, there has been an increase in the number of nodes. The consolidation is important for our clients because it is a part of their expansion roadmap.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises environments, which are important for our customers because they reduce their CapEx costs.

The scalability, performance, and licensing model are the most valuable features.

Although Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is adding features that can enhance the solution, there is still room for improvement in terms of functionality. 

The licensing cost could be lower.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for four years.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is stable.

Scaling Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is easy. To scale, we just need to add the node and expand our cluster.

The technical support is good.

Our customers previously used VMware but switched to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure because they desired to consolidate their environment.

Our customers experience a return on investment by consolidating their server storage networks and benefiting from increased performance.

The overall cost depends on the contract of each customer and the discounts they have, but the price for the three-tier architecture can be slightly lower.

The license cost increases based on the log capacity.

I give Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure a seven out of ten.

The reason our customers choose Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is that the total cost of ownership is lower compared to implementing a traditional three-tier architecture.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is deployed in one primary location and is easy to maintain.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is a viable alternative to VMware. If the price is suitable for an organization, they can consider implementing this solution.

We had a DR within our country and thought of moving to a public cloud. We found the solution in DRaaS from Nutanix. We did a POC and implemented it as the first customer in the email region.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is very cost-effective and reliable. We get notified if there is any issue in a snapshot or replication.

NCI definitely helped improve our organization's security posture. We have used many solutions from a security perspective, like the Nutanix Flow, micro-segmentation, and snapshot that we have over the Nutanix site to help us recover and protect our VMs from any attacks. Having the snapshots and having the flow on-prem helps us to know the flow between the VMs and the nodes. It gives us the visibility to see if any unusual things happen within it.

NCI helped our organization save time and cost. We don't need to spend time and focus on things that Nutanix is doing for us. We got the DR up and running for the cost of a point-to-point connection between our on-prem and existing DR. So it's a massive saving of time and cost.

We used to have one person dedicated to ensuring that snapshots and replication were happening on a daily basis. Nowadays, we get notified proactively by Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure if something is not working well, and my staff gets time to work on other projects or tasks.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is its low cost, guaranteed to failover and failback with only a few clicks.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure can be improved in terms of the sizing of the solution. Recently, I have had minimum requirements or usage of the solution. So, small and medium enterprises will not fit into such a scale.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for around four years.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is very stable.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's customer support is very good. They monitor everything, and if something is wrong, they notify us before we know about it.

Positive

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's initial setup is straightforward and very easy. An experienced engineer assisted and guided us through the best practices.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure’s pricing is very good and competitive.

We evaluated AWS, Azure, and Nutanix, and since we are already a customer of Nutanix, we preferred to go with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. Most of the features we got with NCI are because we are already a customer and already have the setup on-prem from Nutanix. We found the other options very costly and would not have got many of the features we are getting with NCI.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure a nine out of ten.

My primary use case is to deliver cloud services. This is for our cloud infrastructure. Nutanix is deployed on-premises, but I have six locations that I manage remotely, so it's like they're cloud-based. 

Nutanix has improved my company because it's 100% stable and the simplicity of management is amazing. It's my favorite product. We set it up here in Israel, then remote technicians in Africa just plug in the cables, start it up, and everything is running.

One of the most valuable features is the One-Click Upgrade. When I need to update the system, I do it with one click. This product is amazing because everything is easy to manage, from network management to snapshots. 

Nutanix needs to improve network features like Passthrough – SR-IOV. It could be improved by supporting SR-IOV, if they had that support, I would not have needed to implement the VMWare vSAN.

SR-IOV give the ability for a VM to use the physical NIC as its own NIC with all the network featuers on that NIC.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

This solution is very stable. I'm 100% satisfied with the stability. 

For maintenance, one person is enough. If you're looking at an IT environment, the same person who does the Active Directory can manage Nutanix as well. You don't need to hire a person who specializes in Nutanix. 

The scalability of this solution is linear. We have already done two or three scales in two of our locations. We just send two nodes to each location, they connect it, we run Auto-discover, and boom, it's configured. 

At my company, there are many people using our cloud products running on Nutanix. In Ghana there are more than 10,000 users; in Uganda, it's around 30,000 people; in Israel, it's about 200 people; but in London, there are around 20 million people using it. Because we provide cloud services to mobile network operators, each mobile network operator has millions of users and to manage the traffic, we use Nutanix. 

Currently, we have five clusters, twenty-four nodes, and we have plans to increase next year. 

I have a direct phone number that I call and someone immediately answers—you can't get better support than this. I've never needed real support, only clarification on how to use it better. For example, we wanted to do an upgrade and we were on an old version in one of the clusters, so we contacted them for guidance. There were a few steps on the upgrade, so we asked to make sure we were doing it correctly. We got an immediate answer, ran the upgrade, and everything was okay. Their support is great. 

The initial setup is very simple. You turn on the servers, enter the IP configuration, and that's it. You're good to go. The whole deployment—fixing the cables, mounting the equipment under the rack, setting up the cluster—is simple and once the equipment is plugged in, it's up in 15 minutes. 

I implemented through an in-house team. I didn't need any external support. For deployment, I did it all by myself five years ago, but today there are two people to manage the full IT. These two people also run Nutanix. 

I'm a telecom, so I don't see a direct ROI on the IT. I use Nutanix to run a product that brings me money, so the return on investment takes a few months. For example, I have to buy a server (VMware), pay out, I run some virtual machines to run the product, and from that income I calculate ROI. It's not regular IT, so you can't compare it with other scenarios. 

I purchase a license for this product every five years. At the beginning of our work, we purchased the Ultimate edition that included everything. Over the years, they developed some features that require licenses, like Nutanix Flow. But we keep purchasing our five-year license with all the features included. 

I use VMware vSAN as well. I outsourced a team of five to help me configure the servers. I'm not sure if it's better or not because we just started the new cluster of VMware vSAN, but I needed to pay for their knowledge. One product that we are implementing requires the use of VMware. That one product is the reason why we implemented VMware. 

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis a ten out of ten. It's an amazing product. If you are looking into implementing Nutanix, I recommend going to their website (my.nutanix.com) and enjoying the information there.