Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We mainly use it for virtual machine workloads on Application servers. We want to use it for disaster recovery and the way they replicate between sites. It has already got these features, but we just haven't implemented or tested them yet.

We have just put it in, so I can't say anything about that yet.

In general, being able to patch and not having to pay for SanDisk is the best thing about hyper-converged.

We had a few problems with the foundation machine that you can use to build your systems out. We've got it working now, but it should be improved.

I have been using this solution for two weeks.

It is stable so far. It is pretty new, and there are no issues.

It is scalable. I can add or take nodes away really easily. We did that, and it works great.

It is only two weeks old, and there are probably hundreds of people using it.

They are very good. They know what they're doing. I would rate them a nine out of ten. We had a couple of different guys trying to help get us set up. One said one thing, and the other one said another thing. Neither of them was wrong, but they weren't on the same page. That's why they don't get a 10 out of 10.

We did not use any hyper-converged solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. Nutanix pretty much brings somebody along for the foundation of your system, which makes it really nice. This is one of the features we liked in Nutanix.

Its price is fine. I can't really complain about that.

Take a look at the network requirements for the solution. It tells you a lot about the efficiency of it.

I'd give it a nine out of ten because it works. It does what they say it does. It is hard to get a 10 out of 10 for me, but it is a pretty good solution. If I rated other companies I've worked with, they'd get sevens or sixes. I like Nutanix. They're doing a good job.

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. 

The simplicity Prism/AHV delivers over other hypervisor solutions has dramatically alleviated the workload of our IT department without taking away granular features.

The level of statistical performance data it is able to report in real time is extremely useful. I can see what my VM’s hosts and guests are doing form a single pane of glass and identify issues before they would otherwise become apparent.

Site-to-site replication needs some work. It’s not as feature rich for a disaster recovery implementation as I would like to see, but my understanding is that it is slated for improvement in near-future releases. DRS-like functionality is also a much-desired feature that is also slated for future release. Third-party solutions are also few and far between as of right now since Nutanix is so new. In regards to third-party backup solutions, your only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex and requires intensive vendor training. We opted to use the built-in snapshot replication options to Azure.

This is so dramatically more stable than other hypervisor solutions I have used its almost hard to believe. I can do hypervisor upgrades on all my hosts with a click of a button while in production. No need to move or shut down guests or take hosts out of production, or plan off-hours maintenance windows. I don’t need to seek out updates or go extended periods of time because of a lack of awareness of updates. It’s literally as easy as you’d hope for or expect to have… probably more so.

Scalability is a non-issue, especially if you have Prism Central Pro. The only scale issue we ran into was right-sizing the environment we purchased for our existing needs. We over purchase by quite a lot only because we had no way to measure the deduplication and compression savings until the data was actually imported into the system. The storage savings we received from these features was substantial. We got better than a 2.5:1 ratio on compression, which took our storage usage from 12TB down to about 4TB.

Prism Central Pro has a feature called capacity runway that can estimate your growth and inform you when you will need to expand your cluster and even recommend the appropriate node to expand into based on your usage in real time. You can plan your next upgrade 6+ months out with high confidence you’re not over doing it, jumping the gun or purchasing too late and causing your environment to suffer performance issues.

The technical support is pretty stellar. Even when you get a tech that isn’t quite on par, it’s easy to get them back on track or escalate the case yourself with a click of a button, not that you really ever have to that often. The response time is very fast. The language barriers are almost nonexistent, and most issues can be resolved the same day with a couple emails and minimal effort. Most of the time, I just inform support that I have opened the support portal and they login and fix the issue without ever needing to try to make our schedules work together, and the next corresponsive is that its fixed already.

We are currently in the process of switching to AHV from ESXi. We felt the Nutanix solution was significantly easier to manage, has all the features we need, and comparable features to ESX already either exist or are on their way in the near future. We believe that the solution Nutanix offers is the way the market will continue to trend in the future. Finally, going with AHV cuts out ridiculously overpriced costs of ESXi. We were looking at over $100k in licensing with ESXi alone for what AHV will supply us for free.

Initial setup was easy. We could have set it up ourselves; however, Nutanix flew a technician out to use to set up the environment for us. All we had to do was mount our ESXi data pool on Nutanix and vmotion the VMs over to Nutanix, and we were up and running on the new cluster in under a week.

I would encourage you to heed the advice of your rep on what to purchase with one exception: Make sure the hardware you’re purchasing is the latest generation of hardware available. Also, Prism Central Pro is worth spending a few extra bucks. I’d also take into consideration that since Nutanix is fairly new, not all ESX-comparable features exist yet, but don’t let that discourage you away from Acropolis, as their development team is top notch and moving fast… the features are coming. If you must have ESX, it runs fantastically on Nutanix, but you’re probably spending more than you need to on licensing it over just using Acropolis and being patient. You’re also taking away many of the feature that simplify your environment by passing up Acropolis.

We spent a substantial amount of time evaluating many other options, including VxRail, EqualLogic and Compellent, the Dell M series blade chassis, NetShelter, Cisco UCS, as well as SimpliVity. Plus we evaluated Nimble vs Nutanix.

Do not dismiss Nutanix too hastily over one little feature or another. They are coming, and it is worth your patience. The value brought in simplicity, support and time savings is worth a good hard look. Also, consider purchasing Turbonomic with or before Nutanix. They pair and play well together. Prepping my environment with Turbonomic before migrating made the transition much faster and easier by right-sizing my VMs and it continues to offer great features in my new environment. If you do, make sure they know you intend to move to Nutanix to ensure you license the proper features.

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.

One of the municipalities in Istanbul uses it for virtual servers in their data centers. They have about 150 virtual servers.

Before Nutanix, our customers were using VMware with external storage from HPE, IBM, and others. They have been able to consolidate all the external data in the Nutanix clusters. That has reduced their server footprint as well as power consumption, which is important for the environment.

Nutanix has a very rich feature set and product solutions that are good for our customers. Instead of using different types of solutions, Nutanix covers all of them. That is a very big advantage. Often, to get the best feature sets, you need a lot of vendors, each one having different products. Vendor management, in that case, is difficult. But with Nutanix, everything comes from the same vendor, making vendor management easy.

There are a lot of features but the main ones are related to storage. Nutanix provides a software-defined storage solution for virtual servers.

It also has a lot of available services when it comes to infrastructure, and our customers use most of them. It provides a redundant set of data. The snapshots, cloning, and replication are all effective in helping to reduce downtime. It can replicate cluster data for disaster recovery and it provides high availability in case a node or a disk fails. Nutanix's availability feature set is bigger than that of other solutions.

They could improve the graphical user interface. 

I have been working with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for two years.

It is a robust and very stable solution.

It's also very scalable.

They are very responsive and provide quick resolutions.

Positive

The setup is automated and very easy. The time it takes to deploy depends on the project, but in most cases it will take several hours. One person is enough to do the deployment.

Our deployment is on a private cloud, but you can use public cloud because Nutanix has agreements with Azure, Amazon, and other public cloud services.

In terms of maintenance, it's easy to update Nutanix because you can download hardware/firmware upgrade sets and deploy all of them. I worked with VMware for at least 15 years. You can upgrade VMware products, but you can't upgrade hardware firmware with VMware. You need to contact the hardware vendor or support sites. They are separate things. But with Nutanix, you can deploy hardware firmware and software updates together.

It is also very easy to add compute and storage on demand with Nutanix. You can put a disk into an empty slot and, in several minutes, it's working.

In addition, you can get training very easily with Nutanix University and there are certifications. When you complete Nutanix University courses, they provide free certification exams. If I can compare it with VMware, I attended a conference and I passed a VMware certificate exam, but they didn't give me a certificate and said I had to attend a VMware class that costs about $2,500.

Our customers see ROI with Nutanix. Using it, they have very efficient infrastructures. They benefit from the reduced footprint, lower power consumption, and easy management. It also gives them efficient data storage with compression, deduplication, and easy snapshot features to reduce the data footprint. All of these things make it worth the licensing costs.

It's a bit expensive, but it's worth it.

Nutanix has a lot of products and solutions to provide a complete cloud-integrated infrastructure. Our customers use some of them, but not all of them.

My advice is to use Nutanix, without hesitation.

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.

We have a very large deployment of our own, and we also sell a fair amount of it to our clients.

We deliver VDI systems over this and other similar technologies. We only work with hospitals. This is all in healthcare. We've essentially created private CloudOp architecture that we sell to hospitals for specialized VDI environments, and this is the product that we use.

In terms of the version, we have very significant installations of it for our clients. It is part of a product and service for which we work with our clients. I would assume we have the latest versions.

It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us. 

The software-defined networking should be improved. It is quite substandard as compared to the VMware variant. The software-defined networking is quite limited, and we usually use other products to do that. We're aware that Nutanix is working on that and will be coming out with better solutions, and we can't wait because to do a fully software-defined architecture, the abstraction layer needs not only software-defined storage, which you have, but also the software-defined networking piece.

We have been using this solution for about four or five years.

It is quite stable. We had no problems with it.

So far, it hasn't been a problem for us. It is able to do all the expansions that we've needed.

It is adequate. It is no better or worse than VMware's support.

It was straightforward.

We started with a combination of consultants and Nutanix's professional services group, but now, we're supporting it all internally.

It is less expensive than the VMware alternative.

You need to understand abstraction and virtualization properly to be able to deploy it properly. You should look at it as a real alternative to VMware.

I would rate it as an eight out of 10. It is less expensive than the VMware alternative. I wouldn't say it is better than the VMware alternative. If you consider VMware's software-defined networking piece, VMware has an advantage, but its cost is significantly less. For that reason, I would give it a high rating.

We have a lot of homegrown applications using the solutions within the generation and distribution within the company. These internal teams that develop that software, they are primarily on a different architecture. The ones we use are Java and Oracle with Weblogic as the application server and the other one used is Lan Stack. We have been using this configuration for more than 60 years.

The solution has single-window management, the ability to create VMs and monitor their usage on the fly, and the ability to add more resources if required. There are a lot of tools the solution comes with and the performance is good.

The ability to create clusters faster would be nice to see in a future release.

I have been using the solution for more than one year.

In terms of scalability, adding a number of nodes, I find that it will not be any issues. Upgrades are very easy, I can run compatibly check and then download the upgrades that are available. It is just a mouse click.

I have been quite happy with the support from Nutanix during the past year. They have well-equipped support staff always on the phone when I am in contact. They know my architecture, subjects that are important for me, and the staff is quite conversant with the tool that they use.

The implementation was straightforward and we are currently only using a fixed node cluster. 

The pricing is fair for the package.

In terms of the solution overall, there are positive responses from my side.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a nine out of ten.