Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

Our usage of Nutanix Acropolis AOS focuses on normal workloads for OSS-related applications of our operations support systems, e.g. customer facing systems, DNS, DHCP, and DPEs. The word we mention to our customers that describes this technology is OSS (Open source  software). This is not 5G.

One of the good features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the Prism Central. It's a well-designed system. It's a central installation and management tool for more than one cluster. If you have several clusters crossing Europe, you'll have a very fancy, smart, and tiny tool to orchestrate this.

Another feature I find valuable in Nutanix Acropolis AOS is technical, e.g. the rebuild time from the resynchronization between the clusters is fast. If you have an outage caused by a disk failure or a server failure, the system works well and is very fast, because the technology of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is even better than other systems. The system works faster than others.

Whether this system is worth the money will really depend on your goal, on what you want to achieve. The flexibility of Nutanix is very, very good. You have the freedom to use any kind of major vendor, to use it for a hyperconverged installation.

You have the Acropolis hypervisor based on KVM, e.g. the Kubernetes virtual machine. You can also use OpenStack. The system also supports VMware and Microsoft Azure. It also has integration with a hybrid cloud, e.g. AWS. There's also a good integration between the system and Google GCP Cloud. Nutanix Acropolis AOS has finesse. It's very, very good.

The look and feel of the web GUI of Nutanix Acropolis AOS needs improvement, when compared to other systems, e.g. VMware Orchestrator. For example, finding important features of the system should be easier. The features should be made more visible and easier to find, rather than having to figure them out and reconfigure them.

Another area from improvement for the system is hardware integration. I had some issues with the integration with the hardware vendor, in particular, Dell. The integration was really tricky, but the reason could be between the two vendors: Nutanix and Dell, because they have different life cycles for the deployment. The integration issue could be because of the hardware, firmware of Dell, and Dell had a different life cycle for the renewal of an update of the firmware, for the servers like Nutanix. We also had some issues with some Dell-related drivers, and that consumed a lot of time.

A one-touch system for integration could be an improvement. Having a one-touch update is also a very good idea. For example, you'll just need to push the button for the system to be updated automatically, e.g. for updating the firmware, hardware, disk, etc.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS which was integrated with Dell was not running well. What was running well was less than 50%, and the other updates have failed because of issues between the firmware, the server, and the system. This is why hardware integration with this system needs improvement.

I started using Nutanix Acropolis AOS in 2017, so the total number of years I've been using it is five.

I find Nutanix Acropolis AOS stable. In the beginning, we had some issues with its stability, but now, stability for it is good.

The system is very scalable. It's similar to vSAN, but vSAN is a well-known, major vendor for virtualization, while Nutanix Acropolis AOS is better in terms of technical features.

Technical support for Nutanix Acropolis AOS was very good. Their engineers have very good skills, e.g. in every case, they will try to solve an issue.

Technical support from Nutanix was better than VMware technical support. VMware was also very good, but the Nutanix support team had more initiative. Nutanix takes more care of the open tickets. I'm giving them a thumbs up as they're good.

I was involved in the deployment process for Nutanix Acropolis AOS. The system is working okay. It's good. The deployment the first time was a bit tricky, but we had good support from our vendor. I was able to run the installation by myself, with some support. You have to do some preparation for the installation to be good.

You have two Nutanix Acropolis AOS license models. One model is coupled with the hardware appliance, e.g. it's the appliance approach, depending on the vendor: HP, Dell, and Supermicro carry these appliance permit licenses. The other model is the software only model.

We had the first model that was coupled with the hardware from a vendor. For Nutanix Acropolis AOS itself, the pricing was okay, especially because of its features and how you can use it for a lot of hypervisor technologies. The cost, however, when coupled with the hardware vendor was high.

On our project, the renewal was from the hardware vendor and it was expensive. The software was okay, e.g. it had normal pricing.

You can choose to pay the license yearly, or you can pay every three years, or every five years. It depends on how deep your pocket is.

I evaluated VMware vSAN.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is deployed on hardware, without a layer in between. It's server hardware installed.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS was good, e.g. from its performance running faster than VMware ESXi on a vSAN, so I'm rating it an eight out of ten.

We use Nutanix Acropolis AOS for delivering applications, e.g. our billing system.

The challenge we are facing with Nutanix Acropolis AOS is its scalability.

We've been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for more than a year.

I find this solution stable.

The scalability of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be better.

The initial setup for this solution was straightforward.

We implemented Nutanix Acropolis AOS with the help of a consultant or integrator.

We evaluated HPE Hyper Converged and VMware.

I'm satisfied with Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

The implementation of this solution, particularly migrating our all workers to it, took one week.

We have 50,000 users of this solution in our company. We don't have plans of increasing usage for it.

We have 25 engineers who are responsible for the deployment and maintenance of Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

I have never contacted their technical support team.

We are satisfied with this solution.

I'm recommending Nutanix Acropolis AOS to people who want to pay for and use it because from my experience, everything's okay with this solution.

We might be paying for the license fee monthly, but I'm not sure.

I'm rating Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight over 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.

We use Nutanix Acropolis AOS for compute virtualization. The main purpose was to replace FlexPod. The important problem we were trying to solve was to replicate between the two data centers. However, we encountered some issues.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately two years.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has very good stability.

The scalability of the solution had some issues because there were many VMs and the replication ran into some bottlenecks. It was an issue that was known to Nutanix and it was not disclosed to the customer.

The support is very good, responsive, and helpful. Even with the issue we had,  where they did not disclose beforehand, they were very quick and helpful with fixing it.

I have used HPE SimpliVity previously and Nutanix Acropolis AOS is better.

We had a service provider do the implementation of the solution for us. They were able to do it quickly.

The amount of people needed for the deployment and maintenance depends on the size of the implementation. We had 30 or 40 hardware systems and they're servicing them with a team of six people.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is affordable, it has good value. The final price depends a lot on the hardware used, it's an appliance in the end. Whether you use HPE as the hardware vendor or Supermicro as the hardware vendor, it really depends on what hardware is used which is the main cost.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a seven out of ten.

We have only made use of the virtual machine. 

We are very satisfied with the speed, compression and duplication. The solution is transparent. The speed of the operations and of creation of VM is fantastic.

Storage utilization and optimization should be better. 

While the product is great, in certain situations we find it less easy to deal with than how it is presented. 

In the next release, I hope to see a certain and easier means of doing updates, since we have encountered many problems in this arena. 

While the solution is stable, we find it difficult to update. I thought this should be easier to do, but we have encountered difficulty with updating the ESXi and Nutanix versions.

We are currently using Nutanix Acropolis AOS. 

While the solution is stable, we find it difficult to update. I thought this should be easier to do, but we have encountered difficulty with updating the ESXi and Nutanix versions.

I cannot, as yet, address scalability, as we have not expanded the cluster thus far. 

I did not handle the installation. This was done by a system integrator.

We don't use the hypervisor of Nutanix, but only take advantage of its hyperconvergence system. We also use VMware Hypervisor.

We deploy the solution in our organization on-premises. This is because we have ERP on-cloud and a VMware infrastructure satellite server, meaning this server is on-premises, but our ERP is on-cloud.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS as an eight out of ten. 

I advise my customers to have a unique management operation center for the three layers. The primary reason is to convert the storage, computation, and hypervisor into one frame. Of course, you have to replicate the data between all the nodes to have redundancy, so you have two or three nodes in case of failure, depending on the resilience you want. I advise my customers to use this kind of technology when they want to focus on their business and don't want to talk about the layers of the subsequent infrastructure that is matched to their business.

The technology has a lot of room for improvement. For example, when they want to segment applications in conjunction with NSX, which VMware uses, Acropolis is not compatible with the competitors. The integration in the security layer is not compatible with NSX for the application segmentation that uses VMware. And the licensing has a lot of room for improvement also.

I've been using Acropolis AOS for about four years.

Acropolis AOS is stable.

This solution works in small companies with 10 users and large enterprises with 100,000. Acropolis can scale vertically and horizontally by adding more CPUs or nodes. It's quite easy to scale, and you have the option to have distributed nodes everywhere around the world that work as one. You can also have a solution for small branch offices with only two nodes for redundancy, and that's good enough to start. You could even deploy it on a ship or a car or whatever unit.

It's quite technical, so IT departments are the main driver of expanding usage. However, it's an easy sell to decision-makers because it tries to abstract the technical things to the business. When a managing director of a company knows about the benefits of this kind of solution, they give the green light and focus their IT department on the technical business requirements, solutions, and innovations layers, instead of managing the technical layers, like network, storage, and computations. 

We have a contract with Nutanix for 24/7 support, and it's excellent. They contact the customers directly when there is a failure or they need to replace a disk. You only take action when you need to evolve the platform, like installing a new model or a patch because you need preventive action. If we need to patch to the latest firmware of the solution, then they call us. However, that's something that is scheduled well ahead of time. For example, we schedule with the customer to install the latest firmware every six months.

I don't have a lot of hands-on experience with Acropolis because I'm a sales executive, but I can say Nutanix solutions are easy to deploy. The only hang-up is compatibility with other solutions like OM, Lenovo, HP, Supermicro, etc., because sometimes the drivers change.

For example, sometimes you could have a different release of the driver that isn't compatible with the latest release of the software, so you need to match the release with the nodes that support the Nutanix software. You could also have problems with the support and matching all the nodes to the software release that makes the work correctly. I've had a lot of problems with customers trying to match the software with the hardware layer. You have to choose the right vendor for the hardware to avoid problems. Otherwise, the setup is straightforward. 

However, you always need someone with technical expertise. We usually handle the deployment ourselves, but we occasionally ask for support when we have to deploy an uncommon configuration, like Oracle. For example, Acropolis has different ways to support Oracle databases, so we sometimes need Nutanix support to configure the Oracle rack.

We only need a small team of around 10 people to deploy and maintain because 

Return on investment happens when the customer realizes relative value. For example, if the customer is comparing cloud computing to an on-premise server, on-premise Nutanix is always going to be more expensive compared to AWS or Azure if you use it in a typical way. You have to consider the hours that the technicians spend maintaining the solution. Also, if the technicians are spending less time, they could start doing things that create more value for the company.

It's not easy to see a return on investment for this kind of solution, but you need to solve this problem at a higher level of management because the IT department is not involved in innovation at the company, so they might feel the solution is doing the job for them.

Also, they might have a personal stake in keeping the solution because they could see a risk to their livelihood if the company decides to switch to the cloud. It's something to sell to the upper management because even the CIO might not see it because they think their position is at risk. These solutions are like a robot that makes everything by themselves. The return on investment is a reduction in the time spent managing the infrastructure, and you could start seeing that time savings in six months to a year.

Many of my customers have issues with Acropolis' licensing model because they are charging the customers based on two things— the CPUs and the capacity in the solid stack disk — and that's a problem. Nutanix's competitors are not licensing that layer, so this is something that they should change. They should abandon this licensing model because it's too complex. Technical support is bundled with the subscription.

I rate Acropolis AOS seven out of 10. 

It is used for local file management.

Right now there is no downtime as such because it's in high HA mode. I can add different types of VM servers on the fly so it helps to rebuild or launch any application within a short period of time.

The features that I have found most valuable include its HA facility, viability, robustness, flexibility, it's time to go live is very short, and it has a friendly user interface.

As far as what could be improved, they have some built-in backup functions already, but any built-in isolation features like vision security features and free LAN features become a security concern. 

Also a few more backup options and IT security functions to isolate different VMs would be good. Better features would include more on the security side, meaning drill down on the VMs. Also, more on the reporting side for more exclusive reports.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for almost four years.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a very stable.

Its scalability is very good. We can scale up to our limitations.

Our entire organization uses this solution. I can't give the exact number, but almost all the people are using it.

Deployment and maintenance hardly require only one technical person, who understands networking and the system. One or two people are enough for implementation.

We do have plans to increase the usage. It is a very comfortable and usable solution.

The technical support is very good. The support and response is good from the technical team.

The initial setup is easy. Not complex.

The deployment was within four-five days. Our deployment strategy was that it is the right move from physical to virtual.

The ROI is very good. We'll see an ROI in two-three years only.

The license is almost three to four lakhs per month, I think.

There are some additional operating system licenses. It depends because we are not using a Microsoft license. We are using a Linux based one, so that determines the license cost.

I evaluated some other VMware options, but cost-wise, Nutanix Acropolis AOS was the best deal.

My advice to anyone considering it is to go with the latest solution and latest software and that you can go with any hardware. There are different vendors now, they know all this stuff, but go with the best, most updated solution.

Its uptime is good, its flexibility and scalability are very good.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight.

We deployed Nutanix Acropolis for a school system in a recent use case. One of our clients uses Nutanix for three campus sites. They've implemented multi-site replication, so there is protection on the data center end. Another client is a hospital that uses Nutanix HCI for its medical systems, like PACS imaging servers. We also have clients in financial services and banking.

In addition to the hyper-converged infrastructure, most of our clients are pleased with Acropolis' built-in replication in terms of the DR setup. Our clients also like Prism Central's advanced management and analytics, and many find Nutanix Flow and playbooks incredibly useful.

Nutanix could streamline Acropolis' advanced management to keep pace with its competitors. For example, in VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor, you can directly put a host into maintenance mode via the GUI. However, it takes several steps to do this with Nutanix Acropolis, and you need to use the command-line interface for most of the steps.

We also faced another challenge in version 5.15. It wasn't easy to upgrade the firmware. You need to set permissions in your cluster to download it from the Nutanix repository and do it offline. After that, you need to create a dark-site web server and put all the repositories or installers to update there. However, I think they enabled upload mode in the new release, so you can download the firmware directly from the website and manually upload it. I haven't tried it yet, but that should be available in the latest version, according to the press release. 

I also think Nutanix Flow has some room for improvement. It currently only protects east-west traffic — like a mini firewall. You should be able to set a security policy that will let you disallow some ports and subnets. That's the only feature that Nutanix Flow lacks right now. Competing products like VMware NSX and Sangfor are more robust in security at the networking level. I think that's the crucial part, given the security concerns we face. It's not only on Layer 2 but down to Layer 3 and the routing aspects of networking.

We're a Nutanix partner in the Philippines, and we've been working with Acropolis for around five years. We started in 2017.

In terms of stability and performance, Acropolis is excellent. We've never gotten any negative feedback from our users. 

We've deployed Acropolis for clients of all sizes, but most are small or medium-sized businesses. Some are on the enterprise level. We have some major banks or financial service clients who also acquire Nutanix. 

We offer different levels of support to our clients. When they experience a problem, they go directly to us. If we can answer the question, it's all good. However, we sometimes face a hardware or software issue, so we need to open a case with Nutanix or the hardware vendor.

Nutanix support is excellent. Their support engineers are well trained. But the resolution speed often comes down to the communication between Nutanix and their OEM partner. For example, if Nutanix support finds a problem with the hardware, they need to report it to the OEM vendor, so that can take time. But in terms of experience and skills, the Nutanix support specialists are outstanding.

Deploying Acropolis is straightforward. I can implement it by myself in one day. 
After installation, we do some preventative maintenance, like checking the hardware and upgrading the firmware and software for the hypervisor as well as the OEM hardware, whether it's Dell, Supermicro, or Lenovo.

Acropolis is priced similarly to competing solutions. In my experience, as long as we have properly sized workloads on the Nutanix cluster, Nutanix's price can even be lower than other HCI brands. Some of the features are licensed separately from Nutanix Acropolis AOS. For example, Flow has a separate license. Nutanix Files and Objects are licensed per terabyte.

If you are thinking about implementing Acropolis, my advice would be to properly size your workload and forecast performance utilization so your sizing will be accurate and you can predict the cost.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS nine out of 10.