Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

• Small footprint: Our datacenter was already pretty full and we would have had to increase its size and add more electrical and cooling. None of that had to be done when we went to Nutanix. We now increase the capacity of our datacenter without having to add more square footage, while increasing its horsepower, allowing us to run more servers utilizing less space than before.
• High performance
• Many hypervisors supported: Supporting more than one hypervisor allowed us to test different scenarios and didn’t lock us into just one option, like VMware.
• Has its own Hypervisor Acropolis

We condensed four racks of physical servers into one rack taking up 2U of space.

It has the ability to connect to Azure or AWS for storing backups. I would like to have the capability to spin up a backup on Azure or AWS for disaster recovery purposes.
Right now, you can only send a backup to either Azure or AWS. We would like to take a backup and spin it up to an actual server that could be connected to by users from the outside. This is on their (Nutanix) roadmap but the functionality doesn’t exist at this time.

I have used it for five years.

NO issues with stability; had a few minor software bugs that were more annoying, but not disruptive.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. To date, I believe the biggest customer has 1000 nodes.

Support is fantastic and they will even help with issues related to VMware if that is the hypervisor you are running.

We switched from traditional SAN and servers because we needed a smaller footprint while dramatically increasing performance and scalability.

Five years ago, the setup was complex (everything was more manual, like upgrading the operating system), but today a large part is automated; for example, the OS upgrade is now a one-click upgrade.

Make sure you know what features you want, as they have three software licensing editions: Starter, Pro and Ultimate (https://www.nutanix.com/products/software-editions/).

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Simplivity, Stormagic SvSAN, and VMware VSAN.

Make sure you find a good partner who has extensive experience with this. Also, if you are just doing server virtualization, then evaluate their free Hypervisor Acropolis and you can save quite a bit on not having to buy VMware.

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.

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.

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 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. 

We have three clusters of Nutanix. We are using Nutanix Clusters for all of our Intel-based workload. The majority of applications are Oracle databases, application servers, our file services, email hosting, etc.

The machines provisioning times have reduced drastically. The single pane of glass management provides ease of management.  Storage 

There are a lot of features in Nutanix that are different from other hyper-converged solutions, such as site-to-site replication. VM-based site-to-site replication is bundled with the software licensing. For the DR, it has the availability groups, which is one of the key features that Nutanix provides.

Its performance management is pretty good, especially the software-defined storage that Acropolis provides is pretty good.

As far as the availability is concerned, it has RAID nodes, so the availability is pretty good. In case of failure, the system automatically shifts machines from one node to another. Their failure debugger is very good.

The only problem is that not many operating systems are supported on the AOS hypervisor. They need to probably increase the support on multiple operating systems. As of now, a very limited number of operating systems and patch levels are supported on AOS.

In terms of additional features, a lot of backup solutions have integration with AOS, but not many backup solutions provide a solution for VM backup. So probably, in the next release, they can make the backup solutions compatible with AOS for VM backups. It would be great.

We've been using this solution for the last three years.

The solution is rock solid, no software issues or compatibility issues may be because we are using it over 

It is primarily a scale out solution. New nodes can be added pretty easily and workload can be divided on the fly including that of Software Defined Storage that comes with Nutanix Hyperconverged Solution. 

I am very satisfied with their support. Nutanix has probably one of the best support in the hyper-converged industry. Whenever there is a problem, they usually fix it within hours.

VMWARE and Hyper-V are good alternate solutions but if you are using AOS on a Nutanix Hyperconverged solution, than AOS provides better integration with the solution. If the requirement is to fully leverage Nutanix Hyperconverged solution than AOS is the go to hypervisor.

Its setup is very straightforward. You just have to plug in the nodes and power them up. That's it. It will automatically rebuild itself and be available. It is shipped pre-configured.

There are three variants in AOS pricing. 

The Evaluation included VMWARE and Hyper-V. The software defined features required including software defined storage, Performance throughput, scale out architecture etc which were not directly related to hypervisor selection but more geared towards Software Defined Data Center put Nutanix Hyperconverged and to fully leverage its functionalities put AOS in front.

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a nine out of 10. It is pretty good.

We have had customers who wanted new hardware and new software with a certain price point in mind, and didn't want to pay the VMware licensing. We switched them to Nutanix Acropolis.

Our clients like several features including the micro-segmentation flow, the one-page management through Prism, and the LCM (Life Cycle Management) that Prism offers.

There are several features that need improvement. Some of the areas are:

• The Nutanix flow is only for micro-segmentation functionality.
  
• It doesn't integrate with their cloud solution.
  
• It's only for on-premises, even though they have micro-segmentation, it doesn't extend it through the cloud.
  
• It (Flow) doesn't work with the XI frame.
  
• Life Cycle Management is very simplistic for the HPE DX.
• Some of the applications are not supported yet.

We have to look at the ecosystem that Nutanix is trying to create. It's lacking in some features but overcompensating in others. They are trying to be holistic, but they have a lot to catch up on when it comes to VMware. For example, they only support Citrix, and if you run Nutanix Acropolis you can't run VMware Horizon. There are limitations and the Kubernetes solution is limited.

I have been dealing with Nutanix Acropolis for quite a while. I have many certifications with Nutanix.

This solution is stable.

The scalability is fine, as it is advertised, but I can't attest to any performance indicators because I haven't stress-tested it.

Nutanix does a superb job with technical support. Technicians who work your case answer their phones.

It's a good alternative, but it doesn't have all of the features. It's not on par with VMware but it is a potential alternative. It's similar to comparing Apple to Oranges.

If you are invested in the infrastructure and that is what you have to consider, but it's not easy. Overall, it's good software.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our company was in a high growth period, tripling in size within 30 months. Our demand was outstripping our ability to provide additional capacity.

With traditional converged infrastructure (Vblock), the length of our acquisition cycle (analyze, predict, design, justify, procure, manufacture, deliver, install, configure, and provision) was in excess of six months.

We were able to respond to demand more quickly and with less hysteria with Nutanix.

When I left the company, we had decided to use Nutanix to build out our non-production development environment and use the Vblocks only for production and bare metal.

• Speed of acquisition and ease of deployment
• Shorter timeline from PO, to delivery, to operation than converged infrastructure solutions like Vblock
• Able to grow with smaller, more linear increments of investment

Performance was not bad, but it could be better. I never fielded complaints from developers or users, but benchmark testing indicated that workloads did slightly better on our Vblock by a few percentage points.

This wasn’t a major concern, as our stated use case for Nutanix was purely non-production.

We did not encounter any significant stability issues that I was aware of at my level.

It scales nicely if your workloads are predictable and you build for the right mix of storage and compute.

I had no complaints from my engineers with regard to the technical support.

We previously used Vblocks for nearly everything, production and non-production, and we were in a high growth phase.

The large incremental purchase cycles of Vblocks in terms of cost and lead time were causing significant distress.

We had also struggled through some difficult RCM upgrades on the Vblocks. Nutanix was just so much easier to manage and deploy.

We were in the process of migrating non-production to Nutanix and keeping only production on the Vblocks when I left the company in early 2016.

My engineers raved about the ease of setup and configuration, especially when compared to a Vblock.

I wasn’t directly involved in the original purchase. My initial reaction was that we either overpaid or Nutanix was overpriced.

But our experience with the product was very positive and subsequent pricing from the VAR seemed more reasonable. Competition is a good thing.

The team that did the evaluation was not my team so I can’t speak about the specifics. I know they looked at SympliVity as well and there was some lively discussion around the merits of both products.

The market for hyper-converged is competitive and rapidly changing. Take a look around.