Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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.

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.

My primary use case for Nutanix is for running Windows servers. Nutanix is deployed on-premises. 

Nutanix was a very good business solution for our site. It's an expensive system, but it provides power savings, in terms of the low costs for running it, and it was a good business investment. 

One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect. 

I'm sure there are a lot of things that could be improved, but I'm actually very satisfied with this product. There may be some possibilities to move the virtual server dismounting points or to move the server from one group to another, but I can't think of any special improvements or update features. 

I have been working with Nutanix for the past two years. 

I'm very satisfied with the stability and performance of Nutanix. This solution is easy to maintain. You use the LCM module, press update, and it's done for you. It's wonderful because you don't have to do anything—it's almost too easy. I am the only one handling maintenance for and managing Nutanix. 

This solution is scalable. I just added some extra discs to the system because we were running out of space and all I had to do was put the discs inside the service—Acropolis took care of the rest. It added volume and said that everything was done automatically, so it's difficult to make the process any easier. 

Whenever I have had a support case, Nutanix has always helped to solve it the first time around. I have never had to wait for an extra or false opinion on the product or problem; it has always been solved within first contacting Nutanix. Compared to what I've seen of other technical support, it's hard to get better than this. 

We worked with VMware for some years before switching to Nutanix. We had a problem with our SQL servers, which were running on VMware, and the performance wasn't good. There was a product called Pernix that we installed to VMware, to speed up the storage process when it was saving files and data. Pernix worked very well.

They implemented that technology from Pernix into Nutanix, which is why I think Nutanix performs so well. There is an internal storage service, rather than a storage center, so you don't have to spend time waiting for the network. That was what Pernix did: it moved the storage, or part of the storage, inside the server, which then took care of saving to that storage. It's a little complicated to explain, but that was why our SQL servers were working as a traditional server with a separate machine. This is the way that Nutanix works as well. You have the server you are running always located on the local stores and it will make sure to back everything up. Instead of looking at VMware, I would advise looking at Nutanix or something else that's similar. However, it's IP, so it's always evolving. 

The initial setup was done by Lenovo at delivery, but it seemed to be quite easy. There is always some setup in the beginning, but once the setup's done, it will only take a few minutes to add an extra node or anything. It's done almost automatically—you don't have to do anything, just put them in and then they're up and running. 

We implemented through a vendor team. The initial setup was done by Lenovo Professional Services, but on a day-to-day basis, I handle the running of Nutanix. I only contact Nutanix if there is an error I cannot solve myself, which has only happened three or four times. 

This product is expensive, but they do have discounts. At one point, I saw that they were giving a 70% or 80% discount, which is a good thing, but maybe they should have a more realistic price and then a 5% to 10% discount. 

I rate Nutanix a ten out of ten. I recommend this solution to any companies considering implementation. It was a good business investment for our company and as an extended working system, it is easy to maintain and use. The costs for running it are also low. For most companies who are already running some system at a certain scale and on-premises, I think a lot of them could benefit from this solution. 

I'm an end user and don't have any direct business connection with Nutanix—I only contact them when I need technical support. 

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.

For our company, basically, we run all of our production VMs on it. Also, we have two demo networks that we do a lot of testing and whatnot for.

From an operator's perspective, we released from two to one person managing it, and pretty much the main benefit is the ease of use, ease of install, and ease of protecting, et cetera. 

From a grander view, it's allowed our customers to actually reduce the amount of software that they have to purchase. Not only do they have to purchase the hypervisor, and if they're in VMware, in most cases, they're purchasing disaster recovery tools and a whole bunch of other things. However, Nutanix has it all built-in so that users have one area to manage and maintain.

There are lots of different pieces. From a Disaster Recovery perspective, it is very valuable. Some of my customers are getting into Flow. We don't use Flow, however, we're testing it. Flow is their micro-segmentation, which is very useful for protecting your VMs and the traffic that goes to them. From an automation perspective around deploying virtual machines, Calm is pretty good as well.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution is very stable. 

The product scales very well.

Everything has room for improvement.

I could probably name quite a few things from a Nutanix perspective. The area of improvement that they're working on now is more of the files index and more of the API integration into those. From on-prem to public cloud, they already have AWS Nutanix clusters, however, a lot of customers are going to be utilizing a public cloud at some point and they're basically deploying Azure Nutanix clusters as well soon. That's an improvement that they're working on. That said, from an administration perspective, the software's pretty big. It would be great if they could add more features and API integrations to the higher-level products.

I'd like it to be more API-based. They need more additional features around their APIs and additional integration in some of the automation platforms that are out there. Nutanix is a solution where the hyper-converged portion of it is mature. They're working towards the cloud integration portion. 

I would like to see more improvement in that area of being easier to manage, or easy to implement, and easy to orchestrate in an AWS or an Azure type scenario.

I've been using the solution for about three years. 

It's probably the most stable, hyper-conversion environment I've seen on the market. I base that on the storage portion of the hyper-conversion environment.

The solution scales well.

To expand the clusters, you don't really have limits as you would in other products from a scalability perspective. There are still best practices around how big you want to scale it. However, the expansion process is pretty simple and straightforward.

I have probably about 10 people utilizing it within my company and their roles range from infrastructure admins to solution architects that do testing as well as some engineers that we do consulting with. If you look at our customers quite, it ranges. It depends on the products they deploy, however, they might have infrastructure admins, DBAs, or automation engineers. It just depends on how big the deployment is and what products they're using.

We have four clusters. For customers that have 250 to 300 hosts that are running, it's pretty much one person to manage and maintain that system. You can pretty much maintain it with one FTE.

Internally, we will likely expand usage. We have plans to actually spin up on clusters within public cloud infrastructure to protect our systems. From an expansion perspective that just depends on where our business goes and how many more resources we need. From a customer perspective, expansion is going to be more when they start utilizing more of the cloudlike features such as Kubernetes or databases service through Era, or even Calm. That's where things will expand.

Technical support is very good. It's probably one of the best.

I see a lot of technical support. I see a lot of the people or older legacy companies that have been around for a while, and technical support will usually go downhill.  There's probably a handful of them that are really good. 

If you look at their scores online, they're always rated pretty high and it's hard to do that.

We were on VMware, prior to this product. It was getting to the point of being a hassle to maintain, and this solution simplified things considerably.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's straightforward and takes about two hours to deploy.

The deployment for my company, and we're a smaller company, with a total of 60 VMs at most, took about a week total. That involved moving off of VMware to HV including the migration of the virtual machines. That was just done due to the timeframes. You could do those at night. Ultimately, the cluster and everything was set up within a day and ready to go. Then, the move process for those VMs just took a little bit of time to move into. I have other customers who are running migrations that take a little bit longer, however, you're talking 2,500 to 3000 VMs. That's more of a two to three-month process to get those moved. That said, the migration goes pretty quickly and that's pretty small from a migration perspective with a whole new platform.

I cannot speak to the exact pricing of the product. However, as a partner, we do have access to reduced costs.

There are additional costs. Nutanix is a software-driven company. They do sell hardware, however, in most cases, you bring your own hardware. The cost of the solution might be a little bit higher than what you would look at from just a straight out VMware, however, you're getting a lot more and you're reducing the fact that you don't need VMware in that mix. 

The hypervisor that's provided with Nutanix is free. As the costs roll-out, Nutanix is actually a better TCO than any of the other solutions in the market that are even comparable.

We actually evaluated quite a few different hyper-converged infrastructures prior to bringing on Nutanix as a partner and they are the best in the market from that perspective.

I'm a partner of Nutanix. I'm a user, however, I'm also a seller of Nutanix.

We are on version five. I can't remember the exact version number. We have both five and six. I have multiple clusters that are running within our infrastructure and then I have multiple clusters that are running within my customers' infrastructure.

While we currently use Azure for our cloud, we will likely use both Azure and AWS in the future.

I'd advise potential new users to do their homework and make sure that they don't necessarily listen to what the manufacturers are saying. Go find out for yourself.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I wouldn't say it's a ten. I'm a pretty hard scorer. There are features and functionality where VMware makes things easier. Other solutions make things a little bit easier from a deployment perspective or something along those lines, however, that's just due to the fact that they've been in the market for a long period of time and their solution set has built or has grown from that perspective. They are highly ranked as they reduce the amount of maintenance and administration that you have to keep it running.

We have moved to Nutanix AOS as our one-stop hyper-converged solution for VDI and Virtual Servers. We have implemented Nutanix AOS in all our domains to replace old architecture. Before Nutanix, we used a mixed environment of HP Blades, Dell "Pizza Box" servers, a combination of local and shared storage, and a mess of networking hardware to make it all work. Now with Nutanix AOS and cluster, this has simplified everything from standard operating procedures to modification and scalability. Now our new Standard Operating Procedures are much more "Standardized."

Nutanix AOS has improved our datacenter in the way of availability, scalability, and speed. The Nutanix clustering provided by AOS has ensured more uptime and speed of delivering existing applications. AOS also offers fantastic ease of expanding our infrastructure. Initially, Nutanix was our VDI Backend solution, then we started migrating all virtual server infrastructure over to an entire Nutanix solution as well. Since then we have been expanding on both and providing end-users an amazing experience.

One-Click Upgrade and Foundation is the most valuable feature. One-Click Upgrade makes upgrades and LCM a breeze. Prior to Nutanix One-Click Upgrade, upgrades and LCM were overly cumbersome and time-consuming. Foundation provides an easy, yet very structured, approach to cluster modification (adding or removing nodes). Prior to something like Foundation, the process to scale out additional infrastructure was also cumbersome and tedious. Nutanix has completely simplified both of these processes and has made it very easy to focus more time on other things.

The One-Click Upgrade process could/should offer the ability to integrate with 3rd party drivers. For example, we use NVIDIA Grid graphics cards. It would be amazing if, during the One-Click Upgrade process, we could "slipstream" additional VIB drivers for ESXi into the upgrade process. Otherwise, we are left to a typical upgrade/maintenance window process in order to keep ESXi updated with 3rd party drivers for additional hardware installed in each node. If the One-Click Upgrade process could implement this feature, this would limit downtime maintenance as well.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for five years.

Excellent. The best I've seen.

Excellent. The best I've seen.

Technical support has been absolutely amazing. Again, the best I've seen. We felt like the Nutanix Bible didn't quite cover all the bases that we wanted to know more about. On a whim, we asked for a more technical deep dive and support provided us with a 1 time deep dive on-site to learn more about the product and troubleshooting. A support representative came on site and provided us with a bunch of troubleshooting scenarios (in a lab environment) in which we learned some "Tier 2+" troubleshooting methods.

HP/Dell architecture. These proved as an overly tedious and dead-end solution.

Straightforward. I was new to Nutanix but felt completely comfortable diving right in and taking lead.

Our initial setup was supported by a vendor team who was top notch.

The pricing from my experience is, unfortunately, a necessary evil, however, the initial setup cost could be a waste, depending on your comfort and skill level. I say comfort first because the setup is actually very easy and straightforward once you understand the foundation process. It would really depend on your experience and comfort moving to new infrastructures.

Not really. Once we found Nutanix, all other options seemed like lesser options.

Way to go Nutanix. Keep up the great work. We look forward to a very long term relationship.

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.

• 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.