Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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 can troubleshoot customer issues (e.g. crashes, performance issues etc.) very quickly and efficiently since we know exactly how the infrastructure should behave and what performance values are to be expected.

Nutanix delivers full visibility down to a single virtual disk (e.g. a VMDK file) and every single hardware component. Predefined health checks are executed during a support case which will in most cases already narrow down the root cause considerably if not point it out directly.

Most of our customers actually don’t manage their Nutanix environment at all since common tasks such as LUN provisioning, zoning, permission settings etc. don’t apply any longer.

• Very easy management (e.g. daily tasks and also major upgrades)
• Simple and fast to implement as a partner
• Very mature and stable with outstanding Nutanix support if needed (we are a L1 and L2 support partner as well)
• Potential to replace 80-90% of all customer use cases we see in Switzerland

We've been partners for nearly three years, and have been building Nutanix based customer solutions during that time.

Customer Service:

The Nutanix customer service is outstanding and easily the best from all vendors we work with. Usually an answer is provided within the first 10 minutes and the staff is very skilled. thanks to the high degree of standardization we are able to quickly resolve most issues (we know the whole stack).

Technical Support:

Outstanding! We get an answer usually within 30 minutes often this solves the issue or at least show progress.

Positive

Our company is fully committed to new technologies and ways to build data centers using hyper convergence, software defined networking etc. We did not (and have no plans) to sell traditional solutions.

It used to be more work about one and a half years ago. Today, the whole installation process is fully automated and orchestrated. Since NOS 4.5 everything needed is pre-installed at the factory and only the desired hypervisor image (ISO files) need to be uploaded. Then, the cluster will stage itself automatically. The size of the cluster is secondary to the implementation time except for rack and stack of course.

Since we are a Nutanix partner we implement and give support ourselves for customers directly and for other partners as well.

I don’t have any figures available at the moment. Nutanix is most attractive when comparing the full cost (TCO) including CAPEX and also OPEX. Regarding licensing, we most commonly sell the pro license which covers the vast majority of customer user cases.

It is especially interesting to see the development of customers starting to see the included KVM based hypervisor (Acropolis) which results in significant cost savings for hypervisor licensing (e.g. vSphere or Hyper-V) depending on the customer use case.

As a VMware partner we also evaluate VSAN in our lab as a possible alternative but this solution lacks many of the Nutanix advantages. I compared VSAN to Nutanix some years ago when Nutanix was purely a storage layer.

Today, Nutanix offers end to end management, visibility and standardization which offers maybe the biggest benefit. I am personally also not a big fan of the VSAN object storage approach (as opposed to the Nutanix or EMC ScaleIO block based implementations) which causes many bottlenecks and architecture limitations.

This is the Nutanix management web interface.

The most valuable features are Prism and Acropolis, as they simplified our jobs and give us the opportunity to lower operational costs without reducing the current day-to-day operation performance.

We are using VMware 3-TIER architecture since 2006. Up until this day we’re still using the architecture until we could not expand the cluster anymore. Thus, we need to find a way to migrate our VM servers before it’s too late. The architecture using old traditional SANS storage and AMD processors platform. We’re stuck with VMware version 5.1 and can’t be upgrade to latest version due to the hardware limitation. Maintaining this architecture is not cheap also, as we need to pay annual maintenance to hardware vendors and VMware. It keeps increasing every year.

Our customers demand more processing power and more storage, and then we came across Nutanix, which could solve all burden that we have.

1. We hosting a lot of SAP wintel apps, and this kind of apps is storage and processor hungry. We keep facing downtime when we hosting the VM servers on our old architecture. When we decide to migrate the VM servers to Nutanix , we no longer facing the issue and no more complaint from our customers.

2. The maintenance contract is lower compared to annual maintenance/support contract that we must pay to VMware and hardware vendors. We will get the ROI back in short time if we move to Nutanix.

3. Can be manage through one single console (PRISM) oppose to SAN switches , SAN , VMware , Hardware consoles on old architecture.

4. We experienced a nightmare in term of support on old architecture, where we need to gather VMware engineer and Hardware vendor to solve an issue, and it takes a long time to solve. Nutanix assure us that they can solve Hypervisor and hardware issues within a single call log.

5. Nutanix offer features like data deduplication on its storage, which are not available on our old SANS storage.

6. We hosted our DC on 3rd party DC (leasing based on square feet), we can decom a lot of old servers (which can fill up the space and increase the rental) when we moved to Nutanix. 3 racks of old servers with SAN storage can be consolidate to one rack (still have a lot of spaces to put Nutanix boxes).

As opposed to before, the Nutanix platform allows us to pay as we grow instead starting with a large scale. Management seems to like this idea, as it will save us from overspending the budget. We can improve IT utilization and reduce costs by consolidating application infrastructure.

We're thinking about hosting SAP HANA on the Nutanix platform, but we are still unsure about the path as SAP still has not certified Nutanix to host SAP HANA yet. Nutanix should make SAP a close partner and certify their product with SAP so that the consumer has a choice to migrate their existing platform to Nutanix platform.

As far as I'm concerned, and we already ran the test on an actual Nutanix box, Nutanix can host the HANA without issue. However, without certification from SAP, it looks like we don’t have a guarantee from SAP itself. That will cause us to question whether we should go with the Nutanix platform.

I have been using it for about five months, and we just got approval from our management to expand the cluster and buy additional hardware from Nutanix.

So far, the operation has gone smoothly without any big issues, although there was a small bug when we tried the one-click update to upgrade all nodes’ firmware. Some nodes did not finish the update. We are resolving it with Nutanix support, so it's fine. It did not impact system uptime.

I have not encountered any scalability issues at all. We can easily scale this platform as we need.

Technical support is 9/10; only one call to local support and then if it hasn’t been resolved, a Nutanix engineer will help to resolve either hardware or hypervisor issues. It gives us really good assurance and we can sleep peacefully at night.

Previously, we used three-tier architecture, which has lots of points for failure and a lot of consoles need to be attended. It's so tiring and most of the time, we are firefighting to make sure the operation can continue as business as usual. It required a lot of skills and a large sum of money to maintain and to scale, which were painful for us.

Initial setup was straightforward. It takes only one day or less to build up the cluster and provision the virtual machines.

The pricing is good for us and just what we are looking for. We can cut off the VMware license and maintenance support, and migrate to Acropolis instead.

We evaluated SimpliVity and HPE solutions. Both failed us in term of economical cost and did not offer features that Nutanix has.

You have an option to start small instead of going big at first, which will capitalize your budget. You can ask for a loaner unit from Nutanix to play with; to check and verify their performance and match it to your requirements.

Nutanix treats us well. We can say we are happy with the Nutanix offering.

They have OEM partnerships.  

They've got their own developed OS, which is an advantage, if you can save on some licensing, of course. 

The solution is a bit cheaper. The pricing is pretty good.

The stability is very good.

The solution can scale well.

Technical support is helpful.

The initial setup can be a bit difficult. 

Troubleshooting is a problem. 

There are a lot of updates even though the solution itself is fairly long-lasting.

There are no licensed technicians; you have to reach out to Nutanix directly.

They need a more stable operating system.

The stability is pretty good. It is quite long-lasting, however, they've got a lot of releases and upgrades. You need to perform a lot of upgrades during the support peak, which is something new users should keep in mind.

Scalability is okay. It is really similar to SimpliVity in that it's easy to increase the capacity and all resources.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. They seem helpful. That said, they have got some of the bugs that you need to fix sometimes. In terms of just using it and for normal usage, it's fine after you set it up. 

I've also worked with SimpliVity.

The initial setup can be difficult. It's not exactly straightforward. If you get anything wrong, you need to completely start over and begin again. It's not easy to troubleshoot problems either. 

I'd rate the overall setup process at a two out of five due to the level of difficulty involved. 

For the most part, the pricing is fairly reasonable. It's not overly expensive. 

My advice to other users is that you need to think about what you are going to use and why. If you are just using the normal virtual machines, you could consider other brands. However, if you want to use some special instances with the duplication or whatever, Nutanix is a good option.

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten.

We use Nutanix Acropolis AOS for the high availability that we get with it. The platform's extremely stable and other nice things that we like about it is that if we have to move the server or anything, it's not a lot to move and power consumption is a big thing for us as well.

My primary use case of this solution is that it helped me solve all of my use cases. I can create an integrative private cloud in a data center, create a hybrid cloud, public cloud, and near-site data recording. For example, there are lots of sites that do not have the data there so I can create data because Nutanix also has got it stored on the nodes. It takes care of storage on the nodes. I can build storage on the nodes, compute them, give the clients who already have a small data center within themselves but they do not have it externally. By using storage on the nodes in Nutanix I can give them the external.

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

One of the benefits this solution has had for my organization is space consumption. Space consumption was reduced by approximately 40% because if I had gone with another kind of traditional, or open-world solution, then I would have not saved my floor space. Another way it has benefited my organization is because of the energy consumption.

I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software.

On-demand scaling is the most valuable feature, I can keep on scaling on-demand.

With Nutanix, if I do three or four nodes if I look at the traditional environment I have to really figure out the wave concept. Connect wave one, wave two, wave six, wave five. In Nutanix I don't have any of these issues. Lastly, deduplication. Deduplication and erasure coding

As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface that can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I can create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as parallel execution.

I would suggest that this could perhaps be switched. That is so far the only change I would like. I would like it if they could fix the instance where you double click on a VM and it opens the VM instead of the setup.

We've only been using Nutanix Acropolis for a short time now so we haven't gone into full production with the product yet.

This product is very scalable. We currently have 60 users. One of the things I like about it is that you can add extra nodes without any problem. Something we are currently looking at for the future is to put a smaller cluster on each side, where we can then, overnight, replicate the data from the site to the primary cluster. That's one of the other reasons why we looked at Nutanix instead of VMware and Citrix.

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

We've only been using Nutanix Acropolis for a short time now so we haven't gone into full production with the product yet.

The entire setup took us half a day. We used a consultant for the deployment. The service I received from them is unbelievable.

One of the major problems with IT in South Africa is that licensing fees are 14 times more expensive than anywhere in the world.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. If they develop the interoperability then it would make it a ten.

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

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately three years. However, I believe Nutanix Acropolis AOS is used in combination with Oracle solutions.

I have used Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately four years.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability.

The solution is scalable, we can scale it up when needed.

The technical support from Nutanix Acropolis AOS is very good.

The initial setup of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is simple.

We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process.

The return on investment of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is better than other solutions. Other solutions have higher overall costs, such as support or renewals.

Our customers are on three years license to use Nutanix Acropolis AOS. The price of the solution includes all features and support.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a ten out of ten.

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.