Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We have used Nutanix Acropolis for deploying a private cloud. We are using the latest version of Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

The feature that I have found most valuable is its software Move, which we use to migrate virtual info from another platform to the Nutanix platform.

Then you have the Prism Central Core, the user management consoles, for managing most of the VMs. And there are a few options which I bought, including for the reporting.

In terms of what could be improved, they keep updating the product and releasing new features. They are quite up to date with the product. But the fact is that the new features are not free. You need to pay for each feature.

Since it is a high convert solution, we don't need any downtime because all the VMs are being moved to another node. So no downtime is required.

It is very stable and reliable.

Nutanix Acropolis is very easy to scale.

It requires about two people.

We have the technical support. If you pay for maintenance, you have a subscription with maintenance and you get support from them.

We were satisfied with the support. We have been able to resolve any technical issue.

We are still using Palo Alto NG firewall, which we have been using for the last 10 years.

Installing Nutanix Acropolis was quite easy. It took one day.

There was no downtime.

We did not implement with the vendor, but we have a local integrator.

The pricing has been very expensive. Previously, the prices were okay, but now the price has increased since you have to pay additionally for all the features that they are making.

Overall, I would recommend Nutanix Acropolis to other users. On a scale of one to ten, I would give it a nine.

We deliver a lot of different solutions on various platforms, including different HCI solutions and solutions like Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex and NetApps, later HCI mile. Most of them have been on Nutanix and on Cisco HyperFlex and as well as VxRack. Our primary use case has of Nutanix has been for virtualization consolidation. We are partners and resellers of Nutanix and I'm a consulting solutions architect.

Nutanix has several feature sets that we like. For example, everything's core centralized on the UI. You don't have multiple interfaces that you have to jump between like in some other solutions. It's more integrated for the overall management of the infrastructure. The other part too which is very attractive, is the fact they provide an option if you're not leveraging your OEM hypervisor like VMware or HyperV. That was a significant cost saver for us as well as enabling us to look at alternatives to the VMware tax. 

For now, I can't think of anything that can be improved. They've been pretty innovative and have provided a fairly comprehensive roadmap. I've worked directly with some of the backend TME guys and they're very responsive and have addressed anything that's come up. However, I would like to see better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators to have a full backup recovery from site to site and from site to cloud and cloud to cloud - the full range. The cloud ecosystem for public/private, site to site visibility with a single backup product.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

From a software perspective, it's incredibly stable and portable. The only caution I would give is that since it is a software-defined solution, be careful of the underlying hardware. It's nothing to do with Nutanix, it's a hardware issue. You may have a highly available, reliable software platform, but it's on commodity hardware so you might experience more failures on the hardware because you decided to go for commodity. You need to be careful how you're architecting your solution and your application factors as you build up your data center, and not sell yourself short and get the cheapest hardware on the market to save costs, because that can turn out to be an expensive decision. 

I haven't seen any issues with scalability. Most people I know for the most part are very sensitive about the fault domains. So they tend to go off from smaller clusters. You do have the ability to go pretty much as far as is humanly possible, it depends how much risk you want to take, but at the same time the scalability is definitely there. Most systems are capped at where you can scale out cluster-wise of VMware, 64 nodes and HyperV at 64. There are two factors to the scalability equation. There's the storage within each node, which is fine and then obviously the scalability as far as CPU and memory go. You can mix and match your platforms on your favorite vendor, but then you need the ability to go beyond 64 where necessary. We do have a couple of accounts that we've worked with where they have some fairly large clusters and I think that's a great option for people needing that level of scalability.

The biggest thing that I've seen has been the backup and recovery which has been challenging for them over the past couple of years. They partnered with Beam and with Rubrik and Cohesity. They had their OEM go-to's, but didn't initially deliver a very good story for application integration for backup and recovery where they had good copy data management. Most of the OEMs are very good at backing up single clusters for local backup and recovery. That said, whenever true disaster recovery was needed and you're leveraging multiple Nutanix missions site to site, there wasn't the visibility of being able to backup or being able to have the application integration.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are currently using Nutanix in a PoC environment to determine if it will meet our VDI needs, as well as our server virtualization needs. Our current production environment uses Citrix XenServer as the hypervisor. Nutanix plans to work with XenServer, but in the PoC, we have elected to test the Acropolis Hypervisor.

Our current production solution is complicated and requires many different management consoles to configure and monitor the solution. Inevitably, something gets missed and requires us troubleshoot resources. The Nutanix PoC appears to eliminate some of this confusion. The AHV integrates with the solution and most of the complexity is hidden from the admin's duties. 

Prism Central allows managing the cluster from a single pane of glass, and it allows a deeper dive into the solution.

Coming from a XenServer environment, I would like better integration of XenServer into the AOS and Prism Central.

I use it to host all the servers and the storage. It's a replacement for the Vblock.

The customer is happier now with the services. It's much faster for storage with the server connection.

The solution is much faster. The performance is very good - much better than VMware. It's much easier and faster even when you want to create a server from a template or clone. 

The licensing gave us trouble. The licenses for Nutanix are very complicated. Everything had a separate license, and we are having some trouble with that. Some of the licenses are expiring, and when we purchased the solution, we didn't know everything would be all over the place. It's not like there's one server license. Every node has a license, and a person has a license of their own too. They should just group everything together instead of forcing users to worry about separate licenses and various renewal dates. We actually have had some meetings about this and have tickets open about the licensing. 

I don't have a full picture of all the features just yet.

I've used the solution for seven or eight months. it hasn't been a long period of time. 

The performance, the stability, are good. My only concern is about the licensing process and the difficulties involved with licensing. It's much too complicated. That said, overall, we have not worried about bugs, glitches, or freezing.

The scalability is good.

We have roughly 2,000 users on the solution. We use it quite extensively.     

Support is great. We contacted them to help us with the initial implementation.

They are, in general, very helpful and supportive.

It was migrated from Vblock.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's not overly complex.

The migration from Vblock to Nutanix took two days. I remember that didn't take a long time in regards to setting up the hardware or changing the configuration from Vblock to Nutanix. The migration is easy. There is a tool from Nutanix to migrate the servers from Vblock to Nutanix which simplified everything.

We have three people that handled the deployment and maintenance tasks. 

We couldn't do it by ourselves. The implementation was with the help of Nutanix support. They did the job for us.

We have not noted an ROI.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution.

It's not a very common solution in Saudi Arabia. Not all companies use it. My advice is to, even for the large organizations, is it's better for them to move to Nutanix solution, even though they may not recognize it as a brand in this region.

I'd rate the solution at a ten 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. 

I use Nutanix Acropolis AOS to host all of our electronic services in the university, such as e-services, e-learning system, registration system, library system, finance system, HR system, and clinics.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has helped our organization run a lot better by allowing us to manage everything from one single location.

The best feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the central management of all of our resources. Additionally, it is easy to use

The solution has been more than enough at the moment to manage all of my services.

I have used Nutanix Acropolis AOS within the past 12 months.

The solution is very stable at the moment.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is highly scalable. This is the most important factor that we went to this technology.

Every cloud distributer went to hyper-converged because of the scalability.

All of our users have migrated to the new cloud, which is the new hosted at the university. We have approximately 2,000 students, 300 administrators employees, and 150 faculty members. The total is approximately 2,500 users using this solution. The university is still expanding, it is a young institute and we plan to increase usage of the solution.

We are still new at using this technology, and till the moment, we did not have any problems. I think you cannot tell if there are any issues with the product for a couple of years. When we start to upgrade our framework, upgrade the main OS, we will see if then we might have issues. At this point as an administrator, everything has been stable, we do not need any support.

We were using Citrix for our servers previously. However, it is hard to compare to Citrix because it is a different technology.

When comparing Nutanix Acropolis AOS installation to the traditional solution, you have to bring the servers, deploy the operating system, and then attach them to SAN storage. This newer solution was much easier than the old technique that we used, the installation is very straightforward.

Once you start it up from out of the box you can start creating virtual machines and migrate your servers. It is very straightforward. The virtual concept is simple, you create the virtual machines and book the resources.

The one disadvantage is relative, financially Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a little bit more expensive than the old solution.

Nutanix owns the hosting, servers, and licenses. You purchase the whole product as a bundle,  and you can have support for it.

We did our homework and we did study the technology in Nutanix Acropolis AOS before choosing it.

We have contacted more than one partner regarding the hyper-converged system. They sent us their solution from HP, for instance, they have their own hyper-converged system. They are using the DL Series DL380 and I went back to Gartner reports and other review sites, and then compared the specs to others. There is a hyper-converged solution from Dell but I think the leader in this technology right now is Nutanix. It is important to do a proof of concept.

The Patriarchate that owns the university is also in charge of multiple educational institutions. What we are thinking is to migrate all our services, to have our own private cloud, instead of being hosted separately into multiple hosts in our university. That's why we are planning to increase our nodes and to move all of the nodes, and all of the e-services related to our institute, inside our campus.

My advice to others is this solution is great and I highly recommend it. It's much better than the other technology or the deployed traditional solutions.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a ten out of ten.

We're a systems integration company. We do sell a lot of Nutanix, and we implement a lot of it including all different components. We love using the solution. 

It is a great use case for a hybrid cloud on on-premise workloads. However, there are few workloads where it is not a great fit. 

We've had customers that are mid-market, and they have one person for deploying, running, managing, reporting, updating, and upgrading. When you look at the total cost of ownership and you look at what it takes to run that environment, you're simplifying how you manage your environment, which reduces the number of people you need to look after your infrastructure. So, you can put those people into more productive areas.

Its most valuable feature is simplicity. It is so easy to use. Upgrades are easy. It is easy in terms of disaster recovery, failover, database provisioning, and reporting. Everything about it is just simple.

It was not a great fit for really large databases that required high-end or lots of compute. They might already have addressed this concern around very high-end databases that require high-end compute. In the past, it wasn't a great fit for them.

We have been using Nutanix since 2014.

It is very stable. Once it is set up, it just runs.

It is very scalable and easy to scale. We've implemented it in many different customers environments, both small and large. They love the fact that they can grow node by node. So, you add to your environment as you need more performance.

Their technical support is the best I've ever dealt with. I've dealt with all manufacturers over the years, and their technical support is fabulous.

I am not hands-on with other solutions, but I've worked with many different partners in the past, and I know that it is very easy to use. You save money with it by having the virtualization component. The AHV hypervisor is a huge cost saving. If you still want to run VMware in your environment, you can, and we have customers that do that, and they love it.

I'm an owner of the company, and I don't actually do the implementations, but you'd want a partner to help you set it up, or you need to be familiar with the environment. Once it is set up, it is very easy to use. We hear that over and over again from our customers.

In terms of maintenance, the great thing about it is that you can have one person, but it also depends on the size of the organization.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.