Nutanix Database Service Reviews

At my company, I use Nutanix Database Service to set up and version machines, install and configure precomputed machines, and establish connections between databases and application services.

The most valuable features of Nutanix are its robust infrastructure management tools, including a powerful firewall, analytics for system performance, and convenient automation. 

There is room for improvement in the pricing structure, especially given the complexity of our business model involving multiple data centers and a variety of services. While the user-friendly GUI and branded plug-ins for HPI solutions make management easier, there is still a need for simpler operational tasks.

I have been using Nutanix Database Service for two years.

Nutanix's stability is excellent. It has consistently performed well over time, supporting multiple operating systems without any significant issues. It aligns smoothly with our company's varied use cases. I would rate the stability as an eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability as an eight out of ten.

My experience with Nutanix technical support has been great Whenever I have contacted them directly, there have been no issues, and the support provided regarding mechanics has been very effective. I would rate the support as a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have worked with various products from different vendors before Nutanix, including Cisco's UCS, IBM's Internet, and HPE servers. When choosing Nutanix over other solutions, the decision was based on the HCI features, especially for edge computing with one to three nodes.

The initial setup was incredibly quick and straightforward. It took just a matter of minutes to deploy and prepare Nutanix for usage.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Database Service as an eight out of ten.

We needed to migrate all of our Oracle databases to comply with Oracle licensing requirements. That's what led us to get Nutanix hardware because it's an all-in-one: storage, compute, everything. Oracle accepts that. You only have to license the CPUs within that hardware cluster. Since we were going to have to provision all of these new servers and all of these new databases, it seemed like a great time to automate that. That's what Era brought to the table, the automation of server and database provisioning.

In addition to that, we were very interested in the one-click patching solution. And to automate things, you have to have a standardized offering of templates for the software, the servers, and the database. We were also looking for that standardization.

Era has helped us to cut deployment times. It used to take 10 days if we had to get a new server, and I can now do it in two hours, and that includes provisioning the database.

We have an enterprise-level backup product that we're required to use, so we don't rely on Era's version. But occasionally that other system goes down and I wouldn't have any automated backups except for what I have with Era. For us, it's a great fallback, but for other companies, it could be an awesome first-line backup. It's very elegant the way they designed it. It's quick and it doesn't take up nearly as much storage space as traditional backups. It would definitely help to save on tier-one storage. For other companies, that would be a big selling feature.

When it comes to performance and flexibility with Oracle workloads, it's excellent.

The patching should be a one-button function. Also, it works about 80 percent of the time, but 20 percent of the time it requires manual intervention. And sometimes, until you understand the technical underpinnings of that process, you can't fix it. I thought we would move past that. In the last version, they broke a big chunk of that for me, and that's why I'm waiting for the new release because they promised me it would fix the problem.

I've been using Nutanix Era since they released it, which was about three years ago.

It's very stable.

Like anything that runs on Nutanix, as a VM, it's a piece of cake to scale it. We've never had to because it was sized properly in the first place. We're not in a growth state for databases, but it's just very simple to scale either way, up or down, which is great.

For our databases that run on Nutanix hardware, which is almost all of our Oracle databases—the ones that can still be patched—we use Era. We use it for all databases except for two that are still running on Solaris for various reasons. The only thing that we haven't done, and have no plans to do, is to expand use of Era for non-Oracle database engines, because we're moving those to the cloud.

Their customer support post-deployment is knowledgeable and helpful. I might have had special access to people because we were one of the first customers and I developed a relationship with them. I feel that I was helping them beta-test some things.

But if you called up and opened a ticket today, especially if you're used to Oracle support, you would find that Nutanix support is excellent.

We didn't have a previous solution. Nothing was automated before we brought on Era. We were looking to migrate, consolidate, automate, standardize, and reduce maintenance costs. 

And there's an additional challenge that all IT departments have now: finding database administrators. Nobody is coming out of school wanting to be a database administrator. In the workforce, I would estimate that the average age of DBAs is at least 55. We can't find people to train or hire and half of our database staff retired within a two-year period. We had hundreds of databases that had to be migrated and Era was really crucial to that effort. The only way we could see to train new people was to make things as simple and automated as possible. 

We chose Era because we were using Nutanix hardware.

On a scale of one to 10, the complexity of the setup was an eight. You need to have a consulting partner from Nutanix to help set it up. A lot of the backend connections have to be created to the Nutanix cluster and that's going to be outside of the skill set of the DBA.

We had all of it set up in two and a half days of working sessions.

We have two Nutanix clusters that are in geographically separate data centers. Originally, we had to deploy one Era per cluster. Then, as part of continuously improving the product, they centralized Era's administration and went to more of a central server with agents. That way, we could have one deployment of Era with two agents, one for each cluster. So we really went through two implementations.

A consultant from Nutanix was part of the purchase. We didn't have to pay extra for it. We had some issues during our deployment, but they were all resolved. It wasn't perfectly smooth, but what deployment ever is? On the whole, they are dedicated and knowledgeable and they were there for us until it was right. I couldn't have asked for more than that.

I don't think it saves time on the patching, but if we had not had this solution to migrate all those databases, it would have cost us at least $1 million in salary for the entire migration. Using Era it cost us only $50,000.

It's priced fairly. It follows the Oracle model based on CPUs or the number of databases. It's not too expensive and it's not inexpensive. It's a good value. Of course, I'm not paying for it, and I'm the one that it's helping by reducing my work. But I haven't heard managers say, "Oh no, we can't get that, it's way too expensive."

When you go looking for something from Oracle that automates things and makes your life easier, it's always going to be a minimum of $500,000. Era's nothing like that. For something that works on Linux or Unix, and Oracle databases, you expect to pay more than you would for something that runs on Windows, but you get what you pay for.

My advice would be to engage with the Nutanix Era team as soon as possible to plan the implementation and to learn what you need to know about it. Make sure you read the documentation and work with the team so that you're comfortable troubleshooting any problems. In addition to the product being good, the support for Era is excellent. Take advantage of that to make it easy on yourself.

We don't use it for snapshots and to clone databases, but if we did I believe it would decrease the time it takes to do those things.

In our organization, there are three people who use the solution on the Unix team, and there are three DBAs who are the primary users.

Overall, I don't know anything else that does what it does and I would give it a 10 out of 10.

It's a cost-effective database and Unix solution.

It helps in automating things and in reducing costs. Overall, it is helping improve the productivity of the team. We have eliminated traditional tasks, such as manual backups, manual restorations, as well as manual scripting that we used to run. Now there is automated scripting and a large level of automation that we have put in place with the Nutanix DBaaS.

When it comes to reducing downtime it has given us good reliability. We can patch the databases without much downtime, so that has had a big impact. We also have the snapshot backups available and that has also improved on downtime. However, there is still a lot of migration happening. Once we have it in use as a full-blown solution, I think the benefits will be greater.

Our availability standards have risen to at least 99 percent. Previously, with the other platforms, it was 95 or 96 percent; there was more downtime.

Also, with this stable platform, the number of incidents has decreased. Our problem management has improved a lot, as there have been no recurring incidents. We are still further consolidating it, but even now, it has helped us free up IT staff. We have been able to do away with at least two different platforms. The skill sets that we required for both, for 24/7 support, were immense. That has come down significantly and we have reduced 25 percent of the staff.

This is a very well-integrated setup that has made an immense difference. With individual estates, what happens is that there are too many dependencies on multiple people. If a major incident happens, you need to call an application and a database person. Here, it is an application plus the Nutanix person, that's it.

One of the most valuable aspects is the operations perspective. The features are suitable, especially on the database side, as our operations and upgrades on databases have improved a lot. You can also allocate storage to it easily.

The data analytics are also good along with the data reporting. We report certain IT data on a weekly and monthly basis, and it helps a lot with that, giving us consistent data.

It is also a single platform, all in one place, and that is the reason we went for this solution. Earlier, we had multiple platforms, the database and the OS, but this is a single platform that helps us with what we are doing.

Overall, it is easy to use, but up-scaling was important. We are well-versed in virtualization, Oracle Databases, et cetera, but even when Nutanix DBaaS was a new product for us it was still very effective.

There is room for improvement in the automation. It is customizable and we can create our own solutions, but if there were a central repository of automation scripts that we could use, that would be good.

Secondly, the graphical user interfaces could be much more user-friendly. They are already user-friendly, but they could be simpler so that we do not need L3 staff to handle them. If they were simpler, we could also have some command center or L1/L1.5 associates do some housekeeping activities on it.

Also, something we are not very clear on with Nutanix is whether it is also integrable with cloud platforms like Azure and AWS. Right now, we are using it more for traditional infrastructure. But tomorrow, if we have other components, can we also get a hybrid view? That is something that we need to look at.

It's important to have a hybrid cloud environment. At any point in time, you're going to have on-premises and different public cloud environments in use and, at times, a hyper-converged infrastructure. A hybrid environment offering is something that would work well in the future.

We have been supporting it for the last one and a half to two years. We did a PoC with it and then we started using it for one of the customers that we support.

It is a really stable product.

It is scalable.

We are planning to use another Nutanix product for our end-user computing space where we would use virtualization. We are doing away with the legacy middleware and legacy integrations and moving to more hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.

The technical support is effective. The tickets we raise with them are addressed within the SLA that we have. There are two types of tickets: one is informational, and they have a good knowledge base as well, and the other is a priority ticket and they handle them in a timely way.

The knowledge base could be strengthened. Also, more L3 teams would be useful.

Neutral

Prior to using Nutanix, our virtualization layer was VMware. On top of it, we had our OS and the database. Now, we have been able to eliminate the OS database and have it under one platform.

We switched because of the amount of overhead we used to have. Linux would go out of support and we would have to upgrade it. That meant we also had to upgrade the hardware. Now, we have this appliance over the existing hardware and that has helped us in eliminating costs.

We were involved in the proof of concept as well as the final deployment of the solution. We did need assistance from Nutanix at the time. It was a collaboration. The setup was complex because it involved working with a new set of technologies and because the ways you work with Nutanix, as a product, were very new for us. We did not have too many case studies or references. But now, after having used it for some time, the teams are comfortable with it.

Our current model is 90 to 95 percent on-prem. We are not into cloud. Going forward, we will have to move into cloud. We have two data centers and the Nutanix environment is set up in primary and secondary modes across them. All the applications that the business users use are pointing to the infrastructure that is present in these two data centers. The estate would be about 2,000 servers.

The deployment was done in phases. The PoC took about a month's time to see the results. We divided the next stage, going into non-production first, and then we took the corresponding non-production environments to production. It took us at least three to four months overall.

The deployment included project managers, two or three architects, and a team of around 10 to 12 associates.

Our IT department, a team of around 12 to 14 people, actively uses and supports the platform. If there are any releases with certain additional features, there is maintenance required, but that doesn't necessarily require downtime or impact services. It is easy to upgrade the solution. You test it out in the dev environments and then do a release in the production environment.

In house team

Our business case includes a return on investment. In terms of what we expected, we are not there yet, but we have achieved 65 percent of what we intended to do. We thought that, out of a few million, we would save X amount. On that, we have achieved 65 percent. Probably, if we leverage the estate for all our environments, the ROI will be better.

The pricing is competitive.

We also looked at an HPE platform at the time, but from a cost perspective, Nutanix was ahead.

I would recommend this product for any medium to large enterprise. It's not that relevant for a small enterprise because of the cost.

With the enhancements and the features that have been added in the new releases, it's getting much, much better.

We are using the Nutanix Era solution for managing our Microsoft SQL Server, which hosts a database that is approximately five terabytes in size. We also use Nutanix Era with a PostgreSQL server.

This product simplifies the deployment of multiple database engines, which is important to us because we are in an environment where we cannot rely only on a single database engine. We have a large demand for different databases including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server. When we receive a request to deploy a database server, it's very easy for us and in that way, Nutanix Era is very useful.

We manage workloads for both PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server, and the performance is good. It is flexible in this regard because it simplifies both the deployment and administrations of workloads from these different databases.

As part of our operation in production, we have to be able to replicate our SQL database. It is approximately five terabytes in size. One of the ways that Nutanix Era has helped is that with a single click, we can clone the database in less than 30 minutes. This clone can easily then be pushed to our development environment. In general, it has reduced our deployment times.

We save a lot of data in our production database and using Nutanix has improved the performance. We are able to create different clones and work with them separately. Also, copying and synchronizing the logs from clones is something that is very easy to do. The impact of the boost in performance has been good and everybody is happy with it.

Using this solution has decreased the time that it takes us to clone or take a snapshot of a database. We can clone a large database in between 10 and 15 minutes, whereas a snapshot can be created in less than five minutes.

Nutanix has helped to reduce the time required to manage our database workloads, although it is difficult to estimate by how much because I did not use another solution for the same purpose. I can only say that overall, we have spent less time on database management, and it has helped to reduce off-hours work. Because everything is working fine, we do not need to work on the database during our off-hours.

As we have needed to spend less time concentrating on database management, it means that we have been able to spend more time on other IT services. We can work on other things, which leads to better overall performance for the IT department.

Nutanix has increased the team's ability to troubleshoot issues. Because it is easy to manage, we can quickly see whether there is a problem in our operations. When we find out which operation has the problem, we can resolve it using the information available in the log files. The use of the log makes it easy for the team to conduct the troubleshooting process, and this has a positive impact on our business because we can solve problems quickly. In turn, we can readily get back to other operations in the IT department or more generally in the organization.

The Time Machine is the most valuable feature for us. Using it means that we don't have to take regular snapshots, yet we are still able to restore the database quickly in the event of a problem.

We use Nutanix Era to perform in-place backup and restores of our databases. Taking about one hour to complete a restore, this product has reduced our overall downtime.

We are able to create multiple backups during the day without affecting our production workloads, which is important because we receive and manage sensitive data, including personal information, and when we have a problem we can easily restore the previous backup. The RTO is very short.

The creation of multiple daily backups is also good in terms of limiting the amount of possible data loss. This is good for our operations because when we do have a problem, we don't lose any data.

Managing databases can be done through a single pane of glass, which means that we don't have to make use of many interfaces to manage different database engines. From a single place, we are able to see what's happened in our environment.

The updating of the database engine is something that can be improved. For example, assume that we are using PostgreSQL out of the box, and it is version 10. If we want to migrate to version 11, 12, or 13, then it is not very easy to do that using Nutanix Era. This is an area that I would like to see improved because I have had many problems with it. In one situation, I was trying to deploy PostgreSQL version 12 and it was very difficult to achieve. If this were improved then it would be very good for the solution.

The problem is not tied directly to how long it takes to perform updates. Rather, it is not easy to do. Database engines differ in this regard because Microsoft SQL is easier to update than PostgreSQL. With PostgreSQL, for example, upgrading the software profile requires several steps. You have to manipulate too many things, create VMs, import them into Nutanix Era, and deploy a new cluster. If the process were automated by the software then that would save a lot of time.

We have been using Nutanix Era for two years.

The stability is very good and this has a good impact on the IT department. We can rely on this solution to create snapshots and clones, easily restore databases, and update software.

Scalability-wise, it is very good. We can upgrade easily and Nutanix is always creating new solutions to solve problems related to databases.

We have two users with administrative roles, although, for deployment and maintenance, one person is enough. It certainly doesn't take many people to maintain this solution. I am the IT Manager and I have a system admin, as well.

We have more than 10 database workloads and we are planning to add more databases in the future. With that, our usage of Nutanix Era will also increase.

The technical support is very good. When we have had to communicate with them, in perhaps less than an hour we've gotten a response and been able to resolve our problem.

In general, the support is able to address problems easily and solve them quickly, which is very good.

In addition to Nutanix Era, which we have to back up and restore our databases, we use Veeam as our general backup and restore solution.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment takes less than an hour.

When we deployed Era, we had everything saved inside of it. All of the software profiles and computer profiles are saved. You can either create a new one or modify an existing one. Everything is in place so all that we have to do is deploy to our server and after that, it is easy to deploy the database.

We used an integrator to assist with deployment. Their name is Exxoss and our experience with them was definitely good. They assisted us very well and everything works. It was a good experience.

Our return on investment comes from the fact that we don't need very many people to manage or administer the platform. Essentially, our costs have been reduced because we used to have different people working on different databases. For example, we have not had to spend extra on a person to administer our Microsoft SQL Server. One or two people can manage a large number of databases.

In terms of time savings, this has allowed the teams to concentrate on other subjects, rather than spend time troubleshooting and resolving other database-related issues.

Overall, our return on investment is very good.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We did not evaluate other options but this is because originally, we planned only to use a single database engine. We did not plan on using a solution to manage different database engines. Once we heard about Nutanix Era and how it worked, we were very happy and went straight to it.

My advice for anybody who is looking into using Nutanix Era is to go ahead and implement it. This is a good solution that will help the IT department to manage and troubleshoot the database workloads. It reduces the time needed by teams for troubleshooting, deploying a cluster, or deploying a single-node database. It makes life easy for database management and it is one that you can rely on.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Nutanix Era is that it makes the job of our IT staff very easy.

In summary, this is a very good product but perfection does not exist, so there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We ran testing for Microsoft SQL and MySQL. For Microsoft SQL, the test case was to do multiple database schema deployments on a single host. Then we had single database schemas on multiple hosts, and we also tested high availability clusters for Microsoft SQL on four host nodes.

The performance and flexibility of non-Nutanix workloads are quite good because from a working perspective or a load perspective, scaling of the system is very straightforward. Since we're running the hosts on the normal Nutanix infrastructure, we were able to scale the loads according to what we need and it's really easy to scale up or down as needed.

The big advantage that we found was because we run development processes as well, we can actually generate development, testing, and production databases on the fly without us influencing production. This is one of the big time-saves because, in the past, you would normally have to take a backup of production, sanitize the data, then put it on a test machine. This is something that Nutanix Era makes very simple to do.

This solution has helped to save us on Tier 1 storage, which is important to us because we do a lot of systems in-house. Storage clusters are quite heavily used and they have a large footprint. Being able to save storage space for non-production tasks is significant because, for testing, we have a group of five testers working there. On dev, we have two or three developers that would work there constantly. Saving on that storage means that we can grow our production environments more effectively because we don't have to pay for test and dev storage separately. This means that the cost of ownership is a lot less, which saves us on having to purchase more storage as the system starts crowding.

If you think about it, if we run dev, test, and production all with production data, because that's what they need to do the development and testing on, we would need three times the data every time we deploy it. If the system then grows to two terabytes, that's six terabytes that we have to pay for. With Nutanix, we basically save four terabytes, which is a lot of money.

We have been able to simplify database deployment across multiple database engines. We tested with MySQL and Microsoft SQL. With MySQL, you can also use the APIs to automate that type of deployment. We have not tested the Oracle or the PostgreSQL deployment engines since we don't have those. However, with respect to the two that we tested, it simplifies them both to a large extent.

Using this solution has made the task of cloning databases much simpler and much faster. Previously, it would take us two to two and a half hours to do a clone or a snapshot. Now it's five, six minutes. It's a lot of time that we save.

We have tested the backup and in-place restore of databases but we haven't finally signed off. Once we complete the pilot, we hope to sign off on those. What we did see is that the way Nutanix Era works with the Microsoft backup system is much easier, and it appears to be more stable. This is mainly because on the Microsoft backup side, if you have a load issue, your backups will normally fail. With Nutanix Era, the backup system sits separately from the performance of the database. This means that even if you have a load issue on the data database system, the backups will still go through. Specifically, this is because Era backs up from the storage device and not from the Microsoft database. It is very technical, but as I understand it, the backup will still go through, even if the database is under strain.

We expect that once this system is in production, it will reduce downtime. One of the main selling points for us was that it will reduce update and patching downtime because it manages those updates and patches internally. Even if you deploy Microsoft SQL patches, you can manage and maintain them from the Prism interface, which should reduce downtime. They save the users downtime, and we haven't actually seen that yet, but we expect the pilot will show us that.

We tested the ability to make multiple backups per day and assess the impact that it would have on our workloads. In fact, we were able to make differential backups continuously without affecting the performance of the database engine. We were also able to schedule the backups at different times to make full backups and we couldn't see any impact or load on the database performance while we were doing this.

This will definitely help to limit data loss because we can use a continuous differential backup. We should not see any data loss as long as there's no data corruption. But if there's data corruption, and we can pinpoint the point in time, we should be able to go back to that point.

The ability to do this is very important for us. We have a series of data profiles that we have databases for. We are a university and our systems include everything from financial systems right through to medical systems that they use for the academic hospitals and the veterinary hospital.

When it comes to data management, I can see how Era will help to reduce the time spent on operational database workloads. Since we haven't used it in production for an extended period, I can't really say how much time we've actually saved. During the PoC, we only played around with it and we set up the scheduled tasks that we normally do manually.

Since we can automate a lot of things, we can skip it and schedule it. This should replace a lot of our off-hours work such as patching, upgrades, and similar tasks that can be scheduled so that the reboots can happen automatically. We don't have to sit there and babysit the whole time.

This product has helped us to reduce our database footprint because it gives us the ability to deploy Microsoft SQL instances as MySQL instances on the same host, without actually having to reconfigure or do anything. This means that we can consolidate our database service.

We can also scale them the way we need them and we can, if we really want to, move away from the one database per server type of instances that we have now into a more economical database model where we have multiple database instances on a single host, which does reduce our footprint quite a lot.

At this time, when we provision a database, we do so for a specific server. We assign the memory, CPU, and storage for that specific machine. For about 50% of the lifetime of that database, those resources are never actually utilized, whereas with Era, we can provision those as instances on the same host, and we can scale the host to cater to all of those. This gives us the opportunity to better manage how many resources are sitting idle because we can ramp them up and scale them back as needed, which will save in the long run.

More generally, using this solution will definitely improve the service delivery for our department within the organization. It's going to make it possible for us to cater to more user-centric services and needs. Because of the time-saving and the resource-saving, we'll be able to provide our users with a bigger variety of database services that they might require.

One feature that is very good is the backup and validation process that's built into Era. It saves a lot of time and gives you some kind of assurance that when you actually pull a backup, it is done correctly and you will be able to restore it. In other backup systems, because they are not database-aware, that validation process is not as easy because you have to actually restore the backup to see that it worked. With Era, it actually validates on the fly so you know you'll be able to restore.

The deployment process is a lot easier, due to the fact that with Era you can actually script a deployment. If you have a lot of deployments of the same type, say for instance you have a user request coming in to say they need a basic database schema, you can just run that as a deploy script and it automatically sets up everything. It takes about five minutes and the users have access to their database. In the past, we had to go through a whole setup and deployment process, which for us, took about half a day. That's a lot of time that we save.

Setting up a development test and production environment is quite easy and it saves a lot of storage because the dev and test databases are non-data clones of production, where only the changes are saved. For example, if you have a two-terabyte production database then it saves a lot of space because you don't have to have a two-terabyte test database as well.

If there were data integration services included with the platform then it would be interesting, and it would help us a lot.

We completed a short PoC using Nutanix Era last year to see if we want to do a pilot. We haven't actually implemented it yet, and we're in the process of organizing the pilot program. In total, we used it for about three months.

The stability of our PoC system was very good, but as we were only four people working on it and benchmarking it, there were not a lot of connection issues. I think the first thing we would want to do during the pilot is to simulate application connections and see how well it takes it. When you get that scenario of an application having database runaway connections, kind of simulate that and see how it handles it. But for the PoC, no stability issues whatsoever.

At the moment, we're waiting for approval so nobody is using the solution. However, if we go for the final implementation, the plan is to have two permanent Microsoft SQL DBAs, and then have an automation system that does most of the provisioning.

The DBAs will be there for monitoring and optimization purposes, but we intend to have the provisioning system fully automated so that users can request short-term or long-term data storage as they require. That will be provisioned automatically from our ticketing system.

I think the only limiting factor on scalability is licensing. Licensing costs will be the main scalability problem. If you have a large environment already licensed, scaling the resource allocation according to your performance needs is very easy.

We didn't make a lot of use of the technical support after the initial setup, so I can't offer too much about our experience. However, what I can say is the solutions architect was very good, very well informed, and able to return answers to our queries within a few minutes.

Prior to using Nutanix Era, we used VMware to create a service, and then we used to deploy by installing a SQL server.

Our PoC was deployed on the Nutanix hosting cluster.

If you have experience as a DBA, the setup is very straightforward. If you haven't had any database administration experience before, this is definitely going to be easier than doing it from scratch on your own, thanks to all of the guidelines that they add for you. My database set up in Era is mid-tier. It's not as complex as doing it from scratch on your own, and for a DBA, it makes it a lot easier.

Our initial setup for the different scenarios took us about two days, and that was rolling out 14 databases on nine servers. The implementation strategy for the PoC was basically to first set up all the server hosts that we would need with the different resources, and then deploy using the Era tools for each one of the different scenarios.

I think the only reason that we took two and a half days to do it was so that we could get used to how Era does it. In the final part of the PoC, we were able to remove and redeploy database engines in 15 minutes at the most, and that was for the availability group. There were a few niggles that you have to overcome with availability groups, which Nutanix makes easier, but doesn't completely take away.

We had our Microsoft team involved, which was four Microsoft DBAs. However, if Era is fully up and running for our environment, one person should be enough because most of the time, it's just going to be someone to approve. We're not going to need an entire team. This means it will be one person to maintain, without a lot of overhead.

Initially, we had help from one of the Era solution architects, just to help us get to know the Era system. After the third day, once we understood how the process flow works, we didn't need any third-party intervention at all.

We do expect a return on investment, mainly on the number of people we would need and the number of man-hours that we currently spend, on which we're going to save. Because we are an educational institution we're nonprofit. We are able to provide services but we don't actually ask our users for any money. This means that the return on investment calculations will probably include things like support for research outputs and support for dynamic user requests. But from a costing perspective, it is going to be a little bit difficult to do that.

Currently, we're supposed to have eight people with the number of databases we're running. I think that our team of four people will be able to handle this, plus their other duties. Ultimately, we will not need to utilize the remaining four FTE. It's pretty substantial when you add it up if you look at what a SQL DBA costs these days.

We have yet to implement our pilot program and we're waiting for Nutanix to come back with the pilot quotation for costing.

Licensing costs will be the main scalability problem. If we need to start adding resources in terms of hardware then it's easy but adding software licenses normally causes a problem for us, so it is not as straightforward.

I don't expect that there will be any costs in addition to this because most of our hosting for the Nutanix system is done on-site. Furthermore, we're not going to use a hybridized Nutanix Era implementation. Other than for per-CPU licenses, I don't see any additional costs.

We did not evaluate any competing products. We had done an evaluation of Nutanix for our hyper-converged infrastructure and this suggestion for Era came from them.

The one thing that drew us to Era is the constant improvement cycle that they have with the different database vendors, where they do implement best practices as the database vendors change requirements and change their architectures. Since we started with the POC, we started with Microsoft SQL 2016. We also moved over to Microsoft SQL 2019 during the POC and for both of those cases, they were able to actually help us with implementing best practices according to Microsoft for both of those engines, which do differ quite a lot. The 2016 version has certain prerequisites and storage requirements that 2019 changed to an extent.

For example, in 2016, Microsoft requires that you have a TempDB storage drive dedicated to the TempDB space. In 2019, they changed the requirement to say you should not have more than four TempDB files per drive to ensure that you have enough IOP. It is helpful that both of those scenarios were catered to by Era internally already.

During our PoC, we did the technical side of testing Nutanix, and we did some benchmarking on the performance, but we didn't really get into the performance optimization monitoring and tuning of the databases. Assessing and optimizing database performance is one of the reasons that we plan to do the pilot project.

The delay was that we couldn't put our actual production systems online during the PoC because it's a bit difficult to intermix PoC with production. The plan is that when we go into the pilot, we will select better production databases that fit the different use cases, and then we will do the performance tuning and see how those tools help us.

The one thing that I'm uncertain about that might be important would be the monitoring and performance tuning capabilities. Since we do have a lot of other tools and experience with that, we might find that Era doesn't quite cater the same way, or we might find it actually does better. I'm not sure at this point.

The biggest lesson that we've learned is that being able to automate almost 90% of the provisioning process is something that we never thought would be possible, mainly because there are so many different nuanced things that you have to do when you provision the database server. We tried to do manual scripting with PowerShell, which didn't always go as planned. But with the provisioning scripting that Era gives us, we finally have an option for a tool that will automate a lot of the stuff that we do, which means that in turn, we can focus on the important things.

The one piece of advice I would give for anybody who is considering this product is to look at your data storage profile, and see how many different database vendors and database engines you use. If it's anything more than one then definitely, go for Era. It makes life for managing these different types of database engines a lot simpler.

Because I haven't been using Era for at least a year, I don't really know if there are any issues that we haven't seen that might pop up. So far, everything looks good, but over time, little niggles may appear. Considering this, I cannot say that it's a perfect solution at this point.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

When there are multiple teams, there are frequent new requests for copies of production databases. The load is usually on the DB team to create and maintain the copies. We can optimize the process and make it more efficient using the solution. It is one of the main benefits.

We have seen an improvement in the platform management. The effort required to manage a cluster is reduced. It is our main benefit. The skill level needed to manage a Nutanix cluster is less than that of a vSAN cluster. We can have a less expensive resource managing a Nutanix cluster.

The solution enables us to speed up the creation of new instances. A DBA might take a day or two to do it, but the solution can help us do it in half an hour. The snapshot feature is useful.

The tool cannot be sold without a Nutanix platform. There is a dependency. We can sell the product only to a Nutanix customer. Convincing a customer to choose Nutanix is a huge project. It might take two years. We faced some performance issues with Nutanix. Nutanix has limitations. We worked with the support team to overcome the limitations.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The support is pretty good.

Positive

The initial setup is complex. Moving a database to Nutanix and convincing the stakeholders takes time. Validating the business case and realizing the benefits is a very time-consuming process.

The tool is expensive. We need to work more on the business case. It's not a solution for everyone. It has its own niche market. The product is available as a bundle.

I recommend the solution to medium and large enterprises. It makes sense if a customer has multiple instances and has internal dev teams. It will not make any sense if it's just a production database. The product is suitable if an organization has a CI/CD pipeline to develop new functionality. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I sell this solution to customers. The use case is for database provisioning from the snapshots. We are using the latest version, 2.0.

It's deployed on-premises.

Requests come from the application team, and they need to have yesterday's data to give to the analysis team. We need to restore the databases, which is a time-consuming process. AI has been deployed within Nutanix. It's very easy to provision the machine within minutes of the application orders. They can hand those over and work along with the AI team to get the data available quickly for business analysis.

It should be able to be consumed by other customers because only the enterprise cloud customers are able to buy this software.

From an architecture perspective, Era cannot be deployed onto any other platform apart from Nutanix.

More databases should be integrated quickly. If any VM is running on the Nutanix platform, like Oracle or SQL, and we right click that VM, from there we should be able to add the database into Era rather than go on the no-Era console.

I have been using this solution for more than two years.

It's stable.

It's scalable. The software depends upon Nutanix. If you have the resources, like memory, then it's definitely scalable.

Technical support is slow sometimes. Because the talent is not available in India, sometimes we need to accelerate calls to the US or another region, which takes time.

I would rate technical support two out of five.

Setup is very simple. The amount of time it takes to deploy depends on the requirement. If it's a Microsoft SQL database, it doesn't take more than a day to deploy. 

One person is more than sufficient for deployment and maintenance.

Not everyone can afford it. It's a bit expensive, so the price has to be improved.

I would rate this solution six out of ten.

I use Nutanix to provide managed services for one of the biggest telecom providers. 
We proved managed services to the customer, including the platform and service as well as VM as a service.

It's a vast solution, so it depends on what the customer needs. We provide the Kubernetes cluster, and if you want a particular server, we provide the files. We use Karbon, Era, AHV and Prisim Central. We are also now in the process of testing out the VDI feature as well.

They recently came out with a new version, so there are some new features that I still need to try. So it's hard to say what should be improved. Also, I don't have any essential databases that I'm managing with Era, so I'm not really close to the DBAs and don't know what they need or where there is still room for improvement. The best ones to answer this question are the DBAs because Era is basically designed for the databases. 

I've been using Nutanix Era since 2012, so almost nine years.

Era is a stable solution.

Era is scalable.

I would rate Nutanix technical support eight out of 10. I think they're helpful, but maybe they need more technical staff. Their response was slow once, but that was the only time it happened, so I'm not sure. I don't want to judge them. Maybe I'm wrong.

On the Nutanix side, it's very easy. They can enable a section in seconds or minutes. But on my side, I have some network dependency here and there, it took longer for me. My environment is a little different, so it took me longer. But from Nutanix itself there isn't much to do.

I would rate Nutanix Era eight out of 10. I would recommend it to anyone who is considering it. It has some very good features. It really works with multiple silos in terms of infrastructure, database updates, and migration. So many things are easy with Era. You really don't need to follow the cycle that DBAs usually follow. It's really fast also. It really speeds things up.