We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and VMware vSphere based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"The pricing is pretty good."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are storage and hyper-converged. The solution is easy to use and the administration is very good."
"The administration console, automation, and the first cluster are all valuable features."
"One-Click Upgrade and Foundation is the most valuable feature. One-Click Upgrade makes upgrades and LCM a breeze. Prior to Nutanix One-Click Upgrade, upgrades and LCM were overly cumbersome and time-consuming. Foundation provides an easy, yet very structured, approach to cluster modification (adding or removing nodes)."
"The most valuable aspect of Nutanix is the performance of the storage, which is excellent. And controlling compute, storage, the network, and security all together in one box is very efficient for us. It gives us a single platform to manage our all infrastructure."
"The most valuable features are simple management and one-click upgrades."
"It's easy to use and has a very smooth onboarding process."
"One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again."
"In terms of overall features, vSphere's stability stands out on top. Not only is it highly stable, but we're also able to have a quick backup server on standby."
"It's much more stable than other products. It is scalable and easy to implement as well."
"With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier."
"It's easy to use, and it is flexible."
"The feature that I find very valuable is the ability to move images of virtual machines from different workspaces to other workspaces between different installations."
"Vmware vSphere is the benchmark of the visualization market."
"I have found the Storage vMotion feature to be the most valuable."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"One thing to keep in mind is that only experts can use it. It has to be in the proper hands, instead of going to XYZ people just for some cost savings. So lift-and-shift and migrations might be tricky, because it is not like a VMware."
"The solution doesn't support older systems, which can be a problem for some organizations who wish to implement it. It became a problem for us due to the fact that some of our systems are older."
"To have internal stability, we needed to network the solution ourselves. Performance depends on the application. Performance could be the lack of IOPS, memory and CPU and configuration issues."
"I feel like the flow chart and the automated processes have some room for improvement. They're nearly there, and the rest is fine. They've improved a lot over the past few years."
"I believe that improvements could be made in regards to the DR in addition to deduplication and integration with others platforms. They also do not offer opportunities for network virtualization so it would be nice to see that in the future."
"In terms of automation, I know there are ways to do it, but it's not very user-friendly. I've been working for the last three years with Nutanix and I've managed to automate certain things, but it's a somewhat more complex job than it should be. I would like to see more documentation or knowledge base articles."
"They need to improve the look and feel of the interface. The functionality is fine, but the appearance could be better."
"It does not have good backup feature tools, like having templates or being able to back up every two or three days."
"The solution could be more stable."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"The solution needs to improve its stability."
"I can't speak to any missing features. It has everything I need."
"VMware vSphere does not permit hard partitioning."
"The solution’s pricing is too high and could be improved."
"The support for the latest version could be improved."
"Higher cost than other similar solutions."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and Hyper-V, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware Aria Operations.
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Nutanix Acropolis has been specially designed to respond to the problems of hyper-converged infrastructures.
We believe that Nutanix Acropolis is more flexible and better suited to respond to the issues of very high availability.
Question one:
Does the customer already have vSphere because than I would suggest not to use Acropolis? Nutanix wants to control the entire platform with its HCI solution like VMware.
Question 2:
Do you want to use NSX now or in the future? Use VMware, because if it will be supported and it would always give issues with the integrations with Acropolis.
Question 3:
Is the growth of the customer low? Then Nutanix can be a choice if it is bigger than VMware. Nutanix is not flexible in big site setups and can give big problems with updating.
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We found the erasure coding, deduplication, and on-demand scaling extremely valuable. The feature our team liked the best was that Nutanix Acropolis AOS is core-centralized on the UI - you don’t have multiple interfaces that you have to handle. It’s better integrated for the complete management of the infrastructure.
We would like to see more operating systems included, though. If you require high-end or lots of compute, Nutanix Acropolis AOS may not be a good fit for those large databases. We would like to see better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators. The solution’s integration with other platforms could also be improved.
VMware vSphere is very good from a recoverability point of view; everything can be stored much easier on a virtual server than a physical one. VMware vSphere is very good with memory sharing between VMs and CPU scheduling between VMs. The command-line tools integrate well with Microsoft products, so it’s easy to manipulate them. VMware vSphere is very stable and very scalable.
The initial setup with VMware vSphere can be a bit complex. You need to have a good understanding of VMware. Hard partitioning is not permitted with VMware vSphere. We found there were occasional bugs and errors and that the HTML5 is not up to par. The pricing and licensing options can get expensive.
Conclusion
After researching both Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere, we chose VMware vSphere. We felt that they were more reliable, offered better scaling capabilities, and had very good documentation. We also feel VMware vSphere has better integration with other platforms than Nutanix Acropolis AOS does. VMware vSphere has very high availability and allows us to easily save our data and deploy VM machines quickly and we can create the delivery of the server with tremendous ease.
I think VMware vSphere is more mature as a hypervisor than Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). it is more capable to serve almost most of the workloads. having said that if you are talking about a standard workload both of them can do the job, but your workload is sensitive or even newly released you most properly find it will be certified to work vSphere before becoming certified on AHV.
in addition most technology providers and one of them Nutanix they first certify their solutions to work with vSphere before certifying any other hypervisor.
Nutanix is running AHV. There is no need for a VMware license.
Acropolis in itself is no product.
Do we speak AOS or AHV Ort both?
AOS is the intelligence on Top of a hypervisor making AHV Or Vsphere an HCI Solution.
AHV is Nutanix own KVM-based hypervisor managed completely within Prism from AOS, so there is no standalone offering, it always comes with AOS.
This seems to contradict the statement above, but since you can have AOS without AHV, you can make a clear distinction between both.
AHV has the advantage of being optimized tightly with AOS. Together with ESXi, you still have to use two management tools for AOS + ESXi. AHV + AOS utilizes the same prism element web management. So, integration is the biggest difference between AHV and ESXi
For AOS and ESXi the answer is quite simple: you would have to compare VSAN with AOS. Then you see, the integration of products and resiliency in Nutanix is better by a magnitude.
if your comparing features you have AHV on Par with ESXi.
AHV is the predominant hypervisor on nutanix systems deployed. Vmware would mostly be used for customers who already have vsphere licenses or want to keep their standard hypervisor.
I dont think there are stability issues with AOS or AHV. We tend to update more frequently our AHV systems than we do with VMware. With Nutanix you leverage the update process conveniently with LifeCycleManagement (LCM) integrated into Prism Web Management supplying everything from native nutanix products to firmware for your hypervisor hosts. There are also regular customer notifications to warn of detected misconfigurations in the field and check for your own setup and howto act on that. I never got anything from VMware regarding such a thing. And I do know what a purple screen of death looks like...