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.
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"Their Google operating system is more mature, so their results are much better."
"Acropolis AOS's networking concept is excellent."
"Management is simple"
"The most valuable features are easy cloud administration and management."
"Karbon is a must-have as it drastically simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes."
"It gives us a single dashboard to control multiple sites and multiple zones. It helps to do things on a single platform and data sharing is quite easy. The network and the security are easy to manage."
"There are a lot of things I really like. Perhaps the best part is taking a snapshot of a virtual machine. It's very quick. Another useful part is replication and creating a protection domain: using the protection feature to replicate a machine to a remote site for DR purposes."
"The most valuable feature is the integration of all parts in Prism Element, the browser-based management tool."
"I use the ESXi a lot for my users to create their own templates and control their own VMs without my interaction."
"The most valuable feature is the VDP Backup solution."
"VMware vSphere has helped us create our infrastructures and provide services for our customers."
"VMware vSphere has very good applications and services."
"Vmware vSphere is the benchmark of the visualization market."
"I like the capability of vMotion, DRS, high availability, and resource distribution."
"You see more responsiveness, especially now with having the HTML5 client. It feels like a much snappier product."
"We primarily use vRealize to troubleshoot any issues that may arise with our virtual machines, which is the main reason why we believe this solution is excellent."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"They require more media visibility."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"They should support more VM, which is not currently supported."
"The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates."
"Limits on increasing space with the inability to have or attach external storage."
"Native File-Services are under heavy development and Container Services just came out."
"We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process."
"I would like to see official compatibility with Red Hat in the future."
"Areas for improvement would be the memory setting and the CPU setting reserve features, which are not available on Acropolis. I also feel that the DR solution, the reporting, and the component that is combined with the Nutanix OSP need to be improved."
"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."
"Technical support could be faster in terms of response times."
"It would be ideal if they could integrate billing software so that clients can customize it directly on the virtual machine."
"There should be more stability in the updates. They had an issue with the last release."
"The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better."
"The solution is slower than other tools."
"I’d like to see a better web console or rather, transform the web console in a real single pane of glass for the whole infrastructure instead of having to go for vRealize Ops Manager."
"There are some challenges around ESXi hosts — converting them into VMs."
"I can't speak to any missing features. It has everything I need."
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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...