Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Proxmox VE comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Proxmox VE based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, VMware, Dell Technologies and others in HCI.
To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: May 2023).
708,830 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support.""I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN.""The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget.""The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free.""The install itself is easy as pie.""StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer.""The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem.""It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"Acropolis AOS is scalable to nodes and the cloud.""Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, integrates with other hardware configurations, and is simple to manage.""The stability is good. This is the number-one product in that regard.""It's much easier and faster even when you want to create a server from a template or clone.""Acropolis' main advantages are high performance and availability.""Ability to create multiple VMs.""Nutanix Acropolis AOS has very good stability.""The interface is very good. Before we used this solution, we had separate storage and switches, but with the hyper convert, it's all in one."

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"The solution is extremely scalable.""We had issues with this solution when it comes to resources. We have officially created four to five PMs and it just continues to make more resources even though they are delivered in the main post mode.""It's been a stable solution.""The most valuable feature of Proxmox VE is the linked clone.""It is easy to deploy.""Proxmox VE is simple to use and it is feature rich. The fact is that it performs,""The virtualization is good.""The whole solution is good. It has good tools that help me in managing the servers. It is also stable."

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Cons
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves.""We just need more integration with Veeam.""The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting.""The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product.""A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node.""The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved.""The platform needs to improve user management and the web console.""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."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"The productivity and work efficiency of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve.""The look and feel of the web GUI of this system needs improvement, when compared to other systems. Its hardware integration also needs improvement.""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.""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.""USB dongle-based licenses do not allow us to directly locate the USB ports on Nutanix.""There should be a little more access to Nutanix files.""Lacks sufficient integration with other vendors and public clouds.""I would enjoy an advanced mode where experienced users can leverage their knowledge to do advanced things currently only allowed using the command line tools on the CVM."

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"The documentation in Proxmox VE could improve.""A feature which should be added is the ability to encrypt the main installation.""It is a good solution, but it is very complicated in some ways. It is not easy. You must have experience in the console mode to do some configurations. A lot of documentation and YouTube videos are available that you can use to learn about it.""The process for deployment is complicated.""The management can be better. It's not like VMware where you can get all clusters on a single dashboard. In VMware, you can literally see all the VMs running in one cluster regardless of the host.""Proxmox VE can improve the management of virtual discs. For example, if my virtual disc is 200 GB and I want to decrease it is not easy. I have to do a lot of things to decrease the size of existing virtual machines. If the Proxmox VE team can make it easy for customers to instantly increase or decrease the virtual machine hard disc, it will be very helpful for me. However, the containers I can do it easily.""The virtualizer in Proxmox VE could improve.""The solution needs to improve its stability."

More Proxmox VE Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
  • "If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "There is a license required for this solution and my clients usually purchase a two-year license with extended support. The price of the solution could be reduced, it is more expensive than competitors."
  • "The price of the solution is high."
  • "The pricing is quite good in comparison with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Scale, and even traditional architecture."
  • "When compared to the competitors, the price is reasonable."
  • "The cost of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is reasonable."
  • "We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved."
  • "The price of the solution could improve. Nutanix has recently changed its pricing model from perpetual to subscription. They have identified there are challenges with the pricing model."
  • "This product is expensive, but they do have discounts. At one point, I saw that they were giving a 70% or 80% discount, which is a good thing, but maybe they should have a more realistic price and then a 5% to 10% discount."
  • More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Because I'm using Proxmox VE for personal use and it's an AGPL license project, I can use it at home for free."
  • "Proxmox is free."
  • "The way the licensing of Proxmox is structured, you can use it for free. It is an open-source solution, and you can use it for free, but if you do need support, then you have to pay for the support. So, you can use it in a way that you don't have to pay anything, which is a plus point for me. For people or users who have huge and more intense use cases, the advice or the recommendation is to always pay for support. In case something goes wrong, you can fall back on the team that will attend to your request. For me, at the moment, the cost is zero."
  • "To use Proxmox VE there is not a license required. However, you can purchase a support license, which you access, but it doesn't change the functionality of the solution."
  • "Proxmox VE is affordable. It's cheaper than Hyper-V, Huawei Desktop Protocol, and Huawei Desktop Cloud."
  • "There is an annual license to use Proxmox VE and it is approximately $90. There are not any additional costs."
  • "This is a free open-source solution."
  • "We are using the free community version of Proxmox VE."
  • More Proxmox VE Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved… more »
    Top Answer:We underestimated how many guest VMs we would have running on these hypervisors after three years, and would have bought… more »
    Top Answer:The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer: Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer:For me the biggest impact is the cost of licensing in the case of VMware despite its overall intuitiveness and ease of… more »
    Top Answer:One of the best things about Proxmox VE is that it is open-source and very inexpensive. You get all of the same features… more »
    Top Answer:I use Proxmox VE and have been very happy with it. In my opinion, it is a complete and stable solution with excellent… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

    NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

    The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

    • AOS storage
    • Flexible and open compute
    • Automated and secure networking

    Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

    • Integrated disaster recovery
    • Full-stack lifecycle management
    • VMware with Nutanix
    • Intelligent operations

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

    • High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.

    • Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.

    • Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.

    • Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.

    • Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.

    • Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.

    • Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).

    • Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.

    • Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

    The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

    • NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.

    • The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.

    • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.

    • The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.

    • Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.

    • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

    Reviews from Real Users

    According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

    A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

    Proxmox VE is a complete virtualization management solution for servers. It is a powerful open-source platform and supports two virtualization technologies - KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for virtual machines and LXC for containers. Proxmox VE has a central user interface that allows you to manage not only VMs and containers, but also storage resources, network configuration, and high availability for clusters. It is enterprise-ready and is valued for its scalability and maximum flexibility, enabling you to virtualize very demanding workloads. Proxmox VE makes it possible for you to easily install, manage, and monitor hyper-converged (HCI) data centers.

    Proxmox VE Key Features

    The Proxmox VE platform has many powerful features, including:

    pen-source software, high-available clusters, command line, fencing, a web-based management interface, flexible storage options, REST API, live/online migration, storage replication stack, software defined storage, virtualized networking, backup and restore, two-factor authentication, role-based administration, and VM templates and clones.

    Proxmox VE Benefits

    Some of the biggest benefits of Proxmox VE are:

    • Central management: To manage all tasks of your virtual data center, you can use the central, web-based management interface.

    • Unique multi-master design: Proxmox VE allows you to carry out maintenance tasks cluster wide, from any node.

    • Minimize downtime: With the integrated live/online migration feature, you can move running virtual machines from one Proxmox VE cluster node to another, without any downtime or noticeable effect from the end-user side.

    • Granular access: Using Proxmox VE’s role-based permission management system helps you define granular access to all objects.

    • Multiple authentication sources: Proxmox VE supports multiple authentication sources, including Linux PAM, an integrated Proxmox VE authentication server, LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory, and OpenID Connect.

    • Several storage options: The Proxmox VE storage model is very flexible and the web interface allows you to add multiple storage types (LVM Group, iSCSI target, NFS Share, SMB/CIFS, Ceph RBD, Direct to iSCSI LUN, GlusterFS, CephFS).

    • Collaboration with Ceph: Proxmox VE fully integrates Ceph, giving you the ability to run and manage Ceph storage directly from any of your cluster nodes.

    • Scheduled backups: With Proxmox VE, backups can be scheduled so that they automatically run on specific days and times, for selectable nodes and guest systems.

    • IT infrastructure protection: Proxmox VE has a built-in firewall that works to protect your IT infrastructure. The firewall is completely customizable, allowing complex configurations via the GUI or CLI.

    Reviews From Real Users

    Here is some feedback from some of our users who are currently using the solution:

    A PeerSpot user who is a director at a tech services company says, “The most valuable features of Proxmox VE are the ease of containerization. Overall the solution is generic, feature-rich, and has compatibility.”

    Another PeerSpot user who is a head of IT operations at a tech services company mentions that "In addition to the virtualization, the firewall and the routing functions that it provides are valuable."

    Deepen D., director and CTO at TechnoInfotech, expresses that "The feature that I have found most valuable is that its storage container, LVM, and everything else work out of the box."


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    Learn more about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
    Learn more about Proxmox VE
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
    Municipality of Trento, SwitchMIA, inDenova, Valmeita City Council, Alpha IT AS, Grupo Inversor Veracruzano S.A.P.I. de C.V. (GRIVER), Laut und Schoen, IT-Services - Hamburg e.K., KMI Learning, Dynacom Tankers Management Ltd., Serwise AG
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Construction Company9%
    Educational Organization9%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Educational Organization10%
    Government8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Government18%
    Retailer18%
    University12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider16%
    Government9%
    Educational Organization7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise32%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise57%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business69%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise16%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise53%
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    May 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, VMware, Dell Technologies and others in HCI. Updated: May 2023.
    708,830 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 1st in HCI with 80 reviews while Proxmox VE is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 24 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while Proxmox VE is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "What you might not know about Nutanix that makes it so unique". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Proxmox VE writes "Feature rich, good compatibility, and impressive fuctionality". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Sangfor HCI, whereas Proxmox VE is most compared with KVM, Oracle VM VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and ISPsystem VMmanager.

    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.