Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Apr 4, 2022

We performed a comparison between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions say that their initial setup is straightforward.
  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability and scalability. Nutanix Acropolis users say it is a high-performing, user-friendly, comprehensive solution. Several reviewers write that they would like to see improved integration options. VMware vSAN users say the solution has good deduplication and compression abilities. A few VMware vSAN users mention that they would like to see better storage capacity.
  • Pricing: Some Nutanix Acropolis reviewers feel that the price is fair while others feel it is too high. VMware vSAN reviewers say it is an expensive product.
  • ROI: Reviewers of both solutions report seeing an ROI.
  • Service and Support: Nutanix Acropolis users report being very satisfied with the level of support they receive. Most VMware vSAN reviewers are satisfied with the level of support they receive but some users mention a slow response time.

Comparison Results: Nutanix Acropolis is the clear winner in this comparison. In addition to being a powerful and reliable product, it is easy to deploy, has excellent customer support and a significant ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: May 2023).
706,951 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Which solution performs better: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure or VMware vSAN?
Answer: Any HCI solution would be great and have pros and cons, depending on your use case, comfort level, IT support, and system integrator who would support the solution for your business need. This is similar to how we feel comfortable using Proxmox VE's built-in Ceph Software-Defined Storage to deploy HCI.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts.""StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software.""The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection.""Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn.""In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems.""VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage.""The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business.""It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"This is a complete, very user-friendly product.""Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, it is a great platform.""Nutanix Acropolis AOS is flexible and has helped people to work from home during the pandemic.""The most valuable feature I have found to be the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).""One of the most valuable features is the One-Click Upgrade. When I need to update the system, I do it with one click. This product is amazing because everything is easy to manage, from network management to snapshots.""One of the main features of the solution is that it works on many hypervisors. It is a big advantage. Additionally, the solution is compatible with VMware and Hyper-V, and the management interface, which is called Prism, is very intuitive and user-friendly.""I have found the solution to be stable.""It offers very useful data protection."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pros →

"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization.""The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system.""VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products.""The ease of use is great.""Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier.""VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good.""Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware.""I have found that the multi-homing feature is very valuable in VMware vSAN. It is an easy-to-use solution."

More VMware vSAN Pros →

Cons
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example.""I would like to see improvements in the documentation area.""I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode.""Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users.""The console is something that I believe could be enhanced.""StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions.""Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer.""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."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"Setup can be a little difficult""Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by adding some NAS features, similar to the ones that are available in the NetApp solution.""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.""Notifications could be improved as they're not currently very useful.""It would be ideal if it was more secure.""Limits on increasing space with the inability to have or attach external storage.""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.""There is a feature that exists used for disaster recovery, but it requires an extra license. It should be included with the regular normal standard license."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Cons →

"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture.""One area that could be improved is the management feature.""It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring.""The only thing that can be improved is the cost.""It could be cheaper.""When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components.""As no product is 100% perfect, the price for VMware vSAN could still be improved, though it is good when compared to some of its competitors.""The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."

More VMware vSAN Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost."
  • "We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."
  • "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 →

  • "This solution is expensive. Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs."
  • "I feel the pricing to be reasonable."
  • "In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."
  • "The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required."
  • "For a classical node plus storage solution, the price is higher."
  • "It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models."
  • "We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually."
  • "This solution requires the purchase of a license."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    EDWIN ALBERTO ZAPATA LINDARTE
    Avigayil Henderson - PeerSpot reviewerAvigayil Henderson
    User

    Hello Edwin, I am posting this answer on behalf of Daniel Wetter, one of PeerSpot's community members: "Hello, Edwin, first, it would be good to receive more information about your needs and concerns. Would you like to use existing local storage equipped with your Hypervisor servers, it seems you maybe already running on ESXi? Do you already earn fibre channel switches? How fast is your current network? Would you like to easily expand your storage environment? How fast should your storage perform, GB/s , IO/s , average response time / ms (ns)? .. and so on…. Maybe also other HCI Storage vendors like DataCore could gain additional efforts. What is your environment like? Do you need a kind of block storage or maybe you already got S3 aware/ready applications like SAP, document management systems, structured unstructured file services, big data files, databases…. All these topics and a lot more … were needed to give you a good for your special needs a related answer. With such a globalized question, you will earn/receive suggestions and opinions, but not an answer which fits your needs. Maybe my above little questionnaire will help you a little bit. Best regards Daniel"

    Quincy Johnson - PeerSpot reviewerQuincy Johnson
    Real User

    Both can get you the performance you might want, however, you should also consider what else you get with the solution. For Nutanix, you're stuck on Acropolis if you start with that. It would be best to run either VMware or Hyper-V on top of that so migration isn't a gym show, plus the renewal cost will be very high.


    vSAN is a fine option, just ensure it is designed well with enough nodes to tolerate any amount of disk failure.


    Both options have their unique value but the most important thing is the data. You'll need data protection solutions like Veeam, Nakivo, or Zerto. 


    For an all-in-one high-performance solution with built-in data protection consider HPE SimpliVity with VMware. You'll also likely buy fewer nodes than the others with SimpliVity.

    Yves Sandfort - PeerSpot reviewerYves Sandfort
    Real User

    In the early days, Nutanix had the better solution, by now especially when you use a vSphere hypervisor I would go with vSAN for better integration and with ReadyNodes no complex config anymore. Also, I had several customers who complained that Nutanix got very expensive on the first renewal vs. massive initial discounts, however, I can't judge if that is true.

    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:While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We… more »
    Top Answer:We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
    vSAN
    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.

    VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

    VMware vSAN Features

    VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
    • Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
    • Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
    • High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
    • Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
    • HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
    • Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

    VMware vSAN Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 
    • Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 
    • Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
    • Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 
    • Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

    PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

    A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

    Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

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    Learn more about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
    Learn more about VMware vSAN
    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.
    Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
    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%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Educational Organization9%
    Government8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization20%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Government8%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    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 Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise50%
    Buyer's Guide
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware vSAN
    May 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
    706,951 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 1st in HCI with 80 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 60 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware vSAN report.

    See our list of best HCI vendors and best Cloud Software Defined Storage vendors.

    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.