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.
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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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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.
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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"
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.
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.