Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and VxRail compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure space. Based on my data comparisons, Nutanix has the upper hand due to its ease of deployment and comprehensive feature set.
Features: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers high performance I/O, ease of administration, and monitoring through Prism Web UI. It includes non-persistent VDI acceleration and data protection with storage auto-tiering. Its linear scalability and unique data locality ensure optimal performance. VxRail excels with finger-click upgrades, strong VMware integration, and reliable performance, offering a single pane management and flexibility in machine creation and destruction.
Room for Improvement: Nutanix could enhance its networking capabilities and third-party integration, focusing on refining replication and backup features while simplifying usability for beginners. VxRail could improve by offering better automation, enhancing the licensing model to be transparent, and refining support experience to be more streamlined for all marketplaces.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nutanix is known for seamless deployment across various environments, offering flexibility and reduced complexity. It provides quick response times and knowledgeable support. VxRail, while offering strong deployment options for hybrid and private clouds, often highlights complex upgrade paths and reliance on dedicated support.
Pricing and ROI: Nutanix is considered premium-priced but justifies this with broad features and long-term savings. Its licensing is flexible. VxRail faces criticism for higher licensing costs and complex fee structures but is cost-effective against legacy solutions regarding long-term ROI. Nutanix's ability to use a built-in hypervisor can offer cost savings over VxRail’s reliance on VMware.
The technical support from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is excellent, deserving a nine out of ten rating.
A key area for improvement for VMware would be response time.
The support is all provided by Dell, and it is quite good.
The scalability of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) deserves an eight out of ten rating, as there is no solution that is 100% efficient and there is always room for improvement.
There are limitations, such as the inability to upgrade from a single to dual CPU in certain configurations.
Scalability is easy with VxRail.
Compared to VM, we find it most stable.
Regarding stability, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) a seven out of ten.
It is a very stable and mature product, with centralized management and upgrades being perfect for us.
The product is very stable, and I rate its stability as nine out of ten.
I would suggest that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) should develop their own P2V (physical to VM) tools instead of requiring users to rely on third-party solutions.
We hope Nutanix can integrate inside our current license module.
It requires a very clean environment to proceed without issues.
The major issue with VxRail is the razoring process, which can only be performed by Dell.
Stabilizing the update procedure further would make it better.
It costs more compared to VMware due to different licensing areas.
The pricing is renewed every year, at almost $100,000 per year.
Purchasing VxRail is quite expensive compared to a simple Dell server.
Previously, the cost was higher, however, recent changes in VMware pricing have reduced it.
The cost varies for us as a large company because we receive special offers from Dell.
When technology development or devops teams request server provisioning, the setup time has been reduced from hours to less than 20 minutes.
The replication method between Nutanix clusters is a valuable feature.
Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.
Another benefit is the fully automated upgrade process, which is completed with just one click through the VxRail Manager.
The features of VxRail that we find most useful for our customers include the easy update mechanism and the support for both VMware and hardware.
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:
Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:
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:
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits
The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:
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.
VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.
VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.
VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.
VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.
If you know VMware, you know VxRail.
VxRail Features and Benefits
Reviews from Real Users
VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."
VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…”
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.
