Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros and cons

Nutanix has several unique capabilities to ensure linear scalability.

One major thing that comes up again and again is stability. Our downtime is literally based on hardware upgrades that need to be done. Acropolis is very, very user friendly. You don't have to physically have a super IT guy to manage the system. You can actually give it to a younger guy to manage and there won't be problems. And if he makes a mistake, it's very, very easy to fall back and sort out the mistake.

The most valuable features are the RBAC, role-based access control, and the reporting. NCI also provides a single platform, a single pane with a dashboard, to manage the entire infrastructure. We have complete information about overall utilization, performance, and a forecast for our platform in that single pane.

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 initial setup is straightforward.

It has centralized management. It is easy for an engineer to manage. More work goes to patching, upgrades, and maintenance. Nutanix is very easy to upgrade. It takes one click. Engineers do not need to spend additional time with Nutanix for upgrades. With one click, it will complete the upgrade and show the results. Other hypervisor solutions are not like this, specifically since you must do all the components one by one.

The most valuable feature is the integration of all parts in Prism Element, the browser-based management tool.

It's quite easy to scale, and you have the option to have distributed nodes everywhere around the world that work as one. You can also have a solution for small branch offices with only two nodes for redundancy, and that's good enough to start.

The flexibility of this system is very good. It's also faster than others, and has skilled technical support who showed more initiative than a competitor, e.g. VMware.

The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are ease of management, hyper-convergence platform, and it has robust operations.

There is a need is to be able to consume Nutanix storage from outside the cluster for other, non-Nutanix workloads.

In terms of what I would like to see improved, I would say the life cycle management. I don't know if it is because they changed to an LCM from the previous way of upgrading the hardware or software but sometimes it feels that it needs a wizard that says, "Check this, check this," telling you your options. The only thing that's a bit frustrating for me is the life cycle management interface. That's the only thing on the entire system that frustrates me.

It already has the capability to integrate with the major cloud providers but, in an upcoming release, if there is a possibility to have it integrate with other cloud providers like IBM, Alibaba, and other moderate-level cloud providers, that would be good.

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.

I'd like it to be more API-based.

It is a CentOS-based operating system, but CentOS releases security patches almost every week or every other week. However, Nutanix releases their upgrade at three or four month intervals. According to my organization's SLA, if a critical patch is released during that time, then I need to implement the patches within 30 days. If it is a standard patch, then I need to patch it within 60 days. Since that is my SLA, I cannot meet my SLA for security because Nutanix will not release the upgrade within these 30 days. Between the critical patch release and the Nutanix release, my customers say they are vulnerable and I am accepting the risk while the SLA is breached.

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.

The technology has a lot of room for improvement. For example, when they want to segment applications in conjunction with NSX, which VMware uses, Acropolis is not compatible with the competitors. The integration in the security layer is not compatible with NSX for the application segmentation that uses VMware.

The look and feel of the web GUI of this system needs improvement, when compared to other systems. Its hardware integration also needs improvement.

There are other services that Nutanix has that could be improved, but I'm not very familiar with the other services of Nutanix, such as Era and Flow. However, they seem a bit hard for us to implement and integrate with the Nutanix Acropolis AOS and other Nutanix tools. We would not dare to implement those other Nutanix solutions into Nutanix Acropolis AOS right now. The implementation of that tool could be the problem, I am a bit hesitant to implement the other tools into Nutanix Acropolis AOS.