Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We are hosting many companies' IT. We provide IT services for our customers.

In terms of its version, I am not a system owner, so I don't know, but I guess we are regularly updating to the latest version.

Its low maintenance is a key feature. It is easy to install, upgrade, and scale by adding more blocks. 

Compute analysis is really easy. It takes hours instead of days.

The self-service side of the product needs to be improved. We should be able to add two-factor authentication and more security layers to it.

We would also like more tiering of the storage if that's possible.

The company has been using it for about two years.

Its stability and performance depend on what kind of hardware you put in the nodes. Its performance is average. It doesn't have high performance on the storage side, but it is good enough for mainstream users.

It is really scalable. It is too easy to scale. We have around three people who use it right now.

We didn't have any issues that we had to escalate to their technical support.

We are using Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct. I don't know if it can be called hyper-converged, but it is almost hyper-converged. VMware with vSAN is also hyper-converged, but we're using it without the NSX module, so it is not a software-defined network. It is semi hyper-converged for me. As compared to these two, Nutanix is easier to use and easier to manage. It is more complex to get VMware and Hyper-V up and running than Nutanix.

It was really straightforward. We were up and running in hours. It was really easy.

Its deployment was handled internally.

Its licensing model is easy, but the bad thing is that we need to pay for the whole capacity at once. With VMware vSAN, we only have to pay for the capacity that we are using, which is not the case with Nutanix. So, we have more overhead for the licensing cost with Nutanix.

I would advise talking to Nutanix to get the right hardware from the start and only buying certified hardware. You can use the Nutanix capacity planning information that exists to get the right sizing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

It is primarily used as our data management application. It is for data management and storage.

It has greatly reduced our footprint because it is all-in-one. It is a hyper-converged technology. So, in a way, it reduces our server room footprint and provides ease of management.

It is all-in-one. The compute processing, storage, and network altogether make it convenient. We don't have to have different modules for expansion.

They have improved over the years. They can probably improve more of their software offerings or their innovative upcoming technology.

I would like to see them utilize the spare storage that they use as a redundant space. I feel that now a lot of resources are wasted just for standby purposes because we are using data protection. Instead of utilizing those resources only when something happens, they can have an alternative so that we can utilize these resources all the time.

I have been using this solution for the past two to three years.

It is stable.

I believe there is no limit to scalability. The only weak point is that Nutanix is basically a software company. They are very dependent on the hardware and vendor, and because the hardware is always moving ahead quite fast, they are having difficulty in catching up with the technology. If I'm going to scale my current Nutanix cluster, I may have an issue with the newer hardware because it may not be compatible with the older hardware that I already have. That is one of the issues we encountered, but we still manage to sort out the licensing and the hardware requirements with our partners and Nutanix.

In terms of usage, basically, our whole company uses it because it is our central data storage. It is being used quite extensively. We upgraded just recently.

Their technical support is good. Their communication is good, and their technical knowledge is good. The time they take to get back to us is also good.

We were using another solution. I believe we switched because Nutanix provides the failover capability for RPO and RTO. It means RPO and RTO are close to zero because we have the failover data protection from Nutanix as well.

I have support from vendors, so it was not too complex for us. We actually enjoy a good supporting and working relationship with Nutanix.

It was actually quite a straightforward implementation because it was a brand new setup. The migrations were done by our application team and infra team. The complex portion was that they are very dependent on how the network was being set up. Prior to that, our network infrastructure was quite old, so some of the requirements were not met in the first place, but we managed to sort things out.

We used an integrator. We work with a partner. They help us to deploy it.

We have internal staff for its deployment and maintenance. We need two people.

We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved.

The only comparison was VMware site replication. 

I would advise having a good and stable network base. Mine is on-prem, and I'm not sure what is the requirement for the cloud solution, but for on-prem, make sure that the network infrastructure is very stable, and there are no hops or drops from the network. It needs a very stable network.

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight out of 10.

We have multiple verticals in our company and each has its own ERP applications that are business critical and mission critical. Our company is based in India, we are customers of Nutanix and I'm the executive vice president. 

Nutanix has given me an opportunity to create multiple VMs and it's really very resilient for failures. Even if there is a single node failure, the VM gets migrated automatically to the healthy node. I can also take any number of snapshots and restore them at any point in time. The solution offers cloning and it's very simple to create a clone of any server. These are the great features of Nutanix. In addition, it's user-friendly, and in contrast with some solutions, you don't need to know about the technology. Anyone knowing the basics of VMware or hypervisor can start creating VMware, adding the server, and deploying it on the go within a few hours.

The problem with Nutanix is you cannot have or attach external storage so there are some limitations when it comes to increasing space. If you have a three-node cluster and want to increase storage, you have to add one more cluster. I can't attach an iSCSI drive as a solution. I'm hoping that the AOS 6 version will have plenty of improvements.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. 

There is a limitation on scalability. If you have four nodes and want to expand you can't. You have to buy another 3-node Nutanix box.

Technical support is excellent. If there is a critical issue, they get back to you within an hour.

Deployment is pretty easy because once the hypervisor is loaded, the Nutanix team carries out the deployment. Once you have the prism of the queue, then it becomes very easy to work on the Nutanix box.

Pricing could be improved especially with the effects of the pandemic, where the IT sector is not doing so well. Nutanix is relatively new to the industry and if they want to promote it they will need to reduce the cost.

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

We mostly provide the solution to our clients as a virtual server. 

Many clients use the solution in order to move the data center in-house or to a data center in the entity itself. It helps them reduce their footprint.

The solution is stable.

It's scalable. It's software-defined storage.

The initial setup is very easy and the implementation happens quickly.

Technical support is okay.

In Thailand, there really isn't a cloud version of Nutanx available to us. I'd like to see the cloud come to the country, and I'd like to try using it.

The solution entered Thailand around six years ago, which is when we adopted it. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is quite scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

At the time I have about ten users on the solution.

Technical support has been okay. We don't have any complaints, as the solution is working quite well overall.

The initial installation is straightforward. That said, for the first time, there may be some instruction needed, and some prep work so that you understand what's going on. However, for a new installation, it's quite easy and not overly complex.

The deployment is quick. It doesn't take more than two hours. That includes the hardware installation, not just setup and configuration.

We just need one person (an engineer) to perform maintenance tasks.

We're integrators. We're able to help our clients implement the solution.

Typically, clients pay a yearly license fee.

We are an integrator.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities overall.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and organizations.

We use Nutanix Acropolis AOS for the high availability that we get with it. The platform's extremely stable and other nice things that we like about it is that if we have to move the server or anything, it's not a lot to move and power consumption is a big thing for us as well.

My primary use case of this solution is that it helped me solve all of my use cases. I can create an integrative private cloud in a data center, create a hybrid cloud, public cloud, and near-site data recording. For example, there are lots of sites that do not have the data there so I can create data because Nutanix also has got it stored on the nodes. It takes care of storage on the nodes. I can build storage on the nodes, compute them, give the clients who already have a small data center within themselves but they do not have it externally. By using storage on the nodes in Nutanix I can give them the external.

We primarily use Nutanix as our base environment where we host all our database servers. We also host our active directory on it, our mail servers, and all of our bare-metal systems combined into one unit. Then we use Inuvika for the VDI environment on top of Nutanix.

One of the benefits this solution has had for my organization is space consumption. Space consumption was reduced by approximately 40% because if I had gone with another kind of traditional, or open-world solution, then I would have not saved my floor space. Another way it has benefited my organization is because of the energy consumption.

I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software.

On-demand scaling is the most valuable feature, I can keep on scaling on-demand.

With Nutanix, if I do three or four nodes if I look at the traditional environment I have to really figure out the wave concept. Connect wave one, wave two, wave six, wave five. In Nutanix I don't have any of these issues. Lastly, deduplication. Deduplication and erasure coding

As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface that can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I can create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as parallel execution.

I would suggest that this could perhaps be switched. That is so far the only change I would like. I would like it if they could fix the instance where you double click on a VM and it opens the VM instead of the setup.

We've only been using Nutanix Acropolis for a short time now so we haven't gone into full production with the product yet.

This product is very scalable. We currently have 60 users. One of the things I like about it is that you can add extra nodes without any problem. Something we are currently looking at for the future is to put a smaller cluster on each side, where we can then, overnight, replicate the data from the site to the primary cluster. That's one of the other reasons why we looked at Nutanix instead of VMware and Citrix.

We had only one query so far, and the support team was excellent. They came back to us immediately and their service was excellent.

We've only been using Nutanix Acropolis for a short time now so we haven't gone into full production with the product yet.

The entire setup took us half a day. We used a consultant for the deployment. The service I received from them is unbelievable.

One of the major problems with IT in South Africa is that licensing fees are 14 times more expensive than anywhere in the world.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. If they develop the interoperability then it would make it a ten.

We looked at other options like VMware and Citrix, but Nutanix was the only solution that offered us scalability and the option to add extra notes without any problems.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We deliver a lot of different solutions on various platforms, including different HCI solutions and solutions like Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex and NetApps, later HCI mile. Most of them have been on Nutanix and on Cisco HyperFlex and as well as VxRack. Our primary use case has of Nutanix has been for virtualization consolidation. We are partners and resellers of Nutanix and I'm a consulting solutions architect.

Nutanix has several feature sets that we like. For example, everything's core centralized on the UI. You don't have multiple interfaces that you have to jump between like in some other solutions. It's more integrated for the overall management of the infrastructure. The other part too which is very attractive, is the fact they provide an option if you're not leveraging your OEM hypervisor like VMware or HyperV. That was a significant cost saver for us as well as enabling us to look at alternatives to the VMware tax. 

For now, I can't think of anything that can be improved. They've been pretty innovative and have provided a fairly comprehensive roadmap. I've worked directly with some of the backend TME guys and they're very responsive and have addressed anything that's come up. However, I would like to see better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators to have a full backup recovery from site to site and from site to cloud and cloud to cloud - the full range. The cloud ecosystem for public/private, site to site visibility with a single backup product.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

From a software perspective, it's incredibly stable and portable. The only caution I would give is that since it is a software-defined solution, be careful of the underlying hardware. It's nothing to do with Nutanix, it's a hardware issue. You may have a highly available, reliable software platform, but it's on commodity hardware so you might experience more failures on the hardware because you decided to go for commodity. You need to be careful how you're architecting your solution and your application factors as you build up your data center, and not sell yourself short and get the cheapest hardware on the market to save costs, because that can turn out to be an expensive decision. 

I haven't seen any issues with scalability. Most people I know for the most part are very sensitive about the fault domains. So they tend to go off from smaller clusters. You do have the ability to go pretty much as far as is humanly possible, it depends how much risk you want to take, but at the same time the scalability is definitely there. Most systems are capped at where you can scale out cluster-wise of VMware, 64 nodes and HyperV at 64. There are two factors to the scalability equation. There's the storage within each node, which is fine and then obviously the scalability as far as CPU and memory go. You can mix and match your platforms on your favorite vendor, but then you need the ability to go beyond 64 where necessary. We do have a couple of accounts that we've worked with where they have some fairly large clusters and I think that's a great option for people needing that level of scalability.

The biggest thing that I've seen has been the backup and recovery which has been challenging for them over the past couple of years. They partnered with Beam and with Rubrik and Cohesity. They had their OEM go-to's, but didn't initially deliver a very good story for application integration for backup and recovery where they had good copy data management. Most of the OEMs are very good at backing up single clusters for local backup and recovery. That said, whenever true disaster recovery was needed and you're leveraging multiple Nutanix missions site to site, there wasn't the visibility of being able to backup or being able to have the application integration.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Prepping my environment with Turbonomic before migrating made the transition quicker and easier by right-sizing my VMs. It continues to offer great features in my new environment. 

• The simplicity Prism (AHV) delivers over other hypervisor solutions has dramatically alleviated the workload, reducing the work pressure from the current workforce.

• It has helped us to distinctly improve our organization and proved to be an effective solution.

• The level of statistical performance data that it can confirm in real-time is extremely useful. I can see what my VM’s hosts and guests are doing from a single pane of glass and identify issues before they would otherwise become apparent.

• The informatics support for this graphical software is up-to-date with the latest infographic web trends.
  

• Site-to-site deduplication needs some work. It’s not as feature-rich for a disaster recovery implementation, but my understanding is that it is slated for improvement in near future releases. 

• DRS-like functionality is also a much-desired feature slated for a future release.
• Third-party solutions are few and far between right now since Nutanix is so new considering the production of the software. Improvements should be made to compensate for upcoming software and solutions. 
• Regarding third-party backup solutions, the only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex, and requires intensive vendor training. We opted to use the built-in snapshot replication options from Azure.

Consider purchasing Turbonomic with or before Nutanix. They pair and play well together.

If you do use Turbonomic before going with Nutanix, make sure the company knows you intend to move to Nutanix. This ensures you license the proper features.

Do not dismiss Nutanix too hastily over one little feature or another. They are advancing, and it is worth your patience. The value brought in from simplicity, support, and time savings is worth a consideration. 

The features that are most valuable to our company would be the ease of use and configuration. The Nutanix software automatically balances and vMotions the VMs to other nodes on the cluster as resources are needed. The Nutanix Cassandra intelligently moves around the metadata as needed. it’s practically a set it and leave it product.

Our whole infrastructure is maintained by two people. This is how simple it is to use Nutanix. Hyperconverged is the way of the future.

One thing I would like to eventually see from Nutanix is the ability to install the Nutanix OS on any hardware, making it hardware agnostic instead of depending on their expensive servers. NOS is what makes the whole Nutanix cluster work so well.

Our company has been using Nutanix for a little over two years. We decided to implement the Nutanix solution when we decided to virtualize our entire infrastructure.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Scalability is well thought out as well; you can scale out in every direction.

Nutanix support is second to none, their technical support is very knowledgable as well. Though you do pay a pretty penny for it.

Deployment is simple and does not take much time. As long as your network infrasturuture is set up correctly, creating new LUN containers is just two steps. Adding another block only takes a few clicks as well.

We had a vendor do the initial configuraiton and implementation for us. Everything was very straigthforward. The only thing is if you want to add another block (either because you need more space or more computing power), make sure to downgrade/upgrade your NOS software to the same as your current software, or it will not work.

This was the only hyperconverged solution we considered, simply because they were the most mature solution that we felt was right for our environment.