Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

As a systems integrator we use Nutanix on a daily basis since 2013 as our main, strategic and only infrastructure solution for virtualization and it's our related storage component. We can offer most use cases today on Nutanix including VDI, server virtualization, big data and mission critical.

As a system integrator, Nutanix offers a highly standardized solution that can be deployed in a timely fashion compared to legacy three-tier, generation one converged, and most competing hyper-converged solutions. This allows us to move quickly with a small team of architects, and implementation specialists for large projects.

Some years ago when we started working with Nutanix the solution was essentially a stable, user-friendly, hyper-converged solution offering a less future-rich version of what is now called the distributed storage fabric. This is what competing solutions typically offer today and for many customers, it isn't easy to understand the added value (I would argue they should in fact be a requirement) Nutanix offers today in comparison to other approaches.

Over the years Nutanix has added lots of enterprise functionality like deduplication, compression, erasure coding, snapshots, (a)-sync replication and so on. While they are very useful, scale extremely well on Nutanix and offer VM granular configuration (if you don't care about granularity do it cluster wide by default). It is other, maybe less obvious features or I should say design principles which should interest most customers a lot:

Upgradeable with a single click

This was introduced a while ago, I believe around version 4 of the product. At first, it was mainly used to upgrade the Nutanix software (Acropolis OS or AOS) but today we use it for pretty much anything from the hypervisor to the system BIOS, and the disk firmware and also to upgrade sub-components of the Acropolis OS. There is, for example, a standardized system check (around 150 checks) called NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) which can be upgraded throughout the cluster with a single click independent of AOS. The one-click process also allows you to use a granular hypervisor upgrade such as an ESXi offline bundle (could be a patch release). The Nutanix cluster will then take care of the rolling reboot, vMotion etc. to happen in a fully hyper-converged fashion (e.g. don't reboot multiple nodes at the same time). If you think how this compares to a traditional three-tier architecture (including converged generation 1) you do have a much simpler and well-tested workflow which is what you use by default. And yes it does automatic prechecks and also ensures what you are updating is on the Nutanix compatibility matrix. It is also worth mentioning that upgrading AOS (the complete Nutanix software layer) doesn't require a host reboot since it isn't part of the hypervisor but installed as a VSA (regular VM). It also doesn't require any VMs to migrate away from the node/host during and after the upgrade (I love that fact since bigger clusters tend to have some hiccups when using vMotion and other similar techniques especially if you have 100 VMs on a host) not to mention the network impact.

Linearly scalable

Nutanix has several unique capabilities to ensure linear scalability. The key ingredients are data locality, a fully distributed metadata layer as well as granular data management. The first is important especially when you grow your cluster. It is true that 10G networks offer very low latency but the overhead will count towards every single read IO so you should consider the sum of them (and there are a lot of read IOs you get out of every single Nutanix node!). If you look at what development is currently ongoing in the field of persistent flash storage you will see that the network overhead will only become more important going forward. 

The second key point is the fully distributed metadata database. Every node holds a part of the database (the metadata belonging to its current local data for the most part and replica information from other nodes). All metadata is stored on at least three nodes for redundancy (each node writes to its neighbor nodes in a ring structure, there are no metadata master nodes). No matter how many nodes your cluster holds (or will hold) there is always a defined number of nodes (three or five) involved when a metadata update is performed (a lookup/read is typically local). I like to describe this architecture using Big O notation where in this case you can think of it as O(n) and since there are no master nodes there aren't any bottlenecks at scale. The last key point is the fact that Nutanix acts as an object storage (you work with so-called Vdisks) but the objects are split into small pieces (called extends) and distributed throughout the cluster with one copy residing on the local node and each replica residing on other cluster nodes. If your VM writes three blocks to its virtual disk they will all end up on the local SSD and the replicas (for redundancy) will be spread out in the cluster for fast replication (they can go to three different nodes in the cluster avoiding hot spots). If you move your VM to another node, data locality (for read access) will automatically be built again (of course only for the extends your VM currently uses). You might now think that you don't want to migrate that extends from the previous to the now local node but if you think about the fact that the extent will have to be fetched anyhow then why not save it locally and serve it directly from the local SSD going forward instead of discarding it and reading it over the network every single time. This is possible because the data structure is very granular. If you would have to migrate the whole Vdisk (e.g. VMDK) because this is the way your storage layer saves its underlying data then you simply wouldn't do it (imagine vSphere DRS migrates your VMs around and your cluster would need to constantly migrate the whole VMDK(s)). If you wonder how this all matters when a rebuild (disk failure, node failure) is required then there is good news too! Nutanix immediately starts self-healing (rebuild lost replica extends) whenever a disk or node is lost. During a rebuild, all nodes are potentially used as sources and targets to rebuild the data. Since extends are used (not big objects) data is evenly spread out within the cluster. A bigger cluster will increase the probability of a disk failure but the speed of a rebuild is higher since a bigger cluster has more participating nodes. Furthermore, a rebuild of cold data (on SATA) will happen directly on all remaining SATA drives (doesn't use your SSD tier) within the cluster since Nutanix can directly address all disks (and disk tiers) within the cluster.

Predictable

Thanks to data locality a large portion of your IOs (all reads, can be 70% or more) are served from local disks and therefore only impact the local node. While writes will be replicated for data redundancy they will have second priority over local writes of the destination node(s). This gives you a high degree of predictability and you can plan with a certain amount of VMs per node and you can be confident that this will be reproducible when adding new nodes to the cluster. As I mentioned above, the architecture doesn't read all data constantly over the network and uses metadata master nodes to track where everything is stored. Looking at other hyper-converged architectures you won't get that kind of assurance especially when you scale your infrastructure and the network won't keep up with all read IOs and metadata updates going over the network. With Nutanix a VM can't take over the whole cluster's performance. It will have an influence on other VMs on the local node since they share the local hot tier (SSD) but that's much better compared to today's noisy neighbor and IO blender issues with external storage arrays. If you should have too little local hot storage (SSD) your VMs are allowed to consume remote SSD with secondary priority over the other node's local VMs. This means no more data locality but is better than accessing local SATA instead. Once you move away some VMs or the load on the VM gets smaller you automatically get your data locality back. As described further down Nutanix can tell you exactly how much virtual disk uses local (and possibly remote) data, you get full transparency there as well.

Extremely fast

I think it is known that hyper-converged systems offer very high storage performance. There is not much to add here but to say that it is extremely fast compared to traditional storage arrays. And yes, a full flash Nutanix cluster is as fast (if not faster) than an external full flash storage array with the added benefit that you read from your local SSD and don't have to traverse the network/SAN to get it (that and of course all other hyper-convergence benefits). Performance was the area where Nutanix had the most focus when releasing 4.6 earlier this year. The great flexibility of working with small blocks (extends) rather than the whole object on the storage layer comes at the price of much greater metadata complexity since you need to track all these small entities throughout the cluster. To my understanding, Nutanix invested a great deal of engineering to make their metadata layer extremely efficient to be able to even beat the performance of an object-based implementation. As a partner, we regularly conduct IO tests in our lab and at our customers and it was very impressive to see how all existing customers could benefit from 30-50% better performance by simply applying the latest software (using a one-click upgrade of course).

Intelligent

Since Nutanix has full visibility into every single virtual disk of every single VM it also has lots of ways to optimize how it deals with our data. This is not only the simple random vs sequential way of processing data but it allows to not have one application take over all system performance and let others starve (to name one example). During a support case, we can see all sorts of crazy information (I have a storage background so I can get pretty excited about this) like where exactly your applications consumes their resources (local, remote disks). What block size is used random/sequential, working set size (hot data), and lots more. All with single virtual disk granularity. At some point, they were even thinking of making a tool that would look inside your VM and tell you what files (actually sub-file level) are currently hot because the data is there and just needs to be visualized.

Extensible

If you take a look at the upcoming functionality I wrote about further down you can see just some examples of what is possible due to the very extensible and flexible architecture. Nutanix isn't a typical infrastructure company but is more comparable to how Google, Facebook, and others engineer and build their data centers. Nutanix is a software company following state-of-the-art design patterns and uses modern frameworks. Something I was missing when working with traditional infrastructure. For about a year now they heavily extended what they call the app mobility fabric which comes on top of the distributed storage fabric I mentioned above. This layer allows moving workloads between local hypervisors (currently KVM<->ESXi) and soon between private and public clouds as well. You can for example use KVM-based Acropolis Hypervisor clusters for all your remote offices to get rid of high vSphere licensing costs without losing the main functionality and replicate the VMs to a central vSphere-based cluster. The replicated VMs can then be started on vSphere and Nutanix takes care of the conversion. The hypervisor is a commodity just like your x86 servers.

Visionary

When Nutanix released version 1 of its hyper-converged product in 2011 it was a great idea and a good implementation of the same. Most people in IT didn't however expect that it will become the approach with the highest focus throughout the industry. Today the largest players in IT infrastructure push their hyper-converged products and solutions more than any other and while there are still other less radical approaches (e.g. external all-flash storage), it is foreseeable that they will be less and less important for the big part of IT projects. Nutanix is the leader in the hyper-convergence space but having converged storage within your x86 commodity compute layer is by far not the only thing Nutanix has done since then. Their own included hypervisor is a pretty interesting alternative for all those who don't want to spend lots of dollars on vSphere licenses. While it will not yet suit all of your use cases you might actually be surprised at how much of the functionality vSphere offers today (distributed switch, host profiles, guest customization, HA etc.) you care about is already included out of the box with the added value of greatly reduced complexity (yes I am calling vSphere complex compared to Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor).

Standardized

Since Nutanix is purchased solely as an appliance solution (even though they are only making the software on top). You are always dealing with a pretested, preconfigured solution stack. You do have a choice when it comes to memory, CPU, disk, and GPU and you get to select from three hardware providers (Nutanix directly, DELL, and Lenovo) but they are all predefined options. This allows to guarantee a high level of stability and fast resolution of support cases. As a Nutanix partner this is worth a lot since the experience we get from one customer is valid for any other customer as well. It also allows us to be very efficient and consistent when implementing or expanding the solution since we can put standardized processes in place to reduce possible issues during implementation to a minimum. Once the Nutanix hardware is rack mounted at the customer their software automatically installs the hypervisor of choice (KVM, Hyper-V or ESXi) and configures are necessary variables (IP addresses, DNS, NTP etc.). This is done by the cluster itself, the nodes stage each other over the local network.

And last but not least: With outstanding support

The support we get from Nutanix is easily the best from all vendors we work with. If you open a case you directly speak to an engineer who can help quickly and efficiently. Our customers sometimes open support cases directly (not through us) and so far the feedback was great. One interesting aspect is the VMware support we receive from Nutanix even if the licenses are not sold by them directly. They analyze all ESXi/vCenter logs we send them. If the bug isn't storage related we also open a case with VMware to continue investigating. They do have the possibility to directly engage with VMware by opening a support case directly (Nutanix->VMware) which we saw on multiple occasions. The last case we witnessed was a non-responsive hosted process (vCenter disconnects) where the first log analysis by Nutanix pointed out a possible issue with the Active Directory Integration Service. We then opened a VMware case which was handled politely but after two weeks when there wasn't much progress other than collecting logs and more logs we remembered what the Nutanix engineer suggested and there was our solution. Disabling Active Directory Integration did the trick. I wouldn't say VMware support isn't good as well but we are always glad that Nutanix takes a look at the logs as well because at the end of the day, you are just happy if you can move on and work on other things, not support cases. 

Note: I strongly encourage you to take a look at the Nutanix Bible (nutanixbible.com) where all mentioned aspects and many more are described in great detail.

Nutanix has the potential to replace most of today's traditional storage solutions. These are classic hybrid SAN arrays (dual and multi-controller), NAS Filers, newer All-Flash Arrays as well as any object, big data etc. use cases.

For capacity, it usually comes down to the price for large amounts of data where Nutanix may offer higher-than-needed storage performance at a price point that isn't very attractive. This has been addressed in the first step using storage-only nodes which are essentially intelligent disk shelves (mainly SATA) with their own virtual SDS appliance preinstalled. Storage nodes are managed directly by the Nutanix cluster (the hypervisor isn't visible and no hypervisor license is necessary). While this is going in the right direction, larger storage nodes are needed to better support "cheap, big storage" use cases. For typical big data use cases today's combined compute and storage nodes (plus optionally storage-only nodes) are already a very good fit! 

The Nutanix File Services (Filer with active directory integration) are a very welcomed addition customers get with a simple software upgrade. Currently, this is available as a tech preview to all Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) customers and will soon be released to ESXi as well. This is one example of a service running on top of the Nutanix distributed storage fabric, well integrated with the existing management layer (Prism) offering native scale-out capabilities and One-Click upgrade like everything else. The demand from customers for a built-in filer is big, they are looking to not depend on legacy filer technology any longer. We are looking forward to seeing this technology mature and offer more features over the coming months and years.

Another customer need is to be able to consume Nutanix storage from outside the cluster for other, non-Nutanix workloads. These could include bare metal systems as well as non-supported hypervisors (e.g. Xen Server etc.). This functionality (called Volume Groups) is already implemented and available for use by local VMs (e.g. Windows Failover Cluster Quorum) and will soon be qualified for external access (already working from a technical point of view including MPIO multi-pathing with failover). It will be interesting to see if Nutanix will allow active-active access to such iSCSI LUNs (as opposed to the current active-passive implementation) with the upcoming release(s). Imagine if you upgraded your Nutanix cluster (again this would be a simple One-Click software upgrade) and all of sudden you have a multi-controller, active-active (high-end) storage array. (Please note that I am not a Nutanix employee and that these statements describing possible future functionality are to be understood as speculation from my side which might never become officially available.)

We have been using this solution for three to five years.

Nutanix is a hypervisor for hardware and software that allows users to replace the three-tier environment (storage, network and compute) with a consolidated HCI. We provide our customers with Nutanix as a distributor. 

Our environment is now consolidated into one solution. This makes it easier to get support because we no longer need to go to multiple vendors and can just have one point of contact.

The HCI environment itself is very intuitive. Everything is centralized under one solution. And, they also have a fast server built-in in addition to a network analyzer.

I would like them to update their licensing to provide more features with their basic license.

I have been working with the solution for three months.

I cannot say much, because it's fairly new. But, so far I would say it's good.

I would say any HCI can be easily scaled by adding more nodes.

Technical support could use some improvement.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Installment, configurations, and performing detailed network design takes about three weeks, depending on the complexity.

We assist our customers with the deployment and train their technical professional(s).

They offer multiple tier licensing which means that lower level licensing will have less features. 

I would recommend this solution because I believe that HCI is the way to go as opposed to the three-tier environment. Plus, the solution has excellent architecture that is scalable, reliable, and easy to use.

Sizing your existing environment before moving forward is important because you want to ensure that Nutanix will improve your environment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a cloud provider and we are giving cloud services via Nutanix Acropolis AOS, such as core virtual services. This is why we implemented Nutanix Acropolis AOS into our data center.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has improved our organization because of the ease of management. We don't have to deal with any other solutions besides Nutanix Acropolis AOS. If it was a three-tiered architecture, we would have to struggle with the HBA cards from the upgrade, storage area, networks, switches, and other hardware. We only need to deal with the physical servers and the Nutanix on top of it. This is why it's very easy to manage, and that is saving us a lot of time for our technical operations.

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

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.

Nutanix could integrate all of its solutions into one package to allow one implementation, such as Nutanix Acropolis AOS and the other related ecosystem solutions. You should be able to integrate them all in one step. The current method is to first install Nutanix Acropolis AOS then you need to install Prism, Era, and Flow. I would like to see a setup that implements all of those Nutanix tools at once.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately three years.

The stability of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is very high. We have only had one or two problems in our cluster over the past two years. The problems that we did have were solved very quickly by Nutanix and by our technical service engineers together. I would say that it's robust and problem-free.

In our cluster, we have more than 50 servers and as the cluster gets larger, there are some stability issues sometimes, but they are not critical. They can improve on the scalability because when one or two servers are down in our cluster, Nutanix Acropolis AOS struggles to balance the load to the other server clusters and it can take some time. In the time it is attempting to balance the clusters some of our customers are affected by the delay problem. It is not critical, but it could be made better to avoid this in the future.

We have approximately 16 people that are using this solution in my company on a daily basis.

The technical support is very good, they solved some problems we had and they worked with our team well.

The team from Nutanix focuses on the problem and they don't let us go before the problem has been solved. They are very interested in problematic cases and their resolutions.

I have used VMware and Hyper-V. We have different customers using these other solutions.

The initial setup of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is straightforward. The whole process took no more than one day.

We have added a couple of servers each month onto our platform and it's very straightforward.

We have a department in my company that handles the implementation and maintenance of Nutanix Acropolis AOS. We have 15 technicians but we only have two that handle this solution.

We have seen a return on investment because it's a robust platform. We do not have to deal with Nutanix Acropolis AOS related problems every day or from time to time. It gives a return on investment within a year or two.

When we purchase a new physical server or a couple of physical servers into our cluster, we always purchase it with Nutanix licensing. We are receiving the license from Nutanix directly and not from the vendor. In the way we're dealing, with the licenses it is a bit costly for us but as the company is getting larger, day by day or year by year, those licensing costs become lower each time for us. We are purchasing the licenses for three years for some of our clusters and for some others for five-year licenses and the licenses are still costly. We have good discounts for the licenses, but it is still expensive.

My advice to those wanting to implement Nutanix Acropolis AOS is to know the solution well before they do the implementation. They will have to receive some training about Nutanix Acropolis AOS. It's not easy to implement, but once you get used to it, it is very easy to do the implementation in the later phases. I would recommend people to get the training it is important.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight out of ten.

Everything here is virtual. We have virtual desktops, virtual servers, and two Nutanix clusters. We also use Nutanix files, so we don't have any Windows files here anymore.

The interface is very good. Before we used this solution, we had separate storage and switches, but with the hyper convert, it's all in one. I'm very happy with Nutanix.

The price could be lower.

I have been using Nutanix for eight years.

The solution is very stable.

It's very easy to add additional hosts, so scaling out is very easy with Nutanix.

Customer service and support is very good. We don't need it that much because usually everything works fine, but if there is something, they react very quickly. We also have post enabled, which means that if there is a hardware issue or some other issue, there is a case automatically created and they contact us.

The solution is quite expensive.

I would give this solution 10 out of 10.

I would use Nutanix, especially if you have a virtual desktop infrastructure and you want good, stable performance. Before using this solution, we had performance issues with our virtual desktop environment and now our virtual desktops work very well, as if we were working on laptops or desktops.

We provide server consultations and help customers reduce their footprint and begin their FTDC journeys with this solution.

Nutanix has the best virtual desktop infrastructure.

I believe that improvements could be made in regards to the DR in addition to deduplication and integration with others platforms. They also do not offer opportunities for network virtualization so it would be nice to see that in the future.

I have been working with Nutanix for three years.

I think this solution is stable.

Scalability opportunities are great with this solution.

I have not yet required technical support.

I do not have experience with the installation process with Nutanix, but I believe that it would be pretty easy - similar to VMware or SimpliVity.

Nutanix price is high because it bundles all the components into single deals rather than allowing you to select the features that you want/will use.

I live in Sri Lanka, which is a developing country, so the cost is especially high for us.

I would rate this a five out of ten.

Our primary use case of Acropolis was for pre-sales on architecting the solution. The company was partners with Nutanix and I'm a business development consultant. 

I found the most important feature to be the flexibility that the solution offers in adding nodes to the clusters. Nutanix provides a level of scalability and flexibility that you don't get with any other solution on the market. 

I'd like to see more integration with other vendors and integration with public clouds. The feature is there but it could be improved. 

I worked with this solution up until a couple of months ago and I used it for three years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable, it's a key feature. 

The technical support is not great, but it's good. The main problem is the time it takes to connect with the person you need to speak to.

The initial setup is quite easy. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We mainly use SAP S/4HANA as well as the domain controller and file servers.

I have used this solution for two years.

This is a very stable solution. 

The support for this solution is really good. 

The initial setup was straightforward and we completed it with a Nutanix partner. The installation took four hours.

The standard version of this solution is free but we are using a paid version which is billed annually. Previously with another soltion, we needed to purchase SAN storage to accommodate the storage needs which was expensive. With Nutanix, we saved a lot of money due to that new technology.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for our clients. 

The solution has a strong foundation.

The support of the infrastructure is very good.

It offers very useful data protection. It's one of the best features. 

We've had very few problems converting this solution with the iOS or virtual iOS. 

The stability is pretty good.

When we have issues with the solution, they tend to be around networking. 

When we tried to upgrade the LCM, we had issues around the process. When we refreshed the CVM of VM and restart the upgrade, the CVM would not start again. We needed to see the logs to see if we could figure out what happened and if there was something we could do.

We'd like to see a bit more integration with certain products, for example, Qlik, among others. 

I've been using this solution for five years now. 

I like the level of stability we get. It's a good product in that sense. 

In some cases, the setup could be more simple. However, it's important to view the network process surrounding the customers as this is the first problem we face when we try to implement for the first time. Once you've gotten past the initial process, the other processes are simpler. 

We have two to four people that can implement the solution.

While all versions start as on-premises, and we mostly use on=premises, we do have one deployment on the cloud.

I'd advise potential new users to get a little bit of training before starting.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten. It's been very good so far in terms of the level of capabilities on offer.