Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

I used this for training the value-added reseller. I trained the technique on the console terms to be able to pass the NCP exam.

The fact that there is only one interface to deploy a complete solution for maximum storage is fantastic.

They have offered some new features that I have not deployed so I assume that these issues might have been addressed already, but there was a networking problem. This solution could use network improvements.

I think the next release should include a software improvement, like the ability to deploy with a cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft Azure. I believe that they are already working on this and I think that the best improvement would be to remove the storage configuration because you don't need to manage or to configure this. By default, it should take all the available storage to present the data. They should create network storage in which the administrator doesn't have to manage or configure this part. They should work on the deployment and storage. 

The stability is very good. It was actually the hardware that had some issues and that does not have to do with Nutanix. The hardware manufacturer is behind that. I don't remember having any issues with the stability of the software.

Scalability is very good, I have removed nodes with no problem. It works well when you follow all the best practices of course.

Sometimes during the most important trainings, there were 14 staff members on two internet clusters.

I have no idea how customer service is because I've never dealt with them. We managed to solve any problems by ourselves so we didn't call support.

I have used VMware solutions with server and storage on the same switch. It was the same product on the same architecture, so I cannot challenge those architectures. They are one and the same. I used to deploy HP 300 AP, which is the exact same solution from HP with the VSA solution. VMware was embedded, but from my point of view, it was a little bit too difficult compared to Nutanix.

I don't remember how complex the setup was. In terms of deployment time, it depends on the nodes. I bring solutions with ACP on HTTP and it takes about the 45 minutes and once I had the chance to deploy on an all-flash solution and it was very fast.

I did the setup by my self. I had to reimage each of the nodes to be able to produce a definite image.

Follow the best practices and check everything. The network is always the point of failure, and if you don't configure or manage the best ways for the network, it will remind you that you have an issue, or that you don't have well-prepared deployment.

I would rate Nutanix as nine out of ten because there is always room for improvement. From the beginning, they had a start-up position, but now it seems that they are going to move to the dark side of the market on the license end, like VMware. It seems like you will need a license for everything now. In the beginning, you could have everything with one license, but it looks like now you need a license for these features, another license for other features, and for everything that gives improvements to the solutions you have to buy another license for. That is not good from my point of view.

Our primary use case is to support technical applications for our IT team. We are not yet using it for production.

I think that the most interesting features are the replication and redundancy.

It is a good solution and it is easy to work on a Nutanix platform.

I think that there are several areas that they can improve slightly, including the mail servers, the application servers, and perhaps even the database servers.

If we can have certified compatibility with other companies, such as Oracle, then it would let us know that they function correctly together.

My impression of the stability is good. At the moment, we haven't had any issues.

I cannot comment about the scalability at this time because I don't know when we are going to generalize the solution. We may be able to say by next year, perhaps.

Our intention is to expand its usage beyond the IT team to other applications.

Nutanix technical support is very good.

Prior to this solution, we used VMware on Intel technology. We also have IBM IT Infrastructure with Power technology. We switched to Nutanix because it is easier to manage and administer the platform, compared to others.

The initial setup was easy, although we had one problem related to synchronization with the NT servers. We created a technical support ticket, and they helped us to fix the issue. It was very easy.

The deployment took not more than two or three weeks, including the migration of the servers. It is difficult to say because we acquired Nutanix with other solutions, but I think that Nutanix was faster. Not more than two weeks.

Our IT team will be maintaining the solution, and if we ever have an issue then we can call the integrator. If they cannot fix the problem then we will open a ticket to the Nutanix support.

We used an integrator to assist us with the deployment of this solution. They have done a good job.

We haven't measured our ROI for the moment, but the fact that everything is in the same solution will make life easier for our IT team. We won't have to call the storage specialist or the network specialist every time we have a problem. Everything is packaged in the same solution, and to update the platform is very easy. This will be our first ROI.

There are a lot of problems that occur. One example is when we update the firmware for a product, it can make life difficult for us. If we have a new disk that is not compatible with the storage then updating the firmware causes other things to malfunction. That is quite difficult for all of us. Overall, I think that we will be reducing the time in maintenance as compared to other platforms.

The licensing cost is on a yearly basis. There are a lot of features included with Nutanix that cost a lot with other companies.

We were given demonstrations of other solutions, but we were satisfied with all of the features that Nutanix offers.

We have recently acquired this solution and have done the training. We are going to be using it to support technical applications before we can generalize it, and use it on a much bigger scale.

Currently, it is not the number of users that we are focused on. It will be for technical applications used only by the IT team, which is approximately seventy people.

At this point, my advice for other people who are implementing this product is that they should trust Nutanix. It is a good solution and it is easy to work on their platform. It is compatible with VMware, and they have their own container, which is free. 

I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

The Nutanix Prism interface is the most beautiful interface I had ever used in any software. The simplicity and fluency of the HTML 5 interface gives a one-of-a-kind user experience. It provides full visibility into and management of my complete virtual infrastructure. The integration to VMware vCenter gives added value, so you don't have to rely on different interfaces for basic VM management.

As I have been using Nutanix since 2014, I have seen approximately five major release versions. Each release provided improvements in performance and new features enhancements. The best part of it is that you just update to get the new features and improvements.

I would definitely love to see single and two-node cluster setup, as well native network virtualization/micro-segmentation capabilities. These are already announced features and much anticipated. I would also love to get application visibility within the Prism management console with more RBAC capabilities.

Since July, 2014.

So far I have not faced any major issues with stability of the Nutanix platform.

Although I have not scaled my current cluster, as it is enough for my company, as Systems Integrators we have implemented dozens of clusters and scaled without any issues.

One of the best things about Nutanix as a company is it's best of class support. The support model has no support levels and the assigned engineer is an expert not only in Nutanix, but in hypervisors and other components as well. They are correctly called Systems Reliability Engineers (SRE), and deserve an NPS of 90-plus.

Yes, we were using traditional server plus storage infrastructure. As we partnered with Nutanix we decided to evaluate it ourselves before we recommended it to our customers. And it’s worth it.

Foundation of the system initialization is provided by Nutanix. They take care of the complete installation and initial configuration, while you take a sip of coffee.

Although Nutanix cannot be compared directly with any other products on market, it’s worth every penny spent. Most of the features are available in the starter version, and the license can be easily upgraded to activate or deactivate more advanced features without any downtime, cluster evacuation, or rebuild.

Yes, we evaluated a few other hyper-converged platforms, but Nutanix was the obvious choice because of its software-only structure with no dependence on hardware components.

I would highly recommend considering Nutanix for any kind of workload, whether VDI, server virtualization, databases, Exchange or Big Data. I will say Nutanix gives system administrators their lives back; no weekend upgrades or issues. The one-click feature is truly a single-click for any upgrade, including Nutanix AOS, hypervisor, firmware, etc.

We use Nutanix Acropolis AOS for many reasons, such as data protection, application, and file services. My customers are mainly in Israel and are mostly government.

This solution improves management and maintenance.

The dashboard of Nutanix Acropolis AOS allows for simple management. The dashboard has all the information online about what's going on at any given time.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by having an auto-update feature. At this time I have to update each system manually. However, I bought the standard license and I did not buy the maximum license they have available. There could be a certain license that does the updates automatically.

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

I have found Nutanix Acropolis AOS to be very reliable and stable.

The solution is scalable.

 The people that I'm serving are approximately 23,000 people and I have 300 to 400 users that are using the servers and are connecting to my domain.

The technical support is wonderful. They have helped me during deployment and are available when needed.

Positive

I previously used VMware. I did not have a problem with VMware, but when I did research I found that Nutanix Acropolis AOS would be a better product for our needs.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is very easy to migrate. You can migrate from other storage into Nutanix with ease. I deployed VMware to Nutanix Acropolis AOS and I did not have a problem.

The deployment time can vary depending on how large the server is and what kind of storage is being used. The full process did not take long.

We use the help of the Nutanix team for the implementation.

My operation is not very big and I only use one helper for the support of this solution.

We have experienced a good overall ROI with the use of Nutanix Acropolis AOS. I have approximately 400 users and I have 26 servers on Nutanix Acropolis AOS and I manage it myself. There are substantial cost savings.

We have a three-year license for the use of this solution.

For small businesses, the Nutanix basic standard license is really good and I'm very satisfied with this solution.

We tested this solution against VMware and Nimbus.

I would recommend this solution to others because of the great service and reliability. I have used VMware but I prefer Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight 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 can troubleshoot customer issues (e.g. crashes, performance issues etc.) very quickly and efficiently since we know exactly how the infrastructure should behave and what performance values are to be expected.

Nutanix delivers full visibility down to a single virtual disk (e.g. a VMDK file) and every single hardware component. Predefined health checks are executed during a support case which will in most cases already narrow down the root cause considerably if not point it out directly.

Most of our customers actually don’t manage their Nutanix environment at all since common tasks such as LUN provisioning, zoning, permission settings etc. don’t apply any longer.

• Very easy management (e.g. daily tasks and also major upgrades)
• Simple and fast to implement as a partner
• Very mature and stable with outstanding Nutanix support if needed (we are a L1 and L2 support partner as well)
• Potential to replace 80-90% of all customer use cases we see in Switzerland

We've been partners for nearly three years, and have been building Nutanix based customer solutions during that time.

Customer Service:

The Nutanix customer service is outstanding and easily the best from all vendors we work with. Usually an answer is provided within the first 10 minutes and the staff is very skilled. thanks to the high degree of standardization we are able to quickly resolve most issues (we know the whole stack).

Technical Support:

Outstanding! We get an answer usually within 30 minutes often this solves the issue or at least show progress.

Positive

Our company is fully committed to new technologies and ways to build data centers using hyper convergence, software defined networking etc. We did not (and have no plans) to sell traditional solutions.

It used to be more work about one and a half years ago. Today, the whole installation process is fully automated and orchestrated. Since NOS 4.5 everything needed is pre-installed at the factory and only the desired hypervisor image (ISO files) need to be uploaded. Then, the cluster will stage itself automatically. The size of the cluster is secondary to the implementation time except for rack and stack of course.

Since we are a Nutanix partner we implement and give support ourselves for customers directly and for other partners as well.

I don’t have any figures available at the moment. Nutanix is most attractive when comparing the full cost (TCO) including CAPEX and also OPEX. Regarding licensing, we most commonly sell the pro license which covers the vast majority of customer user cases.

It is especially interesting to see the development of customers starting to see the included KVM based hypervisor (Acropolis) which results in significant cost savings for hypervisor licensing (e.g. vSphere or Hyper-V) depending on the customer use case.

As a VMware partner we also evaluate VSAN in our lab as a possible alternative but this solution lacks many of the Nutanix advantages. I compared VSAN to Nutanix some years ago when Nutanix was purely a storage layer.

Today, Nutanix offers end to end management, visibility and standardization which offers maybe the biggest benefit. I am personally also not a big fan of the VSAN object storage approach (as opposed to the Nutanix or EMC ScaleIO block based implementations) which causes many bottlenecks and architecture limitations.

This is the Nutanix management web interface.

The main reason we decided to implement the Nutanix solution was the ease of use of the environment. More than anything, it's a completely robust software environment. We not only migrated our servers from VMware, but we also moved from vSphere to AHV and Acropolis. The change was incredible in every aspect.

Our team managed to complete this migration in just three days and all of our workloads will start to run amazingly after the migration. It is a robust environment that runs smoothly. For example, our SQL Servers increased their performance dramatically after migration.

The biggest change we had was the time it took for our IT team to perform all the tasks of administering and automating the environment. Although everything worked before, with Nutanix, things work even better, almost without administration, since it is a software that allows you to analyze down to the last detail. Tasks that were previously performed manually can be automated.

On the other hand, our development team can consume its customized resources from our datacenter without our intervention, and the Acropolis integrations via API with other environments turn the software into a complete and flexible solution.

One of the most valuable features that can be found, is the inclusion of a hypervisor for free. This allowed us to direct the investments and the budget towards other types of aspects, generating a lot of added value.

With the cost we saved on hypervisor licenses, we were able to invest in more nodes and blocks for our platform. In this way, our environment is now prepared to grow much more without having to re-invest in hardware. On the other hand, automation managed to redirect the time of IT staff to other projects, thus increasing productivity.

There are few areas in which I think this Nutanix product should be improved, but to name a few I can decide that there should be support for more languages natively. This could apply to the main AOS and Prism environment, as well as the help channels that Nutanix offers.

Except for these points, I don't think there is much more to improve.

We have used this solution in our company for three years.

While the customer support is truly incredible, for Spanish speakers it would be appropriate to have support in their native language to further improve problem-solving conditions.

We did a full migration from VMware vSphere and vCenter to AHX and Acropolis.

AHV is free! This is a great feature that should be taken advantage of.

Beforehand, we evaluated using vXRail as a hyper-converged solution, but the cost and usage issues made us opt for Nutanix.

It is a robust solution that also has integrations and a complete suite of solutions for multi-cloud environments.

I had a customer that was a bank. The bank needed to deploy eight nodes at one site and eight nodes at another. Nutanix was great. We consolidated the whole infrastructure because they had heard about the solution and they bought it straight off the top, and they believed in it. 

The most valuable feature would be the ease of deployment. That is the most significant feature for me because I've worked with multiple vendors and it's always been very complicated to install the software and get everything running. It has better software to get everything up and running.

It has a simple interface.

They should lower the price. If they did they would fall into a more competitive market because the price does scare a lot of potential customers away when they get the quote. Otherwise, I never had to call tech support. I actually met up with one of their consultants just three days before I went for deployment. It was the very first time I'd actually tested the software, and that was enough for me to go to the site and get all the work done.

There's one area in which they should make the software simpler with the deployment. If they can make it just a few steps easier, it will be unbeatable. I'm technically experienced so it was simple, but others who aren't as experienced might struggle. If they can simplify the software slightly for the installation, that would make all the difference.

Stability is unquestionable, it's seamless. It's 100% uptime.

The way this device can continue scaling is mind-blowing. I did 1/50th of what it can grow up to and the fact that it can do compression and has all of this amazing software, you don't need it to scale that high. You can just quote for a small solution and it will be significant, which is where they enter the market.

We haven't had any issues that required technical support but I would say that the technical resource who taught us the software and told us how to plug it in and how to install it was amazing. He knew absolutely everything. He had an answer for every question.

The initial setup was very straightforward. I've only been in enterprise as a technical consultant and presales for eight years, which is not so much time relative to a lot of people. The initial setup was simple for me. I never ran into anything that was too complicated. I didn't spend that much time learning the software. I just decoded twice with one of the representatives and that was as much as I needed.

They gave one week to deploy to allow enough leeway for complications, delay and whatsoever. I was finished in three business days. That goes from unboxing each and every device, racking, inspecting and setting it up to walking out of your environment and telling the customer they can take over.

We only require two staff members for the deployment and maintenance, a technical colleague and me.

I would advise someone considering this solution to go with it. We deal with multiple vendors. We're actually partners with a lot of vendors. Most of the enterprise vendors are in the top 10 but I'll say that this is the best that I've worked with.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.