Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We run our primary data center on Nutanix. We run an on-prem Exchange environment along with multiple application servers. We have about 200 VMs and about 20TB of raw storage on the appliance.

Simplified management: It provides us more time to work on other tasks. We were able to replace two SANs and two blade centers with a single 2U Nutanix appliance.

Simplified storage management. Therefore, we do not have to rely on others to manage storage, which removes wait times in getting tasks done.

Extra features should not be so expensive. We would love to be able to use or even just try some of the extra features without having to buy them. Buying those features is just as expensive as buying vSphere licenses, so the cost savings is nullified.

Processes that used to take hours to complete have been drastically improved due to the nature of Nutanix. Data locality means things complete faster and our users now have more time to complete their work rather than having to wait for a certain job to finish before they can continue on.

• One-Click upgrades
• Software defined storage
• The capacity savings

One click upgrades are an absolute godsend. Being able to upgrade our entire cluster with the click of a button during business hours with zero downtime has made managing our infrastructure so easy. Previously, we had to schedule downtime to perform upgrades on our infrastructure and that quickly becomes painful and time consuming.

Because the entire Nutanix system is contained in a VM, we don't have to reboot physical hosts to apply patches. It's just a restart of a guest VM and we're off. This also brings amazing space saving capabilities (given that it's software-defined) across the hot and cold tiers by way of compression, deduplication, and erasure coding.

Given all the amazing features, there is room for improvement around the support ability of different hypervisors. Sure, Nutanix now supports four hypervisors but they are not all at feature parity. If you want all the benefits of Nutanix, you need to be on AHV. For some businesses, that's just not an option. I find we miss out on some of the great features due to being on ESX.

No issues at all with stability.

No.

Customer Service:

This is where my experience varies. Previously, I had deployed Nutanix with Dell hardware, and currently, I have deployed Nutanix on Nutanix hardware.

Customer support through Nutanix is excellent. Regardless of the level of priority, I usually hear back from Nutanix support in less than three hours from when I submit a support request.

With Dell kits, you have to call Dell support first who then liaise with Nutanix support. So, there is a bit of a breakdown and resolution that takes a little longer because you don't have direct access to Nutanix support.

Technical Support:

Again, my experience varies.

Nutanix support, amazing. I can't fault them. They know the product and can resolve your issues fast.

Dell support, not as great. Mainly because they aren't Nutanix employees. It's because of this that they aren't as knowledgeable and have to hand off to Nutanix support for more complex issues.

In both organisations where I worked, which migrated to Nutanix, we were on traditional 3-tier architecture. We switched over to Nutanix for the ease of management, scalability, and performance gains. In both organisations, we were on aging hardware and it needed to be refreshed.

It is very straightforward. The deployment process is extremely easy thanks to the 'foundation' process. A simple WebUI that guides you through the deployment process and imaging of your new nodes.

Both implementations were done by me. With the ease of deployment, I didn't feel it necessary to engage a vendor.

I haven't calculated it yet.

While cost may seem higher than your traditional 3-tier architecture, you need to look at the bigger picture. You're not just buying hardware here. You're buying a complete environment that not only is super-fast to deploy, it's amazingly easy to manage. I find that I'm spending less time managing my infrastructure and more time listening to the businesses needs and tailoring our infrastructure to their needs.

We looked at SimpliVity and VMware vSAN.

The consolidated storage: no need to use central storage that has a performance penalty. For example, while using central storage that enables file-sharing NAS services & SAN services, when one VM had an IO overload, all the VMs in the same data store in the VMware environment on the same LUN suffered from I/O latency. Now, in the new consolidated storage, this does not happen.

We can deploy VM as a service & we can perform updates on the nodes without downtime in a very simple, direct way.

The improvement needed is for elastic clusters, meaning the ability to depart and join nodes in an automatic way. We have a laboratory that needs to perform bare metal tests and therefore needs to unjoin the nodes from the cluster and later on join them back.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, but we are about to add another node to the cluster and it should be a very simple task .

Technical support is very good, and good with responsive time.

We were using central storage and suffered from bad performance latency.

Initial setup was straightforward.

At the time we checked, this solution was unique.

Perform resizing. Check the needs and deploy only what is needed. Check the memory DIMMs and make sure for the price you get, you have free DIMMs.

We Added a dedicated switch for this cluster so that all layer 2 networking will be in this switch and separate from the main routers.

There are many features that catch our attention. The most valuable one is it’s distributed file system with the data protection and storage auto tiering. This feature promise a high redundancy for our data while maintaining the high IOPs for traffic intense applications.

For the business it saves our rack space and maintenance costs, which is also applicable to most of our customers. The simplicity of the management interface of the product has increased the efficiency of our IT administrators, and given us a better planning direction for our storage and server expansion.

The product is quite promising, and is sufficient for daily IT/business operations at the moment.

We have been using this product for two to three years, since it first launched in Malaysia in 2012.

No issues encountered.

The good thing about Nutanix is that there is zero-downtime for expansion, and the process is just too simple to be believe.

Nutanix also supports the dynamic expansion, with which different models can be mixed and matched for future expansion.

I would say their support team is awesome. Nutanix hires a multiple-skill set support engineers, which can solve my issue no matter what system I am using on the box. Also, their respond time is an ace.

Previously, we were using traditional servers, and storage products, which are common in the market. This product has no SAN concept, which totally simplified the whole architecture of server storage, and is a big credit to them. It was this that led us to this product.

I would say that the deployment is quite simple and straightforward. In fact, it was very straightforward, they have their own installation VM which has just a few simple steps to get the whole system up. It took no more than one hour.

We have done the implementation a lot as we are a vendor. My advice is simple, just following the setup guide will do, there are no hidden steps inside.

I would encourage you to try out this product. I believe you will not regret it because of the stability of the technology, and the other benefits you can get from Nutanix.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is used for server virtualization. It replaces the three-tier traditional architecture.

The most valuable feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it has centralized management.

The GUI of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be improved that can be done from the OEM side. It's a very basic stable web browser that they're using. It is not very inclusive.

Nutanix should provide its customers with the documents for predictive workload analysis and other performance metrics, such as compression. This would be a great benefit.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately one year.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a stable solution.

I have found Nutanix Acropolis AOS to be scalable.

We have two to three clients using this solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. The time for the process depends on the size of the cluster.

I rate the initial setup of Nutanix Acropolis AOS a three out of five.

Our customers typically do the implementation of the solution themselves. They have the trained resources. I personally have not had the opportunity to do the implementation.

One engineer and one architect are required to do the implementation.

The price of the license for Nutanix Acropolis AOS is less expensive than the competition. There is a favorable cost saving. Having only the need to deal with a single vendor, the management of the customer's entire stack is cost-effective.

I believe Nutanix has started a subscription-based model. We will need to pay separately for parts of Nutanix. However, I have not explored it and it could still only be a non-subscription-based model at this time.

I would rate the price of Nutanix Acropolis AOS a three out of five.

We evaluated other solutions before choosing Nutanix Acropolis AOS, such as VMware VxRail.

When comparing Nutanix Acropolis AOS to VMware VxRail, in terms of features, VMware VxRail provides a lot of options, such as integration with block storage and other products. The GUI for the browsing product or the console for the VMware VxRailis very simple.

A lot of people have VMware expertise, they don't feel many challenges while using the VxRail platform, it's quite easy. However, the cons with VMware is that you need to buy a license for every feature that you add on. It's not a full-fledge bundle license. Many features have extra costs and licenses.

I would recommend this solution to others.

My advice to others is to do some kind of POC, try and test it themselves before selecting any HCI solution. They should not purchase anything until they have confidence in their abilities. I would suggest they use a demo to receive some hands-on experience, evaluate, and compare both the technologies simultaneously, and then decide which is best suited for purchase.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a six out of ten.

We migrated over our AD finance applications, HR applications, DFS, et cetera. We used the product for a whole lot of different purposes. 

One of the nicest features was the migration tool. Being able to take any application and migrate it over even while it was in use, and then cut it over without any downtime was very helpful.

Everything ran pretty smoothly, from what I recall.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. 

The solution was very stable. 

I found the pricing to be very reasonable.

I'd always like to see a bit of a drop in pricing. Everyone would. 

I only worked with the product for roughly a year, and it worked well. I don't have any thoughts on improvements at the moment.

We did have some integration issues. We did have a problem with a Veeam integration. We ended up using Wasabi instead.

I used the solution at my previous job, less than a year ago. I only worked with it for about a year.

We found the stability to be quite good. Any performance issues were tied to our network and bandwidth, however, we resolved all of that. It was never an issue with the product itself.

We never hit the edge of the scalability potential. My understanding is that the product is plug-and-play. We could add more modules if we needed to. The expansion was never an issue. 

We had around 200 users at our organization using the product.

We did use technical support when we needed help with a couple of questions regarding our forest environment. We were a little outdated in some areas. They were a very useful resource.

They had used VMware and it became outdated and we couldn't get it to the latest version. The pricing was also a little high, which was why they wanted to switch.

The initial setup was not overly complex or difficult. It was a straightforward process and easy to manage. 

The pricing is very reasonable. In contrast, VMware's Smartnet contract is rather expensive.

I was just a customer and an end-user. I used it at my previous organization.

We were using the latest version of the solution at the time, however, I am unsure of the exact version number. It was a brand new install. The included new servers and a new environment. Everything was new. 

I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others. It worked well. Installation was quick or very helpful. Management was pretty streamlined. And most importantly, that migration tool was very impressive.

AOS is one of the most important parts of the Nutanix HCI solution. AOS provides a few main features - managing VMs (Hypervisor), one managing interface (Prism), distributed storage fabric with software-defined features instead of hardware implementations such as RAID.

Over the years, the Nutanix Platform capability set and services have grown substantially. Over the years, this has evolved to simplify and abstract virtualization, automated upgrades and operations, and much more.

We deployed Nutanix three years ago and now we see all benefits of AOS. It doesn't require a lot of engineers for managing the virtualization environment. We see a nice reduction of using storage resources. AOS can run any workloads such as business-critical DBs. Also, AOS provides great features for backup and DR.

AOS optimizes capacity utilization without hurting performance or resiliency by dynamically compressing, deduplicating, and erasure coding blocks of data based on potential capacity savings as well as application access patterns.

Building a beautiful, empathetic and intuitive product is core to the Nutanix platform and something we take very seriously.

• DSF with reduction techniques - more storage resources.
• Resiliency - self-healing, handling a failure.
• One manage interface - Prism. It's easy to use and monitor your workloads.

Monitoring:

• Anomaly Detection
• In the world of IT operations, there is a lot of noise. Traditionally, systems would generate a great deal of alerts, events, and notifications, often leading to the operator either a) not seeing critical alerts since they are lost in the noise or b) disregarding the alerts/events.

Nutanix Software Upgrade:

• Performing a Nutanix software upgrade is a very simple and non-disruptive process.

Nutanix should improve AHV to support migration VMs between clusters and storage containers. Migration between containers is possible, but it requires shutting down the VM. The procedure is long and there is no migration between clusters at all.

By and large, I have nothing more to add, but if we talk about what I have listed, then these functions would greatly facilitate the operation of Nutanix HCI.

I hope they will fix this soon, although I have been waiting for this for a long time.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for three years.

VMware. 

VMware vSAN.

• Storage snapshots and replication
• One-Click upgrades

I can now do upgrades during work hours with One-Click upgrades. I click an upgrade and walk away. I have never had an issue.

Lowering the replication window.

Two years.

Deployment was less than half a day for eight nodes.

Yes, there was a bug with the new Intel chipset, but working with support, they quickly were able to issue an updated BIOS. Even with this issue, we had no downtime

None, scaling up is easy with Nutanix.

10 out of 10. We have been impressed with their level of service during any case we have had to open.

10 out of 10. We have been impressed with their level of service during any case we have had to open.

I have used UCS with NetApp in the past. Nutanix makes keeping things up-to-date much easier.

It is very straightforward, two clusters in four hours.

We used a vendor team. Even though it was their first deployment in production at the time, they were on point!

Pricing is above average, but it is worth it.

IBM, UCS, and NetApp.