Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We are an airline company using NCI as a platform for around 20 Windows and Linux servers, including our web and data servers. We have one primary NCI platform and plan to set up another for disaster recovery. However, it's quite expensive, so we have not implemented that yet. 

We migrated all our services from a hypervisor server to NCI. Since implementing NCI, we have had zero downtime. Our servers run 24 hours a day, and we are running various application-based software worldwide. My company plans to set up a disaster recovery system to prepare for possible downtime, so we can immediately shift to our backup system if there is a catastrophic failure. However, we haven't had any issues so far. 

I like NCI's dashboard. If there are any infrastructure issues, we'll get alerts inside the dashboard. NCI provides a single platform for managing all of our databases. We are running SQL and Linux databases. 

The reporting section of the dashboard could be improved to include more detailed reporting about the servers. 

We have used NCI for the last three years.

NCI is stable. If the company continues to innovate and upgrade the product, I expect it will be a robust solution in the future. 

NCI is scalable. We can scale up sufficiently to meet our requirements. 

I rate Nutanix nine out of 10 for support. Nutanix support is robust, and we're completely satisfied. 

Positive

NCI is easy to implement. You can deploy NCI with one or two staff members. That's typically enough to deal with any issues that may arise. We haven't needed any maintenance so far, but the vendor is responsible for replacing or upgrading memory, hard disks, and other hardware. 

We have support from a third-party provider and our reseller. 

NCI is quite expensive compared to other products. It would help us if Nutanix considered affordability when releasing new products. We have an annual license and are considering extending it for another year. 

I rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure eight out of 10. I would recommend NCI to others if they are searching for a new product.

We use NCI in the transportation domain. 

The tool is simple, stable, and easy to upgrade. It also requires few resources to manage, which simplifies our work. The solution's ease of upgrading is its valuable feature. AHV, provided by Nutanix, is excellent in performance and ease of use. It's based on an open-source product called KVM, which I also use for other services.

Data protection and disaster recovery features have been beneficial for our work. With these features, we're able to create a high-availability environment where if one node goes down, another one takes over.

NCI's pricing is expensive. 

I have been using the product for six years. 

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

I rate NCI's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 1500 users. 

The solution's support is excellent.

Positive

The deployment process usually takes around a week, depending on whether you need to migrate your systems to a hypervisor environment. It can be quite easy if you already have that setup, especially with something like VMware.

For me ROI is the tool's stability. 

Reconsidering the licensing packages could reduce the price, especially for companies that may not need all the bells and whistles. Many of the features are based on open-source software, so there's potential to offer more flexible pricing options. Additionally, with the right expertise, companies could potentially create similar environments themselves, reducing the need for extensive support and licensing costs. I rate its pricing a six out of ten. The tool costs around 300,000 dollars per year. 

I rate the tool an eight out of ten. I am exploring new technologies because the market was different when I implemented NCI six years ago. Keeping up with changes is important, so I'm currently evaluating new options. I am looking to KVM. You should use NCI if you can afford it. 

It is a universal public cloud. It caters to our current usage of a private cloud. It ensures performance and security, whether on-premises or in a hybrid setup, offering us a cost-effective solution. It has enterprise data services with consolidated storage data protection and disaster recovery. We are also running Microsoft SQL Server on the tool.

The tool facilitated the consolidation of our organization's applications by combining storage and completing configurations. This has enhanced the effectiveness and availability of our applications. Consolidated storage, data protection, disaster recovery, and virtualization contribute to its commendable performance and service delivery.

One valuable aspect is its efficiency as a robust platform. It can also be updated with a single feed. Mainly, there is an ease of managing all processes. It effectively minimizes downtime with features like container management and robust networking capabilities. Additionally, the data recovery process is remarkably fast, enabling us to swiftly retrieve and restore information within a short period.

The latency needs improvement, particularly in terms of storage. The current system has complex storage issues, compounded by legacy infrastructure-blocking incident software. To address this, an enhancement in storage capacity is crucial, which, in turn, would contribute to a decrease in latency.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It’s a stable solution.

The product is scalable. It accommodates around 200 users in my company. One administrator handles the administration part.

In my organization, we used VMware, and when comparing it with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, the latter stands out for its high performance and efficient and robust infrastructure. It provides high-speed live migration capability. We migrated from VMware to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

My team executed the initial setup.

I recommend the solution because it can converge the data center stack, including computing, storage, networking, and installation, all under one umbrella. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our clients use Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for technology refresh, workload consolidation, and data-driven infrastructure.

Our clients run VMware and other enterprise applications on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has helped our clients reduce downtime.

It has helped our clients reduce their data center footprint, increase their performance, and simplify management.

Our clients have migrated their services from different hypervisors to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

The pricing model for software and hardware subscription renewals can be improved.

I have been selling Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for ten years.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is extremely stable.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is highly scalable.

The technical support is excellent.

Positive

We previously offered a three-tier architecture but switched to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for its reduced data center footprint, improved manageability, and enhanced performance.

Initial deployment is straightforward. We have implemented hundreds of deployments. For example, in one deployment, we consolidated a physical and virtual environment that existed on a three-tier architecture and physical server onto a complete virtualized infrastructure on Nutanix Cloud.

Two people were required for deployment.

Our clients have seen a return on investment using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. One of our clients was able to expand his storage without having to purchase an entirely new infrastructure for his new application.

The initial cost is affordable but the renewal fees are high.

We evaluated Cisco HyperFlex, Dell VxRail, and HPE SimpliVity. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has better features, local team support, and hardware associations.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure an eight out of ten.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's application and database performance is more seamless compared to the traditional solutions.

Our clients value Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's ability to offer a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises, Edge, and multiple hosted managed and public clouds.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure requires maintenance.

Upgrading is easy to do. Adding storage on demand is a moderate task.

We have four Nutanix clusters at different sites and we are using it as our hyper-converged infrastructure solution.

By using more than one cluster, if any node is down, the VMs can be moved to a remaining node, and that helps us to work without any downtime. A node can be moved, online, to another node, which minimizes downtime as much as possible.

Flow Network Security for microsegmentation also helps in maintaining security. For example, we can protect servers with policies between an application server and a database server.

Previously we had our own storage, stand-alone servers, and stand-alone network. For any new project, it would take us at least six months until we could provide a new server. Now, when we have a new product, we can avoid that long wait and provide a server in hours. 

We have also moved all our servers to Nutanix and have been able to eliminate our legacy servers and infrastructure.

And it keeps our IT staff informed by email regarding any error or alert. They log in and get a full view of all our servers, including memory, storage, and CPU usage. It helps our IT staff to be more productive.

The most valuable aspect of Nutanix is the performance of the storage, which is excellent. And controlling compute, storage, the network, and security all together in one box is very efficient for us. It gives us a single platform to manage all our infrastructure.

It's so easy to configure anything on Nutanix. We have had Nutanix for more than five years and all our products are on it. It's really easy to manage them. We can monitor our servers and get notified if there is any issue with a server and correct it before a problem happens.

They need to improve the look and feel of the interface. The functionality is fine, but the appearance could be better.

We have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for five years.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues with Nutanix.

It's so easy to scale out or scale in our infrastructure.

If we have any issue, we contact their support and they solve it within the SLA time. They are very helpful and respond to us as soon as possible.

Positive

We had another solution, VxRail. We did a comparison between Dell VxRail and Nutanix and we found that Nutanix is more compatible with our organization.

The initial deployment was easy.

We installed Nutanix in multiple locations: at three sites in Egypt and one in Indonesia. We have the main site and a DR site in Egypt. There are three people on our IT team who administer the four clusters.

We have had to do maintenance on the hard disk two times in the last four years. And upgrading our Nutanix servers takes one click. We have upgraded our firmware and AHV and it is so easy. It's also very easy to add compute and storage. We just click to expand a cluster and add new nodes.

Nutanix has helped us to reduce the cost of the operations in our company.

The price of Nutanix is lower than other products.

My advice is to purchase Nutanix. It will help with your infrastructure.

One of the municipalities in Istanbul uses it for virtual servers in their data centers. They have about 150 virtual servers.

Before Nutanix, our customers were using VMware with external storage from HPE, IBM, and others. They have been able to consolidate all the external data in the Nutanix clusters. That has reduced their server footprint as well as power consumption, which is important for the environment.

Nutanix has a very rich feature set and product solutions that are good for our customers. Instead of using different types of solutions, Nutanix covers all of them. That is a very big advantage. Often, to get the best feature sets, you need a lot of vendors, each one having different products. Vendor management, in that case, is difficult. But with Nutanix, everything comes from the same vendor, making vendor management easy.

There are a lot of features but the main ones are related to storage. Nutanix provides a software-defined storage solution for virtual servers.

It also has a lot of available services when it comes to infrastructure, and our customers use most of them. It provides a redundant set of data. The snapshots, cloning, and replication are all effective in helping to reduce downtime. It can replicate cluster data for disaster recovery and it provides high availability in case a node or a disk fails. Nutanix's availability feature set is bigger than that of other solutions.

They could improve the graphical user interface. 

I have been working with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for two years.

It is a robust and very stable solution.

It's also very scalable.

They are very responsive and provide quick resolutions.

Positive

The setup is automated and very easy. The time it takes to deploy depends on the project, but in most cases it will take several hours. One person is enough to do the deployment.

Our deployment is on a private cloud, but you can use public cloud because Nutanix has agreements with Azure, Amazon, and other public cloud services.

In terms of maintenance, it's easy to update Nutanix because you can download hardware/firmware upgrade sets and deploy all of them. I worked with VMware for at least 15 years. You can upgrade VMware products, but you can't upgrade hardware firmware with VMware. You need to contact the hardware vendor or support sites. They are separate things. But with Nutanix, you can deploy hardware firmware and software updates together.

It is also very easy to add compute and storage on demand with Nutanix. You can put a disk into an empty slot and, in several minutes, it's working.

In addition, you can get training very easily with Nutanix University and there are certifications. When you complete Nutanix University courses, they provide free certification exams. If I can compare it with VMware, I attended a conference and I passed a VMware certificate exam, but they didn't give me a certificate and said I had to attend a VMware class that costs about $2,500.

Our customers see ROI with Nutanix. Using it, they have very efficient infrastructures. They benefit from the reduced footprint, lower power consumption, and easy management. It also gives them efficient data storage with compression, deduplication, and easy snapshot features to reduce the data footprint. All of these things make it worth the licensing costs.

It's a bit expensive, but it's worth it.

Nutanix has a lot of products and solutions to provide a complete cloud-integrated infrastructure. Our customers use some of them, but not all of them.

My advice is to use Nutanix, without hesitation.

We use Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for SQL Server, VDI, general workload, and remote sites.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure allowed us to run our BDI a lot more efficiently, and the SQL servers worked up pretty well.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is running all of my business-critical workloads. In my area of the world, we'd have our test dev running on there as well, but we have our core applications that are critical to our operations 24/7 that are running on the solution

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together. They really help with the administration side of things. Rather than having a bunch of admins, only a few admins really need to work on it.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's LTS version needs to be more reliable. I've run into too many issues where I've found the bug, and it caused a lot of grief. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure should do more testing on its LTS version and get that straightened out.

Performance-wise, there is an upper limit on the number of nodes that Prism Element and Prism Central can handle. My two Prism Centrals are scaled for huge workloads, but I struggled with them for a better part of five or six months, where they were timing out on my admins and throwing random errors. The same thing was happening with Prism Element in our larger clusters.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for about ten years.

In the beginning, Nutanix support was top-of-the-line. When I had a problem, I would call them and get a knowledgeable engineer. As of late, it's been a bit of a challenge. I understand that Nutanix is going through some onboarding issues, and it takes a long time to get support people onboard and then get them trained in different situations they will encounter. I think Nutanix does not have enough support staff to care for all its customers.

Positive

We still have some VMware floating around, but it's considerably smaller. I used VMware when it was just VMware hosts, and I could throw that on top of Windows and have VMs.

We switched from VMware to NCI because we wanted to get rid of the three-tier solution. On top of that, our hardware was aging, and we didn't want to increase it. So we just started shrinking it down, and now the old hardware is going to end. We only have around 16 to 17 nodes of VMware left, but everything else is Nutanix.

I was not initially involved in the initial setup or deployment of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. It was handled by some admins overseas. However, after those initial VDI clusters, I got more involved with Nutanix and I did the conversions from VMware to Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's core licensing needs to have an upper limit since processors are coming out with incredible numbers of cores on them.

I wasn't involved with the original comparison for VDI, but I do recall that solutions like VMware and vSAN were reviewed.

We struggle with software licensing. Everybody's charging by the core. The larger nodes I put in, the more dense I can go, but my licensing costs are still going out.

I really like the whole LCM process in Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. The whole one-click isn't true. If I go into LCM, do an inventory, and then say patch everything, it will ultimately fail. However, it still works out all right, and we can patch the firmware, drivers, AOS, and all the nodes and do a rolling patch.

When considering NCI, the big thing is considering your entire infrastructure because you go from different vendors and different hardware to handling storage and computing. I think what Nutanix and NCI offer is far better than VMware and Red Hat.

We haven't used much on the security side with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. NCI being pre-hardened helps me a lot because that keeps the security team off my back. We do the encryption but don't use the micro-segmentation because that falls to our security team and their firewalls

I have run into problems with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, where I have an overabundance of one aspect of the infrastructure and then come up slightly short on another aspect. For example, somebody throws out a server and needs 20 terabytes of space. I buy nodes to fulfill that, but now I'm sitting there with a whole bunch of extra computing. I've tried using just the storage blocks, and I'll never do it again because it's just a waste of licensing.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) a six out of ten.

It's an infrastructure product that we mostly use to manage virtual services.

The DR solution in Nutanix has helped us reduce downtime. There are periods of downtime, intentional as well as unintentional, but because we have another site already replicated, our downtime is minimal. The protection policies have the greatest impact in reducing downtime because they help us replicate our data. We're able to do synchronous replication to the remote site and that keeps our machine ready there in case of the need for DR. We just go there and manually power it on.

Nutanix has also helped us free up IT staff. Since I joined this company, I have been the only one managing the solution. Prior to that, there were multiple people involved. The more we move toward Nutanix from vCenter, the more we reduce the number of resources needed. We have freed up almost half of the time we used to need.

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.

I also like Nutanix Flow. It is quite a control mechanism. Other than external firewalls, Nutanix Flow is a good feature to control your traffic and not allow the infra to create two-way contact with any location other than what we specify.

Nutanix Files is also good. It's a little immature but it's still good. I use it more than Windows for files.

And the fact that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a variety of cloud operating models is also significant for us. Based on the good number of application products that we are using, having multiple options is going to be a benefit for us.

Nutanix Files is a new feature and, as I mentioned, it's immature, although it's a good tool. I have already given this feedback to the engineering team. 

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. There should also be some pre-built, basic tasks that are shared by Nutanix. That would be helpful. I understand the other side of the picture, that we might hamper production, but some basics that can be shared by Nutanix, for automation, would be good.

There are a lot of things to be worked on. They need to provide more features and certain features that have been released need to be made more mature.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for three years.

There have been one or two bugs reported in the past one and a half years, but other than that, I don't see any issues with the product. It's quite stable.

It is quite easily scaled.

The user base, the people who are benefiting from the product in our organization, is more than 25,000.

As soon we have issues, we report them and their engineering team comes in and works toward a solution. Their technical support is quite good. There are times when I would rate them a 10 out of 10 because there have been engineers who have very good knowledge and who know what they're doing. Other engineers have also tried to do their best.

Positive

Earlier, we were using VMware on Nutanix hardware, but for the last year we have been using the Nutanix built-in virtualization technology, Nutanix AHV.

The switch to Nutanix was a decision that came completely from senior management. Initially, we were using a different environment, HPE and then VMware, and then we moved to Nutanix plus VMware. We had licenses available from VMware so we didn't switch to AOS and AHV. But gradually, as the licenses for vCenter expired, we moved to Nutanix AHV. Most of our jobs are done using it.

Our deployment is on-prem. There are discussions happening about moving a part to private cloud, but that's future planning. As of now, it's just on-prem. We have it in multiple locations. It started with South Africa, then we added Germany, Italy, and Singapore. So it's now in multiple data centers.

The initial deployment was slow, to be honest. Before the day of deployment, there were a lot of tasks to be done, prerequisites that had to be fulfilled. But on the day of deployment, it went very smoothly.

We started with keeping vCenter in place, so at first, it was just deploying the hardware and getting the foundation set up done. It didn't take much time, although there was a lot of hardware to add. But it didn't take not more than three or four hours for the actual deployment part.

We did a lot of planning, obviously, even before purchasing the solution, regarding how much hardware and how many resources would be required. That was the most important consideration and, in the backend, there was the networking. We wanted to keep everything on the same network. We added the hardware, the engineers helped to deploy and move things so that everything was on the same network. The virtualization technology itself was the same. It wasn't a very difficult task for us to migrate our VMs from the old hardware to Nutanix hardware. We used the basic migration tools, either vMotion or SvMotion of vCenter. At a later stage, we moved to Nutanix virtualization and we're still migrating but we are now using the Nutanix Move tool.

Nutanix Move is one of the very good tools I've come across. I've been using it quite a lot for the last few months.

There were different tracks and technologies involved in the deployment, including the networking and data center guys, and we needed to have somebody from offshore with access to all the infra. Other than the Nutanix engineers, there were not more than seven or eight people on our side. One person was part of the planning, and one or two people from the networking, server, and virtualization teams. I was part of the virtualization and server teams.

We now have one person dedicated in each region to taking care of the solution. We do regular upgrades of the hardware. It has never incurred any downtime because it's always in the cluster. One of the best parts about Nutanix is that it automatically does all the upgrades and firmware one by one, so we don't have to bother about it. We just initiate it and go for a tea break or lunch. I've done it three times and I haven't found any challenges. It's quite easy and very smooth. It shouldn't be made so easy for such an experienced analyst like me. People like me could lose their jobs, that is how easy it is.

We did come across one scenario two years back in which we had to get additional storage. We are using iSCSI technology and it wasn't that difficult from a technical point of view. We had to purchase additional hardware because the demands from those specific applications were quite high.

Pricing is not my area of expertise. But the license is quite clear to me. It's much clearer than what we had with our previous virtualization environment. The licensing is not complex to understand. I have added some hardware recently and we got the licenses added for it. That was quite simple and very straightforward.

Evaluating other products was not my call, that was also for senior management. I was asked to review Nutanix only. Before we started implementing it or the sign-off happened, I did find the product suitable. When something is new in the market, you have to get used to it and you feel uncomfortable. That's normal for everybody and that happened to me. The only differences were that the GUI did not have certain features that were in vCenter, but I think we have everything covered now. There have been improvements while creating the current version of the product.

I have good friends in the field from different organizations because I have more than 12 years of experience. I've been recommending Nutanix to them. I'm not sure about the cost part, but I'm quite sure about the administrative part.