Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We have three clusters of Nutanix. We are using Nutanix Clusters for all of our Intel-based workload. The majority of applications are Oracle databases, application servers, our file services, email hosting, etc.

The machines provisioning times have reduced drastically. The single pane of glass management provides ease of management.  Storage 

There are a lot of features in Nutanix that are different from other hyper-converged solutions, such as site-to-site replication. VM-based site-to-site replication is bundled with the software licensing. For the DR, it has the availability groups, which is one of the key features that Nutanix provides.

Its performance management is pretty good, especially the software-defined storage that Acropolis provides is pretty good.

As far as the availability is concerned, it has RAID nodes, so the availability is pretty good. In case of failure, the system automatically shifts machines from one node to another. Their failure debugger is very good.

The only problem is that not many operating systems are supported on the AOS hypervisor. They need to probably increase the support on multiple operating systems. As of now, a very limited number of operating systems and patch levels are supported on AOS.

In terms of additional features, a lot of backup solutions have integration with AOS, but not many backup solutions provide a solution for VM backup. So probably, in the next release, they can make the backup solutions compatible with AOS for VM backups. It would be great.

We've been using this solution for the last three years.

The solution is rock solid, no software issues or compatibility issues may be because we are using it over 

It is primarily a scale out solution. New nodes can be added pretty easily and workload can be divided on the fly including that of Software Defined Storage that comes with Nutanix Hyperconverged Solution. 

I am very satisfied with their support. Nutanix has probably one of the best support in the hyper-converged industry. Whenever there is a problem, they usually fix it within hours.

VMWARE and Hyper-V are good alternate solutions but if you are using AOS on a Nutanix Hyperconverged solution, than AOS provides better integration with the solution. If the requirement is to fully leverage Nutanix Hyperconverged solution than AOS is the go to hypervisor.

Its setup is very straightforward. You just have to plug in the nodes and power them up. That's it. It will automatically rebuild itself and be available. It is shipped pre-configured.

There are three variants in AOS pricing. 

The Evaluation included VMWARE and Hyper-V. The software defined features required including software defined storage, Performance throughput, scale out architecture etc which were not directly related to hypervisor selection but more geared towards Software Defined Data Center put Nutanix Hyperconverged and to fully leverage its functionalities put AOS in front.

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a nine out of 10. It is pretty good.

We use our cluster for three scenarios:

• Virtualized Infrastructure
• Citrix 3D Terminal Services
• Clustered File Server (Windows-based).

Any task with our servers which is painless because the system runs really fast.
Our users are glad to be migrated to Citrix, although giving up the local admin rights there (yes, there are some local admin users still in place), because it performs so well.

• Single click actions is definitely the most important. They were not even aware that they wanted this.
• Performance was the main point for buying it. 
• No virtualization-vendor lock-in is another main point.
• But if you ever had good support, Nutanix Support will overwhelm.

There are various areas, but all points that I could mention are under development and get to you free of charge with another single-click cluster-upgrade.

To name some: Native File-Services are under heavy development and Container Services just came out.

No, also the system does daily self-checks and comes up with warnings. Support can fix this without system downtime. Over time you learn from support sessions to fix thngs yourself. The tool chest (already there inside the Controller-VM) is really impressive.

We had no requirements to scale it yet.

A 10 of 10. Simply that. Responsive, callbacks, top knowledge, easy escalation, and fast connection to development (during our PoC-phase I had a conference with developers in a few days).

Traditional storage on NetApp with ESX-Blades from Dell. We switched because of the simpler setup and easier scalability.

Initial setup was in a half workday. This means the first VM was up and running.
And it would be half on hour without racking and cabling.

We had consultants to guard us through it although we could have done it ourselves. It is good to get things straight initially. Their expertise was well set.

We do not estimate numbers for administration, rack powerage, and such. We use IT to do our business, not vice versa. You get nowhere if you want to measure the street instead of driving on it. But I was quite firm with netapp and the blades and had no huge admin effort. The timely effort for nutanix is even less now.

Setup cost is minor, pricing is quite a bit (we have a 7-node-cluster for about 450K EUR with 2 vGPU-nodes for Citrix) but that includes hardware, software, and support. I would also license Prism Central in Pro Edition because you get capacity planning. This makes sense even for a single cluster setup.

We evaluated the successor models of our former systems. New NetApp Filers and new Blades, but the pricing was similar so we went with the better solution. We never used NetApp Vendor support (we did it ourselves with support from a netapp partner) and Dell Server support was poor (I can google manuals myself). Buying Nutanix includes superior support. You should call Nutanix support if you are doing a ProofofConcept!

Always check compatibility matrix before you upgrade to get a clear view what comes after your upgrade. I recently found that AOS 5.1.4 and 5.1.5 will not let you upgrade to 5.5.x as of now see (https://portal.nutanix.com/#/p... Login Required). 5.6 is your upgrade path if you are on 5.1.4 or 5.1.5.

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.

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.

We have a lot of homegrown applications using the solutions within the generation and distribution within the company. These internal teams that develop that software, they are primarily on a different architecture. The ones we use are Java and Oracle with Weblogic as the application server and the other one used is Lan Stack. We have been using this configuration for more than 60 years.

The solution has single-window management, the ability to create VMs and monitor their usage on the fly, and the ability to add more resources if required. There are a lot of tools the solution comes with and the performance is good.

The ability to create clusters faster would be nice to see in a future release.

I have been using the solution for more than one year.

In terms of scalability, adding a number of nodes, I find that it will not be any issues. Upgrades are very easy, I can run compatibly check and then download the upgrades that are available. It is just a mouse click.

I have been quite happy with the support from Nutanix during the past year. They have well-equipped support staff always on the phone when I am in contact. They know my architecture, subjects that are important for me, and the staff is quite conversant with the tool that they use.

The implementation was straightforward and we are currently only using a fixed node cluster. 

The pricing is fair for the package.

In terms of the solution overall, there are positive responses from my side.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a nine out of ten.

What I like best about Nutanix Acropolis AOS is its simplicity. It's simple to install and simple to understand.

As Nutanix Acropolis AOS is on the expensive side, one of its areas for improvement is the price.

An additional feature I'd like to see in this product in the next release is for it to have integration with other cloud providers, e.g. Amazon, Azure, etc. Currently, it's only for private cloud, so it would be better if we can benefit from integrating Nutanix Acropolis AOS with other cloud providers.

I've been working with Nutanix Acropolis AOS for two years.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable, because we used it in a production environment. We didn't choose a test solution, e.g. we installed it in a stable environment.

The technical support for this product is very good. We launched a lot of cases with their support team and we received a lot of help from them. They also have a support portal that contains a lot of articles that help you resolve the issues more quickly.

The implementation process was easy for this product.

Pricing for Nutanix Acropolis AOS is higher. It's expensive. This is also one of the reasons why we were looking into other options.

I evaluated VMware and Dell solutions.

I have experience with Nutanix Acropolis AOS, and I have a lot of certification in Nutanix products. I'm a consultant. My customers are enterprise companies. I have a lab where I test the infrastructure before presenting it to a customer.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is my first hyperconverged solution. The client told our team to search for other solutions, so I did a comparison among three solutions: one from VMware, one from Nutanix, and one from Dell.

My advice to others who may want to use this product is to learn first from the Nutanix University. Nutanix has a great website you can use to be familiar with the basics of the product, then you can do the certification.

I'm giving an eight out of ten rating for Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

We mainly use it for virtual machine workloads on Application servers. We want to use it for disaster recovery and the way they replicate between sites. It has already got these features, but we just haven't implemented or tested them yet.

We have just put it in, so I can't say anything about that yet.

In general, being able to patch and not having to pay for SanDisk is the best thing about hyper-converged.

We had a few problems with the foundation machine that you can use to build your systems out. We've got it working now, but it should be improved.

I have been using this solution for two weeks.

It is stable so far. It is pretty new, and there are no issues.

It is scalable. I can add or take nodes away really easily. We did that, and it works great.

It is only two weeks old, and there are probably hundreds of people using it.

They are very good. They know what they're doing. I would rate them a nine out of ten. We had a couple of different guys trying to help get us set up. One said one thing, and the other one said another thing. Neither of them was wrong, but they weren't on the same page. That's why they don't get a 10 out of 10.

We did not use any hyper-converged solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. Nutanix pretty much brings somebody along for the foundation of your system, which makes it really nice. This is one of the features we liked in Nutanix.

Its price is fine. I can't really complain about that.

Take a look at the network requirements for the solution. It tells you a lot about the efficiency of it.

I'd give it a nine out of ten because it works. It does what they say it does. It is hard to get a 10 out of 10 for me, but it is a pretty good solution. If I rated other companies I've worked with, they'd get sevens or sixes. I like Nutanix. They're doing a good job.

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

The main reason why we liked it is because of the high availability that we get with it. The platform's extremely stable and other nice things that we like about it is that if we have to move the server or anything, it's not a lot to move and power consumption is a big thing for us as well.

We are not fully in production yet and we are still busy testing Nutanix. A couple of things that it makes a huge difference in is our company's power consumption because we don't have to use computers for all our employees. We can simply put down a Raspberry Pi or a little nook, and in the Inuvika environment, everything is up and running immediately. It gives the users a lot more freedom in connection with what they usually have in a standard setup. With everything operating in the cluster, the chances of losing data is reduced by about 90%. We use this move from one site because we've got about seven sites that we are running from the one Nutanix cluster.
We can move a user from one site to another site without having to move hardware. It is very user-friendly. Another thing I like a lot about Inuvika is the deduplication that you can do on different containers. You don't have to do everything on one container or on one VM itself. 

I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software. We have found that it is a lot more responsive using VMware compared to Citrix.

One thing I've noticed is that, when you do a shift from VMware to Nutanix, it opens the setup of the VM that's currently running. If people from another site double click on it, it opens the VM instead of the setup of the unit. So I would suggest that this could perhaps be switched. That is so far the only change I would like. I would like it if they could fix the instance where you double click on a VM and it opens the VM instead of the setup. That's the only thing that's a major bother to me.

The easiest way to explain the stability of Nutanix is to start it up and forget about it. We haven't had any problems with this solution. We've done a couple of tests and restarts and we've moved VMs from one machine to another machine. We tested the availability and we didn't have any problems with that either. The performance and stability of Nutanix is so good, it is almost unbelievable. 

This product is very scalable. We currently have 60 users. One of the things I like about it is that you can add extra nodes without any problem. Something we are currently looking at for the future is to put a smaller cluster on each side, where we can then, overnight, replicate the data from the site to the primary cluster. That's one of the other reasons why we looked at Nutanix instead of VMware and Citrix.
At this stage, we haven't transferred our SQL database as of yet. We're waiting for the software providers to come in and do the transfer from the old server to the new server. All our documents and all our data must be transferred. 

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

We used a different solution before we started using Nutanix. We ran three sites on EXSi from VMware. After doing some research, I saw the feasibility of Nutanix. Not only on costs, but on scalability as well. Although I'm a big VMware fan, I've found that one only has a certain amount of time to build your setup with VMware, and if you don't do it in that time, you must start again. One of the main things I liked of Nutanix, is that I can add an extra node or four extra or nodes if needed within a period of two years.

The initial setup was really straightforward. We had a little trouble with the nicks. Also, under the software setup, it doesn't give you the version of the software. It only shows as 'unknown'. So we had to dive into the setup to find out which version it was to update correctly. The entire setup took us half a day. We used a consultant for the deployment. The service I received from them is unbelievable.

One of the major problems with IT in South Africa is that licensing fees are 14 times more expensive than anywhere in the world. This is due to the rand/dollar exchange rate. If I remember correctly, our licensing fee on the total setup was about R900,000. 
There are no additional costs. The only additional things we added to the system was Commvault for additional backup services for the cluster.

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

Nutanix is an extremely cost effective product for the stability that you get without having to install additional hardware to get everything up and running. No other product out there can compare with Nutanix. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.