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Solutions Engineer at Grainger
Real User
Nov 27, 2020
It works and has good scalability and support
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
September 2026
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for two weeks.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use any hyper-converged solution.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1439661 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at U.S. Naval War College
Real User
Oct 27, 2020
Improved our datacenter in the way of availability, scalability, and speed
Pros and Cons
  • "One-Click Upgrade and Foundation is the most valuable feature. One-Click Upgrade makes upgrades and LCM a breeze. Prior to Nutanix One-Click Upgrade, upgrades and LCM were overly cumbersome and time-consuming. Foundation provides an easy, yet very structured, approach to cluster modification (adding or removing nodes)."
  • "Nutanix AOS has improved our datacenter in the way of availability, scalability, and speed."
  • "The One-Click Upgrade process could/should offer the ability to integrate with 3rd party drivers. For example, we use NVIDIA Grid graphics cards. It would be amazing if, during the One-Click Upgrade process, we could "slipstream" additional VIB drivers for ESXi into the upgrade process."
  • "The pricing from my experience is, unfortunately, a necessary evil, however, the initial setup cost could be a waste, depending on your comfort and skill level."

What is our primary use case?

We have moved to Nutanix AOS as our one-stop hyper-converged solution for VDI and Virtual Servers. We have implemented Nutanix AOS in all our domains to replace old architecture. Before Nutanix, we used a mixed environment of HP Blades, Dell "Pizza Box" servers, a combination of local and shared storage, and a mess of networking hardware to make it all work. Now with Nutanix AOS and cluster, this has simplified everything from standard operating procedures to modification and scalability. Now our new Standard Operating Procedures are much more "Standardized."

How has it helped my organization?

Nutanix AOS has improved our datacenter in the way of availability, scalability, and speed. The Nutanix clustering provided by AOS has ensured more uptime and speed of delivering existing applications. AOS also offers fantastic ease of expanding our infrastructure. Initially, Nutanix was our VDI Backend solution, then we started migrating all virtual server infrastructure over to an entire Nutanix solution as well. Since then we have been expanding on both and providing end-users an amazing experience.

What is most valuable?

One-Click Upgrade and Foundation is the most valuable feature. One-Click Upgrade makes upgrades and LCM a breeze. Prior to Nutanix One-Click Upgrade, upgrades and LCM were overly cumbersome and time-consuming. Foundation provides an easy, yet very structured, approach to cluster modification (adding or removing nodes). Prior to something like Foundation, the process to scale out additional infrastructure was also cumbersome and tedious. Nutanix has completely simplified both of these processes and has made it very easy to focus more time on other things.

What needs improvement?

The One-Click Upgrade process could/should offer the ability to integrate with 3rd party drivers. For example, we use NVIDIA Grid graphics cards. It would be amazing if, during the One-Click Upgrade process, we could "slipstream" additional VIB drivers for ESXi into the upgrade process. Otherwise, we are left to a typical upgrade/maintenance window process in order to keep ESXi updated with 3rd party drivers for additional hardware installed in each node. If the One-Click Upgrade process could implement this feature, this would limit downtime maintenance as well.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Excellent. The best I've seen.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Excellent. The best I've seen.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support has been absolutely amazing. Again, the best I've seen. We felt like the Nutanix Bible didn't quite cover all the bases that we wanted to know more about. On a whim, we asked for a more technical deep dive and support provided us with a 1 time deep dive on-site to learn more about the product and troubleshooting. A support representative came on site and provided us with a bunch of troubleshooting scenarios (in a lab environment) in which we learned some "Tier 2+" troubleshooting methods.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

HP/Dell architecture. These proved as an overly tedious and dead-end solution.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward. I was new to Nutanix but felt completely comfortable diving right in and taking lead.

What about the implementation team?

Our initial setup was supported by a vendor team who was top notch.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing from my experience is, unfortunately, a necessary evil, however, the initial setup cost could be a waste, depending on your comfort and skill level. I say comfort first because the setup is actually very easy and straightforward once you understand the foundation process. It would really depend on your experience and comfort moving to new infrastructures.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Not really. Once we found Nutanix, all other options seemed like lesser options.

What other advice do I have?

Way to go Nutanix. Keep up the great work. We look forward to a very long term relationship.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
September 2026
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Samuel Rothenbuehler - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at Axians Amanox
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
Dec 30, 2024
What you might not know about Nutanix that makes it so unique
Pros and Cons
  • "Nutanix has several unique capabilities to ensure linear scalability."
  • "There is a need is to be able to consume Nutanix storage from outside the cluster for other, non-Nutanix workloads."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

Upgradeable with a single click

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

Linearly scalable

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

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

Predictable

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

Extremely fast

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

Intelligent

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

Extensible

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

Visionary

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

Standardized

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

And last but not least: With outstanding support

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. We are a partner for over ten years based in Switzerland. The author of this review previously worked five years at a large storage vendor as System Engineer specialized in Storage, Virtualization and VCE converged infrastructure.
PeerSpot user
Steffen Hornung - PeerSpot reviewer
Steffen HornungAdministrator at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees
Real User

Hello Samuel, a review of AOS 4.6 seems like referring about invention of the wheel. We one-clicked over Christmas 2020 from AOS 5.10 to 5.15 while 5.19 is available. Don't get me wrong. Your review is great - but outdated. Nutanix Files is now a separate license on a per TB basis and available on ESXi for a long time. Congrats on your Nutanix Technology Champion Elite by the way!

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reviewer1234917 - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP-Datacenter Practice at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Apr 17, 2022
Scalable solution with user-friendly controls and management
Pros and Cons
  • "Acropolis AOS is scalable to nodes and the cloud."
  • "The console and managing are user-friendly."
  • "Deployment could be more user-friendly - currently, it requires certain skills with the network and nodes."

What is most valuable?

The console and managing are user-friendly.

What needs improvement?

Deployment could be more user-friendly - currently, it requires certain skills with the network and nodes. In the next release, capacity planning and reporting should be included.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for around four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This solution's stability is fine.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Acropolis AOS is scalable to nodes and the cloud.

How are customer service and support?

Nutanix's technical support is ok but could be improved - sometimes cases get passed around, and it takes some time to get a solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward, with deployment taking an hour and a half.

What other advice do I have?

I would advise anyone considering implementing Acropolis AOS to configure their network properly because if it isn't, it's very difficult to apply the solution. I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Implementer
PeerSpot user
reviewer1072428 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Real User
Feb 22, 2022
Everything is centralized under one solution
Pros and Cons
  • "The HCI environment itself is very intuitive. Everything is centralized under one solution. And, they also have fast server built in in addition to a network analyzer."
  • "Our environment is now consolidated into one solution, making it easier to get support because we no longer need to go to multiple vendors and can just have one point of contact."
  • "I would like them to update their licensing to provide more features with their basic license."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the solution for three months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

Technical support could use some improvement.

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1279107 - PeerSpot reviewer
Pre sales manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Feb 21, 2022
Surpasses others when it comes to hybrid cloud Infrastructure
Pros and Cons
  • "You can be sure that whatever you patch is already compatible with the current firmware and the current version of the Acropolis that you're using."
  • "The feedback provided by our customers has been nothing but excellent."
  • "There is a feature that exists used for disaster recovery, but it requires an extra license. It should be included with the regular normal standard license."

What is our primary use case?

I work for a reseller, a consultancy firm. We have successfully onboarded three customers to Nutanix. Nutanix is the solution that I prefer. I deploy the solution for customers and assist them when they encounter any issues. The feedback provided by our customers has been nothing but excellent. 

Some of our customers use Nutanix due to its ease of management across their data centers and also, the cloud experience it offers. The Business continuity functionality embedded in Nutanix is priceless. From putting your VMs in a protection domain to setting up an RPO which can be as low as 10mins for synchronous environments, you are able to seamlessly perform planned and unplanned failover in a time-efficient manner. 

The Nutanix Database as a service is another use case that our customers have found very interesting and useful in their environment. With their DBaaS solution, you are able to provision databases within minutes and patch databases faster without bothering about compatibilities issues as to how some environments are. 

What is most valuable?

Database as a service (ERA). The value of Nutanix AOS embedded in ERA can be seen In the course of doing some cumbersome  database operations, such as database provisioning, snapshots and patches. The solution gives our customers the ability to provision databases faster and perform patching. With Nutanix, I have seen a database instance that took less than 15 minutes to provision as compared to the normal one that actually takes 30 minutes or more.

For their Time machine which is also a great feature of their DBaaS Solution, you are able to recover DBs quickly even with less backups and hence, this saves you money from a storage perspective.  

In terms of scalability, customers can scale in/out utilizing a plug and play approach. When there's need for compute or/and storage, you can acquire a compute-only node or a storage-only node and insert it like you would in a blade chassis. 

What needs improvement?

I think nothing for now.. I and my clients are enjoying the services provided by Nutanix thus far.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with Nutanix Acropolis for two years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have never had an issue with the scalability of Nutanix Acropolis because it is plug and play. Their architecture utilizes that of a public cloud. If you already have a Nutanix cluster, and you get a new node, you can easily add it to the cluster 

How are customer service and support?

I am the product manager for Nutanix in my company. Time to time, customers call to commend the support service from Nutanix and has been reported as the best support across all their other products in their organizations 

How was the initial setup?

Nutanix has the simplest deployment no matter the type of environment you are setting up. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

If a customer has been using VMware, the difference in pricing is lower. However, Nutanix is not "cheap" as they would say in the news.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution to other companies, they are the best. Nutanix has surpassed others when it comes to hyper-converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud infrastructure.  If customers are looking for a solution that is easy to learn, intuitive and not complicated, Nutanix is what you want. 

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a 9 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
PeerSpot user
Karim Elwardany - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Sales Account Manager at BMB
Real User
Feb 20, 2022
Helpful support, reliable, and high availability
Pros and Cons
  • "Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability."
  • "The return on investment of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is better than other solutions."
  • "We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process."

What is our primary use case?

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately three years. However, I believe Nutanix Acropolis AOS is used in combination with Oracle solutions.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Nutanix Acropolis AOS for approximately four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable, we can scale it up when needed.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support from Nutanix Acropolis AOS is very good.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is simple.

What about the implementation team?

We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process.

What was our ROI?

The return on investment of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is better than other solutions. Other solutions have higher overall costs, such as support or renewals.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Our customers are on three years license to use Nutanix Acropolis AOS. The price of the solution includes all features and support.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Neelash Nair - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle Tech Architect at Unisys
Real User
Top 5
Feb 20, 2022
Flexible, functional hyperconverged solution
Pros and Cons
  • "This is a very flexible solution that you are able to run however you want."
  • "This solution is great for people who do not want to go with Acropolis or other VMs."
  • "This solution offers excellent functionality but could use a stronger interface."

What is most valuable?

This is a very flexible solution that you are able to run however you want.

What needs improvement?

This solution offers excellent functionality but could use a stronger interface.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for the past five years or so.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a stable solution that stands out amongst the competition.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This is a scalable solution that can be put on to hardware from any vendor.

What was our ROI?

We have not calculated exact numbers, though it is safe to say that, like any other hyperconverged solution, it does give back.

What other advice do I have?

This solution is great for people who do not want to go with Acropolis or other VMs. With Nutanix, you are able to put your hypervisor of choice on it and run it the way that you want - it is extremely flexible.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
it_user1784469 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Feb 17, 2022
Reasonably priced with helpful technical support but needs a more stable operating system
Pros and Cons
  • "The pricing is pretty good."
  • "They have OEM partnerships, they've got their own developed OS which can save on licensing, the solution is a bit cheaper, the pricing is pretty good, the stability is very good, the solution can scale well, and technical support is helpful."
  • "The initial setup can be a bit difficult."
  • "The initial setup can be difficult; it's not exactly straightforward, and if you get anything wrong, you need to completely start over and begin again."

What is most valuable?

They have OEM partnerships.  

They've got their own developed OS, which is an advantage, if you can save on some licensing, of course. 

The solution is a bit cheaper. The pricing is pretty good.

The stability is very good.

The solution can scale well.

Technical support is helpful.

What needs improvement?

The initial setup can be a bit difficult. 

Troubleshooting is a problem. 

There are a lot of updates even though the solution itself is fairly long-lasting.

There are no licensed technicians; you have to reach out to Nutanix directly.

They need a more stable operating system.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is pretty good. It is quite long-lasting, however, they've got a lot of releases and upgrades. You need to perform a lot of upgrades during the support peak, which is something new users should keep in mind.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is okay. It is really similar to SimpliVity in that it's easy to increase the capacity and all resources.

How are customer service and support?

We've dealt with technical support in the past. They seem helpful. That said, they have got some of the bugs that you need to fix sometimes. In terms of just using it and for normal usage, it's fine after you set it up. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've also worked with SimpliVity.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup can be difficult. It's not exactly straightforward. If you get anything wrong, you need to completely start over and begin again. It's not easy to troubleshoot problems either. 

I'd rate the overall setup process at a two out of five due to the level of difficulty involved. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

For the most part, the pricing is fairly reasonable. It's not overly expensive. 

What other advice do I have?

My advice to other users is that you need to think about what you are going to use and why. If you are just using the normal virtual machines, you could consider other brands. However, if you want to use some special instances with the duplication or whatever, Nutanix is a good option.

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
MarcMermuys - PeerSpot reviewer
ICT System Administrator at College of Europe
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
Feb 13, 2022
Stable solution that improved the performance issues with our virtual desktop environment
Pros and Cons
  • "The interface is very good. Before we used this solution, we had separate storage and switches, but with the hyper convert, it's all in one."
  • "Before using this solution, we had performance issues with our virtual desktop environment and now our virtual desktops work very well, as if we were working on laptops or desktops."
  • "The price could be lower."

What is our primary use case?

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

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

The price could be lower.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Nutanix for eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is quite expensive.

What other advice do I have?

I would give this solution 10 out of 10.

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

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: September 2026
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.