Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

My primary use case for Nutanix is for running Windows servers. Nutanix is deployed on-premises. 

Nutanix was a very good business solution for our site. It's an expensive system, but it provides power savings, in terms of the low costs for running it, and it was a good business investment. 

One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect. 

I'm sure there are a lot of things that could be improved, but I'm actually very satisfied with this product. There may be some possibilities to move the virtual server dismounting points or to move the server from one group to another, but I can't think of any special improvements or update features. 

I have been working with Nutanix for the past two years. 

I'm very satisfied with the stability and performance of Nutanix. This solution is easy to maintain. You use the LCM module, press update, and it's done for you. It's wonderful because you don't have to do anything—it's almost too easy. I am the only one handling maintenance for and managing Nutanix. 

This solution is scalable. I just added some extra discs to the system because we were running out of space and all I had to do was put the discs inside the service—Acropolis took care of the rest. It added volume and said that everything was done automatically, so it's difficult to make the process any easier. 

Whenever I have had a support case, Nutanix has always helped to solve it the first time around. I have never had to wait for an extra or false opinion on the product or problem; it has always been solved within first contacting Nutanix. Compared to what I've seen of other technical support, it's hard to get better than this. 

We worked with VMware for some years before switching to Nutanix. We had a problem with our SQL servers, which were running on VMware, and the performance wasn't good. There was a product called Pernix that we installed to VMware, to speed up the storage process when it was saving files and data. Pernix worked very well.

They implemented that technology from Pernix into Nutanix, which is why I think Nutanix performs so well. There is an internal storage service, rather than a storage center, so you don't have to spend time waiting for the network. That was what Pernix did: it moved the storage, or part of the storage, inside the server, which then took care of saving to that storage. It's a little complicated to explain, but that was why our SQL servers were working as a traditional server with a separate machine. This is the way that Nutanix works as well. You have the server you are running always located on the local stores and it will make sure to back everything up. Instead of looking at VMware, I would advise looking at Nutanix or something else that's similar. However, it's IP, so it's always evolving. 

The initial setup was done by Lenovo at delivery, but it seemed to be quite easy. There is always some setup in the beginning, but once the setup's done, it will only take a few minutes to add an extra node or anything. It's done almost automatically—you don't have to do anything, just put them in and then they're up and running. 

We implemented through a vendor team. The initial setup was done by Lenovo Professional Services, but on a day-to-day basis, I handle the running of Nutanix. I only contact Nutanix if there is an error I cannot solve myself, which has only happened three or four times. 

This product is expensive, but they do have discounts. At one point, I saw that they were giving a 70% or 80% discount, which is a good thing, but maybe they should have a more realistic price and then a 5% to 10% discount. 

I rate Nutanix a ten out of ten. I recommend this solution to any companies considering implementation. It was a good business investment for our company and as an extended working system, it is easy to maintain and use. The costs for running it are also low. For most companies who are already running some system at a certain scale and on-premises, I think a lot of them could benefit from this solution. 

I'm an end user and don't have any direct business connection with Nutanix—I only contact them when I need technical support. 

The features that I have found most valuable are the user-friendliness of that hypervisor. Also, people who are not agnostic about the hardware can go with Nutanix. It has a user-friendly dashboard and interface.

Pros, it's an OEM kind of a hypervisor. It can fit to any size. Pros are that any enterprise company can fit in with it, and that budgets are also not heavy on their pockets. So, these are the pros of Nutanix.

In terms of what can be improved, their local people in this region are not good, to be frank. They don't support any inquiry. They don't support anything we need, especially for projects. So either we need to bypass them or we need to get support from the other regions.

I would say that applies from the sales cycle to the support.

The sales cycles is a very closed group kind of thing. Cons, region-wise, sometimes it's a monopoly. And the pricing factor is there. Plus, they are not open and transparent.

Procurement can be an issue as well.

Plus I don't see any updates happening in this region in terms of what's cooking in the head offices. It should be updated and alerted to the partners. For example, recently Nutanix has done many things in its acquisitions. What new features are going to be added? Certainly partners and other people should have a right to know. And they may gain advantage, an edge, over the other products when they are pitching this.

As for what I would like to see in future releases, maybe the cloud things which were very recently added. What is the roadmap for the cloud and what are there exactly? These things are very new to Nutanix now. That should be more transparent. What is their good part, like Azure or AWS? I would like to know these things. They just need better documentation in general.

I began using Nutanix Acropolis AOS about five or six years ago.

Their stability depends on how agnostic they are. It depends on if I'm using super micro hardware or it depends on if I'm using HPE. So, it's stable. I don't think we are having any issues. It is mostly a stable product. The main issue with stability would be related to the hardware, not to the actual solution.

Scalability depends on the customer. If the customer is savvy they can just add maybe SSDs or something which the KC doesn't support, or something which is out of the box from the hardware which was procured previously. Then we would face issues in the scalability. Or maybe a limit to that addition which was purchased some time back.

We don't require support, as we have in house expertise.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have worked on many products, including VMware and others. It is not complex. I would even say the portal is not so complex.

I would say that it's a simple to use product. It fits all sizes and it is budget-friendly.

One thing to keep in mind is that only experts can use it. It has to be in the proper hands, instead of going to XYZ people just for some cost savings. So lift-and-shift and migrations might be tricky, because it is not like a VMware.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Nutanix Acropolis AOS a nine.

We're a systems integration company. We do sell a lot of Nutanix, and we implement a lot of it including all different components. We love using the solution. 

It is a great use case for a hybrid cloud on on-premise workloads. However, there are few workloads where it is not a great fit. 

We've had customers that are mid-market, and they have one person for deploying, running, managing, reporting, updating, and upgrading. When you look at the total cost of ownership and you look at what it takes to run that environment, you're simplifying how you manage your environment, which reduces the number of people you need to look after your infrastructure. So, you can put those people into more productive areas.

Its most valuable feature is simplicity. It is so easy to use. Upgrades are easy. It is easy in terms of disaster recovery, failover, database provisioning, and reporting. Everything about it is just simple.

It was not a great fit for really large databases that required high-end or lots of compute. They might already have addressed this concern around very high-end databases that require high-end compute. In the past, it wasn't a great fit for them.

We have been using Nutanix since 2014.

It is very stable. Once it is set up, it just runs.

It is very scalable and easy to scale. We've implemented it in many different customers environments, both small and large. They love the fact that they can grow node by node. So, you add to your environment as you need more performance.

Their technical support is the best I've ever dealt with. I've dealt with all manufacturers over the years, and their technical support is fabulous.

I am not hands-on with other solutions, but I've worked with many different partners in the past, and I know that it is very easy to use. You save money with it by having the virtualization component. The AHV hypervisor is a huge cost saving. If you still want to run VMware in your environment, you can, and we have customers that do that, and they love it.

I'm an owner of the company, and I don't actually do the implementations, but you'd want a partner to help you set it up, or you need to be familiar with the environment. Once it is set up, it is very easy to use. We hear that over and over again from our customers.

In terms of maintenance, the great thing about it is that you can have one person, but it also depends on the size of the organization.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

It is primarily used as our data management application. It is for data management and storage.

It has greatly reduced our footprint because it is all-in-one. It is a hyper-converged technology. So, in a way, it reduces our server room footprint and provides ease of management.

It is all-in-one. The compute processing, storage, and network altogether make it convenient. We don't have to have different modules for expansion.

They have improved over the years. They can probably improve more of their software offerings or their innovative upcoming technology.

I would like to see them utilize the spare storage that they use as a redundant space. I feel that now a lot of resources are wasted just for standby purposes because we are using data protection. Instead of utilizing those resources only when something happens, they can have an alternative so that we can utilize these resources all the time.

I have been using this solution for the past two to three years.

It is stable.

I believe there is no limit to scalability. The only weak point is that Nutanix is basically a software company. They are very dependent on the hardware and vendor, and because the hardware is always moving ahead quite fast, they are having difficulty in catching up with the technology. If I'm going to scale my current Nutanix cluster, I may have an issue with the newer hardware because it may not be compatible with the older hardware that I already have. That is one of the issues we encountered, but we still manage to sort out the licensing and the hardware requirements with our partners and Nutanix.

In terms of usage, basically, our whole company uses it because it is our central data storage. It is being used quite extensively. We upgraded just recently.

Their technical support is good. Their communication is good, and their technical knowledge is good. The time they take to get back to us is also good.

We were using another solution. I believe we switched because Nutanix provides the failover capability for RPO and RTO. It means RPO and RTO are close to zero because we have the failover data protection from Nutanix as well.

I have support from vendors, so it was not too complex for us. We actually enjoy a good supporting and working relationship with Nutanix.

It was actually quite a straightforward implementation because it was a brand new setup. The migrations were done by our application team and infra team. The complex portion was that they are very dependent on how the network was being set up. Prior to that, our network infrastructure was quite old, so some of the requirements were not met in the first place, but we managed to sort things out.

We used an integrator. We work with a partner. They help us to deploy it.

We have internal staff for its deployment and maintenance. We need two people.

We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved.

The only comparison was VMware site replication. 

I would advise having a good and stable network base. Mine is on-prem, and I'm not sure what is the requirement for the cloud solution, but for on-prem, make sure that the network infrastructure is very stable, and there are no hops or drops from the network. It needs a very stable network.

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS an eight out of 10.

For our company, basically, we run all of our production VMs on it. Also, we have two demo networks that we do a lot of testing and whatnot for.

From an operator's perspective, we released from two to one person managing it, and pretty much the main benefit is the ease of use, ease of install, and ease of protecting, et cetera. 

From a grander view, it's allowed our customers to actually reduce the amount of software that they have to purchase. Not only do they have to purchase the hypervisor, and if they're in VMware, in most cases, they're purchasing disaster recovery tools and a whole bunch of other things. However, Nutanix has it all built-in so that users have one area to manage and maintain.

There are lots of different pieces. From a Disaster Recovery perspective, it is very valuable. Some of my customers are getting into Flow. We don't use Flow, however, we're testing it. Flow is their micro-segmentation, which is very useful for protecting your VMs and the traffic that goes to them. From an automation perspective around deploying virtual machines, Calm is pretty good as well.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution is very stable. 

The product scales very well.

Everything has room for improvement.

I could probably name quite a few things from a Nutanix perspective. The area of improvement that they're working on now is more of the files index and more of the API integration into those. From on-prem to public cloud, they already have AWS Nutanix clusters, however, a lot of customers are going to be utilizing a public cloud at some point and they're basically deploying Azure Nutanix clusters as well soon. That's an improvement that they're working on. That said, from an administration perspective, the software's pretty big. It would be great if they could add more features and API integrations to the higher-level products.

I'd like it to be more API-based. They need more additional features around their APIs and additional integration in some of the automation platforms that are out there. Nutanix is a solution where the hyper-converged portion of it is mature. They're working towards the cloud integration portion. 

I would like to see more improvement in that area of being easier to manage, or easy to implement, and easy to orchestrate in an AWS or an Azure type scenario.

I've been using the solution for about three years. 

It's probably the most stable, hyper-conversion environment I've seen on the market. I base that on the storage portion of the hyper-conversion environment.

The solution scales well.

To expand the clusters, you don't really have limits as you would in other products from a scalability perspective. There are still best practices around how big you want to scale it. However, the expansion process is pretty simple and straightforward.

I have probably about 10 people utilizing it within my company and their roles range from infrastructure admins to solution architects that do testing as well as some engineers that we do consulting with. If you look at our customers quite, it ranges. It depends on the products they deploy, however, they might have infrastructure admins, DBAs, or automation engineers. It just depends on how big the deployment is and what products they're using.

We have four clusters. For customers that have 250 to 300 hosts that are running, it's pretty much one person to manage and maintain that system. You can pretty much maintain it with one FTE.

Internally, we will likely expand usage. We have plans to actually spin up on clusters within public cloud infrastructure to protect our systems. From an expansion perspective that just depends on where our business goes and how many more resources we need. From a customer perspective, expansion is going to be more when they start utilizing more of the cloudlike features such as Kubernetes or databases service through Era, or even Calm. That's where things will expand.

Technical support is very good. It's probably one of the best.

I see a lot of technical support. I see a lot of the people or older legacy companies that have been around for a while, and technical support will usually go downhill.  There's probably a handful of them that are really good. 

If you look at their scores online, they're always rated pretty high and it's hard to do that.

We were on VMware, prior to this product. It was getting to the point of being a hassle to maintain, and this solution simplified things considerably.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's straightforward and takes about two hours to deploy.

The deployment for my company, and we're a smaller company, with a total of 60 VMs at most, took about a week total. That involved moving off of VMware to HV including the migration of the virtual machines. That was just done due to the timeframes. You could do those at night. Ultimately, the cluster and everything was set up within a day and ready to go. Then, the move process for those VMs just took a little bit of time to move into. I have other customers who are running migrations that take a little bit longer, however, you're talking 2,500 to 3000 VMs. That's more of a two to three-month process to get those moved. That said, the migration goes pretty quickly and that's pretty small from a migration perspective with a whole new platform.

I cannot speak to the exact pricing of the product. However, as a partner, we do have access to reduced costs.

There are additional costs. Nutanix is a software-driven company. They do sell hardware, however, in most cases, you bring your own hardware. The cost of the solution might be a little bit higher than what you would look at from just a straight out VMware, however, you're getting a lot more and you're reducing the fact that you don't need VMware in that mix. 

The hypervisor that's provided with Nutanix is free. As the costs roll-out, Nutanix is actually a better TCO than any of the other solutions in the market that are even comparable.

We actually evaluated quite a few different hyper-converged infrastructures prior to bringing on Nutanix as a partner and they are the best in the market from that perspective.

I'm a partner of Nutanix. I'm a user, however, I'm also a seller of Nutanix.

We are on version five. I can't remember the exact version number. We have both five and six. I have multiple clusters that are running within our infrastructure and then I have multiple clusters that are running within my customers' infrastructure.

While we currently use Azure for our cloud, we will likely use both Azure and AWS in the future.

I'd advise potential new users to do their homework and make sure that they don't necessarily listen to what the manufacturers are saying. Go find out for yourself.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I wouldn't say it's a ten. I'm a pretty hard scorer. There are features and functionality where VMware makes things easier. Other solutions make things a little bit easier from a deployment perspective or something along those lines, however, that's just due to the fact that they've been in the market for a long period of time and their solution set has built or has grown from that perspective. They are highly ranked as they reduce the amount of maintenance and administration that you have to keep it running.

We have multiple verticals in our company and each has its own ERP applications that are business critical and mission critical. Our company is based in India, we are customers of Nutanix and I'm the executive vice president. 

Nutanix has given me an opportunity to create multiple VMs and it's really very resilient for failures. Even if there is a single node failure, the VM gets migrated automatically to the healthy node. I can also take any number of snapshots and restore them at any point in time. The solution offers cloning and it's very simple to create a clone of any server. These are the great features of Nutanix. In addition, it's user-friendly, and in contrast with some solutions, you don't need to know about the technology. Anyone knowing the basics of VMware or hypervisor can start creating VMware, adding the server, and deploying it on the go within a few hours.

The problem with Nutanix is you cannot have or attach external storage so there are some limitations when it comes to increasing space. If you have a three-node cluster and want to increase storage, you have to add one more cluster. I can't attach an iSCSI drive as a solution. I'm hoping that the AOS 6 version will have plenty of improvements.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. 

There is a limitation on scalability. If you have four nodes and want to expand you can't. You have to buy another 3-node Nutanix box.

Technical support is excellent. If there is a critical issue, they get back to you within an hour.

Deployment is pretty easy because once the hypervisor is loaded, the Nutanix team carries out the deployment. Once you have the prism of the queue, then it becomes very easy to work on the Nutanix box.

Pricing could be improved especially with the effects of the pandemic, where the IT sector is not doing so well. Nutanix is relatively new to the industry and if they want to promote it they will need to reduce the cost.

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

The solution allows us to make use of high IOPS requirements.

We used to go with a traditional architecture, storage and server. Now, with Nutanix, we have 30,000 IOPS, up from 1,000. 

A great feature involves real-time hardware changes. There is no need to shut down any VM during the hardware changes.

The solution does not lend support when we connect with a few dongle licenses. There is a need to make use of certain third-party USB switches through which we can have USB access. USB dongle-based licenses do not allow us to directly locate the USB ports on Nutanix. Other than this, I have no complaints.

We have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for the last four years.

The solution is certainly stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

I do not recall contacting Nutanix's support within the past four years. Nutanix sends us daily alerts and messages. A year-and-a-half ago I encountered a RAM failure, but there was no need for me to log a case with Nutanix, as the call was automatically logged and an engineer was sent to deal with the problem. 

We previously made use of Scale Computing and HPE SimpliVity.

The initial setup was quick. Previously, the operations involved three days of downtime but, with the solution, the initial migration from traditional architecture to Nutanix lasted three hours, instead of three days. It was so much quicker. 

We handled the implementation on our own. 

The pricing is quite good in comparison with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Scale, and even traditional architecture. We found Nutanix's pricing to be the best. We did not incur license fees as we did with HPE Simplivity's VMware licenses, so this kept the costs down. 

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS as a nine out of ten. 

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.