Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

The converged storage infrastructure is a great benefit that removes the necessity of a separate storage network.

The web-based management portal (Prism) is very robust and easy to understand.

There is very little to manually configure, for the Nutanix or (in our case) VMware OS, once the scripted installation has completed.

Very knowledgeable support engineers.

For us, the Nutanix 3060 was a fantastic solution because it was an exact fit for the purpose of refreshing our hypervisor (VMware) infrastructure. For example, our existing VMware licensing allowed for a total of 8 sockets, which fit perfectly since the 3060 consists of (4) nodes with (2) sockets each. Our fiscal planning called for the replacement of two of our hypervisor hosts and an HP P2000 G3 SAN however, we were able to justify a Nutanix 3060 appliance due to the hyper-converged features. We also went from a 1G iSCSI storage network to 10G and we didn't need to purchase a 10G switch for the storage traffic since we connected the 10G nics in the Nutanix nodes directly to our end-of-rack switches. The simplification, cost-savings, and across the board performance increase made the Nutanix a great decision.

The Nutanix uses controller VMs for disk I/O, metadata, etc. and they can consume significant resources so be sure to account for the additional CPU and memory the controllers will need. There is one controller VM per node so Nutanix and/or your reseller can help you calculate what additional resources you'll need.

The Nutanix OS (NOS) is proprietary so, out of the box, you will need a Nutanix Support Engineer's (SE) help to configure the appliance. This doesn't take long and I haven't needed to make any adjustments since the configuration was performed.

We have (2) 10G ports per node (you can have 4) so all of the network, vMotion, storage, etc. traffic goes through the same nic. This hasn't been an issue for us and the 10G nics handle all the traffic quite well with no bottlenecks. In fact, we are still seeing 0ms read and write latency with 40% resource utilization.

Our Nutanix has been in production for 1 month.

There was some sort of communication breakdown with the Nutanix SE and our reseller. I mentioned before the installation is done with a Nutanix SE due to the proprietary installation but I was not made aware of this until after I tried to perform the installation myself. Once I became aware (after reading a lot of documentation) and contacted Nutanix Support, the engineer who helped me was extremely knowledgeable and got the installation back on track.

No stability issues.

No, however we do not have any short-term plans to scale out beyond our current Nutanix appliance.

I have not needed to contact customer service.

Outstanding on every level.

We were using HP servers, switches, and SANs for our hypervisor solution. The hyper-converged infrastructure became a more attractive option since there is less to manage separately. The management portal (Prism) manages everything centrally and can be configured for your SNMP solution.

The initial setup is somewhat complex and needs to be coordinated with a support engineer. Given the amount of proprietary technology (NOS, features, and Nutanix has their own optional hypervisor solution (Acropolis)), it isn't surprising nor a frustration.

As I mentioned previously, the installation was done by me with the help of a Nutanix SE.

This is a pricey solution considering it's essentially a fork lift upgrade but the features, redundancy, and performance made it the most attractive solution for us.

We looked at Simplivity as well but decided on the Nutanix because it was a better fit for our VMware licensing. We were able to simply replace (4) of our existing VMware hosts with (4) Nutanix nodes in a single appliance.

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 are currently using Nutanix in a PoC environment to determine if it will meet our VDI needs, as well as our server virtualization needs. Our current production environment uses Citrix XenServer as the hypervisor. Nutanix plans to work with XenServer, but in the PoC, we have elected to test the Acropolis Hypervisor.

Our current production solution is complicated and requires many different management consoles to configure and monitor the solution. Inevitably, something gets missed and requires us troubleshoot resources. The Nutanix PoC appears to eliminate some of this confusion. The AHV integrates with the solution and most of the complexity is hidden from the admin's duties. 

Prism Central allows managing the cluster from a single pane of glass, and it allows a deeper dive into the solution.

Coming from a XenServer environment, I would like better integration of XenServer into the AOS and Prism Central.

• Ease of installing the hyper-visor
• Out of the box High Availability

• Decreased Rack space/power consumption
• No need for SAN
• IOPs has increased as new nodes are added

None, as I like that Nutanix listen to their customers, and implement new features to improve the kit.

I've used it for six months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

We previously used a huge blade chassis with a SAN. We switched because of a bottleneck in the SAN, and it didn't scale well, as we hit queue depth limits. Some advantages Nutanix has over our old solution are:

• Decreased the datacenter foot print
• No need for hypervisor purchase with the addition of Acropolis
• Reduce costs with regards to virtualisation technologies (i.e. VMware)
• Features are at no extra cost
• Ability to scale virtual hosts fast

It's straightforward.

We did it in-house.

Pricing is a little high but if you really look into what the product provides, the cost saving on setting up infrastructure and maintaining it is greatly reduced. Unlike VMware, features are provided at no extra cost. The support for the product is exceptional! Nutanix are keen to make sure their product excels in all areas.

When you get over the initial shock of the price, and think about what you get you will never go back to the old way of implementing infrastructure.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

In most of the cases, the clients use the solution as a file server or database with data and another solution. Mostly, there is hyperconversion with Acropolis and its hypervisor.

My experience with the Nutanix Acropolis is good from both a reseller and end-user experience.

The automation is excellent.

The product offers a quality hypervisor.

The solution offers very good customization.

The administration with the prem solution is very good.

Overall, it's quite a comprehensive solution.

The user experience is very good.

The product has a very nice user interface.

It's easy to use and has a very smooth onboarding process.

We find the performance to be excellent on this solution.

The cost of the solution is too expensive. There are other options, such as VMware, that are offered for less money. In Latin America, it seems to be overpriced for the market.

We've been using the solution for one year at this point. It hasn't been too long.

We've found the stability to be excellent. There aren't any issues around its reliability. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy at all.

Nutanix scales better than VMware, however, the pricing is an issue. As you scale, it costs more.

Typically, the customers that use Nutanix are larger organizations as the cost is quite high and an SME would not necessarily be able to afford it.

The technical support is very good. We're quite satisfied with the level of service we receive.

We also find that the documentation is very good and quite easy to understand, which helps with the usability of the product.

We also deal with VMware. There's some competition between the two as VMware is less expensive. 

The initial setup is not complex at all. it's very easy and straightforward. The onboarding process is also nice and simple. We've had a good experience.

Between VMware and Nutanix, the price of VMware is lower. In comparison, Nutanix is pricey. 

I work for a distributor of Nutanix that also handles VMware. However, I market the Nutanix solutions primarily. We're resellers and we're a partner of Nutanix. We use both on-premises and cloud deployment versions. We tend to use Google and Amazon clouds when we use cloud deployments.

The platform is very easy to use and the administration functionality is good. Even in relation to VMware, which is cheaper, I like Nutanix best. It's easy to learn and the processes of configuration and onboarding are fantastic.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

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."

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.

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.

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.

I have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for five years.

Excellent. The best I've seen.

Excellent. The best I've seen.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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