What needs improvement with Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

NCI's pricing is expensive.

The documentation could be improved. To better assist new users, I'd recommend including more detailed instructions and making the content more user-friendly. For example, it would be helpful if Nutanix offered a video explaining the key differences between their features and those of their competitors.

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

I only started using the solution a few months ago. So far, I've found error reporting needs work. The reporting feature isn't very good. Sometimes it takes time for data to be reflected in the dashboard. We'd like to have more Kubernetes information in the dashboard. That kind of dashboard would help.

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

Usually, there are separate administration teams that take care of servers, but in our organization, servers are usually looked after by the application owner. However, the application owners cannot reinstall the software, OS, and other things. That only aligns with the role of the HCI administrator. If these rights can be provided, it will be very easy. Previously, it was there, but after certain updates, we found that they have withdrawn those services. For example, you requested a VM, and based on the business use case, I approved it and gave you a bare-metal server. Now you are the owner of that particular VM, so whatever you need, you should be able to do over there, but currently, you have to request me for the installation of the OS that you need, and I have to do it. It is an overhead for the HCI administrator. If that can be offloaded to the VM owners, that will be much easier for us. I have already shared this feedback with Nutanix.

Our client had some old Citrix Xen servers for which there is no direct migration. Nutanix has a move utility for Microsoft Hyper-V clusters or VMware clusters. You can easily migrate them using the move utility, but the Xen clusters cannot be migrated in a simple way. That is the only thing that is lacking, but nowadays, no one uses the Citrix Xen server for their clusters. Everything else is already there. Nutanix keeps on upgrading its hardware's or hypervisor's capability to be able to support new technologies.

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

In a hybrid cloud setup, we should be able to port our floors from on-premises to the public cloud and from the public cloud to on-premises.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure can be improved in terms of the sizing of the solution. Recently, I have had minimum requirements or usage of the solution. So, small and medium enterprises will not fit into such a scale.

The product requires a lot of resources. We have to assign a lot of resources to the servers.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's cloud platform management software could be improved so that I can manage my load between the cloud and on-premises.

The product should improve its naming convention. The name of the solutions offered by Nutanix does not indicate what the tool does.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's LTS version needs to be more reliable. I've run into too many issues where I've found the bug, and it caused a lot of grief. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure should do more testing on its LTS version and get that straightened out. Performance-wise, there is an upper limit on the number of nodes that Prism Element and Prism Central can handle. My two Prism Centrals are scaled for huge workloads, but I struggled with them for a better part of five or six months, where they were timing out on my admins and throwing random errors. The same thing was happening with Prism Element in our larger clusters.

Although Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is adding features that can enhance the solution, there is still room for improvement in terms of functionality. The licensing cost could be lower.

Nutanix Files is a new feature and, as I mentioned, it's immature, although it's a good tool. I have already given this feedback to the engineering team. In terms of automation, I know there are ways to do it, but it's not very user-friendly. I've been working for the last three years with Nutanix and I've managed to automate certain things, but it's a somewhat more complex job than it should be. I would like to see more documentation or knowledge base articles. There should also be some pre-built, basic tasks that are shared by Nutanix. That would be helpful. I understand the other side of the picture, that we might hamper production, but some basics that can be shared by Nutanix, for automation, would be good. There are a lot of things to be worked on. They need to provide more features and certain features that have been released need to be made more mature.

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

There is a cost for us with a Controller VM. For example, if you are purchasing a Nutanix node with 500GB, then 32GB of that node will need to be allocated for Controller VM. Therefore, we need to spend 32GB of RAM for Nutanix, which is not in our production requirements. This is an area that they need to improve. Most other software comes as an OVF template. These kinds of OVF software templates are only supported in VMware. We technically can customize and use them in Nutanix, but the vendors tell us that there are technical issues that they will not support. So, they either have to improve this or software providers have to provide the proper software for Nutanix supported software. It is a CentOS-based operating system, but CentOS releases security patches almost every week or every other week. However, Nutanix releases their upgrade at three or four month intervals. According to my organization's SLA, if a critical patch is released during that time, then I need to implement the patches within 30 days. If it is a standard patch, then I need to patch it within 60 days. Since that is my SLA, I cannot meet my SLA for security because Nutanix will not release the upgrade within these 30 days. Between the critical patch release and the Nutanix release, my customers say they are vulnerable and I am accepting the risk while the SLA is breached. Because of this SLA breach, I am rating this solution as eight out of 10.

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.

The price could be lower.

With some projects that we are deploying, there are errors that arise when adding nodes.

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

The look and feel of the web GUI of Nutanix Acropolis AOS needs improvement, when compared to other systems, e.g. VMware Orchestrator. For example, finding important features of the system should be easier. The features should be made more visible and easier to find, rather than having to figure them out and reconfigure them. Another area from improvement for the system is hardware integration. I had some issues with the integration with the hardware vendor, in particular, Dell. The integration was really tricky, but the reason could be between the two vendors: Nutanix and Dell, because they have different life cycles for the deployment. The integration issue could be because of the hardware, firmware of Dell, and Dell had a different life cycle for the renewal of an update of the firmware, for the servers like Nutanix. We also had some issues with some Dell-related drivers, and that consumed a lot of time. A one-touch system for integration could be an improvement. Having a one-touch update is also a very good idea. For example, you'll just need to push the button for the system to be updated automatically, e.g. for updating the firmware, hardware, disk, etc. Nutanix Acropolis AOS which was integrated with Dell was not running well. What was running well was less than 50%, and the other updates have failed because of issues between the firmware, the server, and the system. This is why hardware integration with this system needs improvement.

When we have issues with the solution, they tend to be around networking. When we tried to upgrade the LCM, we had issues around the process. When we refreshed the CVM of VM and restart the upgrade, the CVM would not start again. We needed to see the logs to see if we could figure out what happened and if there was something we could do. We'd like to see a bit more integration with certain products, for example, Qlik, among others.

An area for improvement would be the cyber security features.

The GUI of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could be improved that can be done from the OEM side. It's a very basic stable web browser that they're using. It is not very inclusive. Nutanix should provide its customers with the documents for predictive workload analysis and other performance metrics, such as compression. This would be a great benefit.

We haven't come across any issues. Our clients haven't seen any issues with Nutanix at all. There should be a little more access to Nutanix files. As it is right now you have one type of Nutanix file at no additional cost. Most customers have a little more than a one-byte file server. An initial byte size could be a little more than one terabyte.

The solution has been more than enough at the moment to manage all of my services.

The process of migrating from old hardware to new could improve.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is new technology in a competitive market. Pricing is too high for a new product and requires better discounts to be able to compete with IBM, Dell EMC, and HP.

The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Thailand, there really isn't a cloud version of Nutanx available to us. I'd like to see the cloud come to the country, and I'd like to try using it.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by adding some NAS features, similar to the ones that are available in the NetApp solution.

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.

I would enjoy an advanced mode where experienced users can leverage their knowledge to do advanced things currently only allowed using the command line tools on the CVM. While using the Shell is okay for sich advanced things like take a disk image as a ground for a Calm blueprint it would be easier to get it done. Even more so of you just follow directions of a colleague. Currently that kind of task is limitted to the shell.

In the future, I would like to see integration with external storage using the fiber channel. As it is now, Nutanix can only integrate with external storage using the SCSI protocol.

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

I think some of the tasks that must be done using CLI could be added to the web interface. I think it is kind of frustrating, opening a CLI session going through all the CLI commands you have to run to accomplish that task and then get back to the web console to continue doing what you were doing. It would be much easier to have that same setup option available on the web console. Also, I believe that running several different commands through a CLI can increase the chance of typos/mistakes, resulting in a bigger issue.

This solution would be improved with built-in integration with Rubrik.

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 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.

This product would be improved if it included a hybrid cloud solution. Better integration with various solutions with Citrix would be helpful, as well as perhaps working with VMware on Workspace ONE.

In the next release, I would like better and more competitive pricing.

The access speed needs to be improved. I would like to see official compatibility with Red Hat in the future. This is important because we have a lot of customers who are using Red Hat.

having more integrations with security vendors to be able to introduce more Virtual Load Balancers and Virtual Firewalls.

Nutanix should improve AHV to support migration VMs between clusters and storage containers. Migration between containers is possible, but it requires shutting down the VM. The procedure is long and there is no migration between clusters at all. By and large, I have nothing more to add, but if we talk about what I have listed, then these functions would greatly facilitate the operation of Nutanix HCI. I hope they will fix this soon, although I have been waiting for this for a long time.

As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface that can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I can create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as parallel execution. I would suggest that this could perhaps be switched. That is so far the only change I would like. I would like it if they could fix the instance where you double click on a VM and it opens the VM instead of the setup.

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 think there is a lot that Nutanix can improve in AOS, in particular, moving tasks such as creating trunked networks and managing nodes from the CLI to Prism Element. I would like to see more information in Prism Element about how Curator works. There is a lot of functionality in Prism Central, but sometimes you want to see those features in Prism Element. One of them is RBAC. If we have one small cluster, and we need RBAC, we must install Prism Central. This is an inconvenience and I hope to see this feature in Prism Element in the next releases of AOS.

There are few areas in which I think this Nutanix product should be improved, but to name a few I can decide that there should be support for more languages natively. This could apply to the main AOS and Prism environment, as well as the help channels that Nutanix offers. Except for these points, I don't think there is much more to improve.

There are several features that need improvement. Some of the areas are: * The Nutanix flow is only for micro-segmentation functionality. * It doesn't integrate with their cloud solution. * It's only for on-premises, even though they have micro-segmentation, it doesn't extend it through the cloud. * It (Flow) doesn't work with the XI frame. * Life Cycle Management is very simplistic for the HPE DX. * Some of the applications are not supported yet. We have to look at the ecosystem that Nutanix is trying to create. It's lacking in some features but overcompensating in others. They are trying to be holistic, but they have a lot to catch up on when it comes to VMware. For example, they only support Citrix, and if you run Nutanix Acropolis you can't run VMware Horizon. There are limitations and the Kubernetes solution is limited.

The pricing of the solution is too high. It needs to be adjusted or lowered to be more competitive.

I'm not very technical, so I don't know if there are any features that are really lacking. Our customers seem pleased with it, and I haven't heard of any downsides.

It's difficult to discuss what is lacking on the solution. We would have to do a proper analysis because not every client has the same requirements. Based on our experience up until now, even the clients, when they are looking for a proper platform, have already identified Nutanix as being the one solution that would be the most relevant to them. We would need to get into a more detailed analysis in terms of what features or benefits the clients are looking for to see if there is something lacking. We would need to look at scalability, or reduced latency, and stuff like that. There are so many elements that are implemented for each client. As well, there may be specific areas that the client wanted to be improved. However, from our perspective, we don't see any glaring holes in the product. The initial setup does need a team with experience with it in order to execute it correctly. It's not easy. Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high.

For now, I can't think of anything that can be improved. They've been pretty innovative and have provided a fairly comprehensive roadmap. I've worked directly with some of the backend TME guys and they're very responsive and have addressed anything that's come up. However, I would like to see better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators to have a full backup recovery from site to site and from site to cloud and cloud to cloud - the full range. The cloud ecosystem for public/private, site to site visibility with a single backup product.

Pricing and varieties of options could be better. I represent an educational Institute, higher education. So, the cost is a major concern. Secondly, we have the 1000 and 3000 series. So we would like to see that graphic virtualization. It should support all the open standards as well as Nutanix. If the other vendor brought some SAN or NAS, it should be very compatible with that. I would rate it at a nine on a scale of ten.

The solution doesn't support older systems, which can be a problem for some organizations who wish to implement it. It became a problem for us due to the fact that some of our systems are older.

In the licensing, it needs to be clear about features because it is not clear whether Flow is integrated or not.

The storage and back-up facilities could be improved. The storage and recording back-up for updates where we can maintain the data server and handle an insurance company. We need day-to-day encrypting of the database. We're purchasing Acropolis and Veritas. That is a big headache. We are using Nutanix for backup and storage purposes. That is now going well in terms of storage and backup. The cloud base is an extra feature. It should be the standard. Nutanix Cloud is not that helpful for us.

There could be better support for high power ESX and other cross-platform applications. A major feature in Nutanix is that it should be able to move from AHV to BFX. I would like to see an improved interface. I think Dell EMC is going to launch ClarityNow to address this.

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

I believe the only things that may need to improve is that the Nutanix Controller VM consumes quite a lot of resources. If that could be reduced, it would be great. Secondly, I would have liked it if Nutanix were a hardware as well as a software platform. I think they are currently progressing into a software only path. I think that, in the near future, their own hardware will be discontinued. I can understand why they're doing it, but I would have preferred them to continue being a one-stop shop for hardware and software alike. However, so far, for our company, the wish list is completely covered.

In terms of the IT different categories, I would like for the governing sections to be able to use it in the IT department. If they can have something like a one view management portal or software similar to VMware that would be an added value.

The product could be improved with more security. The product needs a bit more experience in the market. I think you don't have the possibility to add other hardware. It could be improved with the ability to add and extend.

They have offered some new features that I have not deployed so I assume that these issues might have been addressed already, but there was a networking problem. This solution could use network improvements. I think the next release should include a software improvement, like the ability to deploy with a cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft Azure. I believe that they are already working on this and I think that the best improvement would be to remove the storage configuration because you don't need to manage or to configure this. By default, it should take all the available storage to present the data. They should create network storage in which the administrator doesn't have to manage or configure this part. They should work on the deployment and storage.

They should lower the price. If they did they would fall into a more competitive market because the price does scare a lot of potential customers away when they get the quote. Otherwise, I never had to call tech support. I actually met up with one of their consultants just three days before I went for deployment. It was the very first time I'd actually tested the software, and that was enough for me to go to the site and get all the work done. There's one area in which they should make the software simpler with the deployment. If they can make it just a few steps easier, it will be unbeatable. I'm technically experienced so it was simple, but others who aren't as experienced might struggle. If they can simplify the software slightly for the installation, that would make all the difference.

We could always use a performance upgrade, or simplified management. The features I would most like to see added would be: compatibility for HV, improvement to the cloud features, and more private features.

The GUI for this solution needs improvement.

I think that there are several areas that they can improve slightly, including the mail servers, the application servers, and perhaps even the database servers. If we can have certified compatibility with other companies, such as Oracle, then it would let us know that they function correctly together.

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 which isn't very attractive. This has been address in a first step using storage only nodes which are essentially an intelligent disk shelf (mainly SATA) with its own virtual SDS appliance preinstalled. Storage nodes are managed directly by the Nutanix cluster (hypervisor isn't visible and no hypervisor license necessary). While this is going 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 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 builtin 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.)