Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

In our company, we use the solution for workload management. Our company has chosen Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure as its best solution in the market on scalability, and it gets easily deployed in a hybrid cloud. In our company, we move the workload to on-premises or sometimes to the cloud. 

The solution has allowed our organization to reduce space in the data centers and the system to consume only an hour of power. Power consumption has been reduced by 50%with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. 

The solution requires a limited number of components in the stack, software, and hardware. It's a robust and stable solution. Maintenance is not required for Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, which is operating in the best condition in our company. I personally believe Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure to be the best solution I have worked with in my 16-year career. 

In our company, we believe the solution has more features than required. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is used for basic security and performance needs; we don't need advanced features such as flow and embedded firewalls.   

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for seven years.

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

It's a highly scalable solution. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. Our organization has around 700 users of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. Our company doesn't plan to increase the solution's usage in the near future. The solution is mainly used by IT experts. 

Useful documentation is available for the solution and minor issues can be easily fixed by our company team on their own. Our organization rarely needed to contact tech support, probably just once every six years. 

Our company uses the community edition of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and the setup process was satisfyingly simple. I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. The deployment process of the solution can be finished within an hour. 

It's a cost-effective solution. Our company conducted extensive market research for enterprise solutions but found Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure to be the most affordable and suitable for our organization. 

I have used VMware, Proxmox and other competitor solutions, but at our company, we found Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure to be the best for our organization's use cases. The solution is faster and easier to manage than other competitor tools and doesn't require enhanced skills. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is an efficient solution that functions with limited resources. 

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure can be used up to 100% of its capacity, but our company is presently using 80% of the solution's resources. Our company manufactures iron casting products in the metal industry, and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is also used. 

For virtualization purposes, Nutanix Acropolis is used as a full-stack solution. For the Windows virtual machines in our company's server, Nutanix Acropolis is utilized instead of solutions like VMware Hypervisor. 

One of the main reasons our company adopted Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure was its data protection features. The solution is also used in disaster recovery through the automatic snapshots feature on the local site. Next year, our organization will try to join clusters in the network using the solution.

Network clustering will help our organization's team move workloads into the geographical cluster automatically. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is considered an ideal solution for disaster recovery where data protection remains embedded. The solution is capable of even capturing auto snapshots for remote sites. 

Next year, our company plans to test new features of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure that will assist in automated workload movements on two sides at a distance of 60 kilometers. I would recommend others use the solution for its exceptional stability, performance, hardware compatibility, and overall flexibility. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure allows the use of varying hardware for the same cluster. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten overall. 

We use the solution in a growing industry where the expansion of servers is critical. The expansion power is pretty accomplished. I can add a node or change hardware easily.

The web application on the servers has been a game changer. It was expensive before. It used to be a headache. It used to take weeks if we had a crash. Now, we can fix everything and put everything as it was within hours. 

The management is very easy. You can see everything within a single platform to manage your databases. Everything is there on a single dashboard. 

NCI's features helped our organization reduce downtime greatly. We use it effectively for replication as well. 

The ability to restore within seconds is great. It takes a few seconds to rewind back to a previous marker and have everything up and running again. 

We migrated other services over to Nutanix. For example, we migrated over from Microsoft Hyper-V. This allows us to manage everything from one single platform and to save on licenses. We no longer have to license all of these different types of hardware. 

It's easy to launch on demand if you are using a newer OS. 

The feature that is lacking right now is the backup. It does not have good backup feature tools, like having templates or being able to back up every two or three days. 

I've been using the solution for almost five years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues. 

We have the solution in one central location. Everyone connects to it remotely. the number of end users fluctuates. It could be 200 to 300 users. 

It's very easy to scale. It's the main reason we chose it. It's easy to add nodes and resources. 

They assign you according to the time you call. If I'm calling after hours, I'll be assigned to someone in another country.

Positive

We used to use XenServer, Hyper-V, and vSphere among other solutions. We decided to consolidate everything under one console to save on licensing and having to check multiple places. It makes manageability and the ability to extend easier. 

I was involved with the deployment. There were five people involved. The deployment itself was pretty straightforward. That said, it did take some time. We gradually moved the servers. We kept both operating to make sure everything was running, then moved off the older servers slowly.

In the case of hardware failures, we'd inform the supplier. Otherwise, the software is upgraded every six months. There is very little maintenance required beyond that. 

We did use a reseller to assist us with the initial setup. Our experience with them was very positive. 

We can easily provision servers and add nodes on the fly without shutting down. There are no limitations either, beyond having the proper licensing. It's the easy extension of resources where we see the ROI. 

They were pretty aggressive coming into the market and the solution started as a cheap option, however, the price is now going up as they mature. 

We looked into Simplivity. The main difference was the cost between the two options. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. 

I'd advise people to try it out. However, ensure that you lock in your price over the next three to five years so that incremental changes do not affect your contract.

We use NCI in the transportation domain. 

The tool is simple, stable, and easy to upgrade. It also requires few resources to manage, which simplifies our work. The solution's ease of upgrading is its valuable feature. AHV, provided by Nutanix, is excellent in performance and ease of use. It's based on an open-source product called KVM, which I also use for other services.

Data protection and disaster recovery features have been beneficial for our work. With these features, we're able to create a high-availability environment where if one node goes down, another one takes over.

NCI's pricing is expensive. 

I have been using the product for six years. 

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

I rate NCI's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 1500 users. 

The solution's support is excellent.

Positive

The deployment process usually takes around a week, depending on whether you need to migrate your systems to a hypervisor environment. It can be quite easy if you already have that setup, especially with something like VMware.

For me ROI is the tool's stability. 

Reconsidering the licensing packages could reduce the price, especially for companies that may not need all the bells and whistles. Many of the features are based on open-source software, so there's potential to offer more flexible pricing options. Additionally, with the right expertise, companies could potentially create similar environments themselves, reducing the need for extensive support and licensing costs. I rate its pricing a six out of ten. The tool costs around 300,000 dollars per year. 

I rate the tool an eight out of ten. I am exploring new technologies because the market was different when I implemented NCI six years ago. Keeping up with changes is important, so I'm currently evaluating new options. I am looking to KVM. You should use NCI if you can afford it. 

It is a universal public cloud. It caters to our current usage of a private cloud. It ensures performance and security, whether on-premises or in a hybrid setup, offering us a cost-effective solution. It has enterprise data services with consolidated storage data protection and disaster recovery. We are also running Microsoft SQL Server on the tool.

The tool facilitated the consolidation of our organization's applications by combining storage and completing configurations. This has enhanced the effectiveness and availability of our applications. Consolidated storage, data protection, disaster recovery, and virtualization contribute to its commendable performance and service delivery.

One valuable aspect is its efficiency as a robust platform. It can also be updated with a single feed. Mainly, there is an ease of managing all processes. It effectively minimizes downtime with features like container management and robust networking capabilities. Additionally, the data recovery process is remarkably fast, enabling us to swiftly retrieve and restore information within a short period.

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 have been using this solution for two years.

It’s a stable solution.

The product is scalable. It accommodates around 200 users in my company. One administrator handles the administration part.

In my organization, we used VMware, and when comparing it with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, the latter stands out for its high performance and efficient and robust infrastructure. It provides high-speed live migration capability. We migrated from VMware to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

My team executed the initial setup.

I recommend the solution because it can converge the data center stack, including computing, storage, networking, and installation, all under one umbrella. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our clients use Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for technology refresh, workload consolidation, and data-driven infrastructure.

Our clients run VMware and other enterprise applications on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has helped our clients reduce downtime.

It has helped our clients reduce their data center footprint, increase their performance, and simplify management.

Our clients have migrated their services from different hypervisors to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

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

I have been selling Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for ten years.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is extremely stable.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is highly scalable.

The technical support is excellent.

Positive

We previously offered a three-tier architecture but switched to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for its reduced data center footprint, improved manageability, and enhanced performance.

Initial deployment is straightforward. We have implemented hundreds of deployments. For example, in one deployment, we consolidated a physical and virtual environment that existed on a three-tier architecture and physical server onto a complete virtualized infrastructure on Nutanix Cloud.

Two people were required for deployment.

Our clients have seen a return on investment using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. One of our clients was able to expand his storage without having to purchase an entirely new infrastructure for his new application.

The initial cost is affordable but the renewal fees are high.

We evaluated Cisco HyperFlex, Dell VxRail, and HPE SimpliVity. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has better features, local team support, and hardware associations.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure an eight out of ten.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's application and database performance is more seamless compared to the traditional solutions.

Our clients value Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's ability to offer a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises, Edge, and multiple hosted managed and public clouds.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure requires maintenance.

Upgrading is easy to do. Adding storage on demand is a moderate task.

We have a lot of servers. Previously, they used to be physical servers. Managing all those physical servers was difficult. Many times hardware used to fail and there was a disruption of services. After we moved to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, life got a lot easier. We have deployed more than 80 VMs in a cluster.

We have many homegrown applications that we run on Nutanix. We have a customized web portal and applications. They are customized for our business.

Nutanix NCI’s features help our organization reduce downtime. We use RA3 stuff in our clusters. If there is any issue with the hardware, node, or something else, my cluster is up and running. Over these three years, we have probably upgraded the Nutanix software twice or thrice. We had to restart nodes multiple times during this upgrade, and none of our users felt that something was going on. They did not have any issues related to slow response or no response from the applications while we had to shut down one of the nodes, put it into maintenance, apply the patches, bring the node up, and then make it join the cluster. It was smooth.

It has helped with consolidation. Previously, we had more than 40 servers, and now we have only 6 nodes. It is a lot easier to manage these 6 nodes. With the hardware, if something goes wrong, such as the hard disk showing amber, I have to create a ticket, share the logs, and then the engineer will come and check. After that, the part will come. It can come at 2 AM or 4 AM. We have to be physically present. They will shut down the server, take out that hard disk, and replace the hard disk, and then we will have to bring up the service. We have to spend a lot of time.

They have a product for database management called Nutanix Era, but we do not use that. We have not deployed it over here. We primarily use this HCI for making VMs and running web applications and their databases. We have migrated database services but not through the Nutanix Era. We have our own system, so we used that. The purpose of migration was to have a single pane of glass for management. The downtime is less, and the service becomes a smooth service. The users who are using the service are happy.

A lot of features are there, but for us, on the server administration side, creating a clone of the VM is valuable because many times, we have to deploy security patches. For deploying these patches, it helps to have a clone so that if something goes wrong, we can discard that VM and put back the clone VM. That is a very cool feature.

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.

I have been working with this solution for more than two years.

It is stable. Its reliability is very good. In the last three to four years, we have not faced any outages. It is smooth on the hardware side and the software side.

We first thought of deploying about 40 VMs, and now, we are running more than 80 VMs, so a lot of scalability options are there. If you have a smooth augmentation, all the capabilities are there. 

We have plans to use our present data center for DR. We will build a new DC, and we will be deploying another set of Nutanix clusters over there. 

Their support is very good. Whenever we found any issue, we raised a ticket, and there was always an expert who had discussions with us and helped us. If required, they do a remote session and help us out. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have not worked with any similar solution previously.

In terms of the deployment model, we have an on-prem cloud. In terms of the initial setup, the Nutanix team took care of building the clusters. For such a solution, we create a service request, and they set up the entire cluster. After the cluster is ready, they hand it over to us for creating VMs and migrating applications to those VMs.

Its maintenance is easy. You can do it with a few clicks. There are interfaces, and you need to do checks for those interfaces. You need to look for the long-term support version and follow the procedure. Overall, it is smooth.

For the deployment and initial setup, there is usually one person from Nutanix. From the hardware vendor team, there are usually one or two people, and then there are two people from our side. One is from the software side, and one is from the network side for IP allocations and other related things.

We also evaluated VMware, but at that time, VMware was not mature, and it was not within our requirements. That was the reason why we chose this solution. Another reason was that our technical evaluation team found Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure to be more suitable for our architecture.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure a nine out of ten.

Any single server or one-plus-one server is very difficult to manage if there is hardware failure. But with this solution, the transition is seamless because a 10-plus-one redundancy is built into the system.

With the click of a button, we can migrate the services to other servers. We have never had any downtime and we are a 24/7 operation. Production has continued,

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure also helps us to optimize power utilization and the rack space used in the data center, resulting in overall energy savings.

These were immediate advantages because, eight to 10 years back, this was a new technology. We tried it with our less critical operations, and we slowly introduced more production-critical workloads.

Also, we were using Active Directory and other SQL databases on individual servers. We were able to consolidate them into a single database. That helps with ease of operations and enables taking backups from a single place. We migrated all our standard database structures and we don't need a cluster mechanism because the cluster or failover mechanism is built into the Nutanix architecture.

It gives us a single dashboard to control multiple sites and multiple zones. It helps to do things on a single platform and data sharing is quite easy. The network and the security are easy to manage.

I would like to see more Kubernetes and container-related workflows and multiple cloud-partner management. I would also like to see how they will synergize all these AI/ML functionalities that are available on other platforms. We need to see those intelligent functionalities included.

I've been working with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for almost eight years.

It's quite stable. We have never had any downtime.

For any on-prem or hybrid solution, it is highly scalable and easy to manage. We expect to increase our usage of NCI.

We used VMware which was helpful for a lot of things, but in terms of the scalability, the main thing was the central storage architecture. That became a bottleneck. Scaling up the storage was a little difficult. When it came to usability and ease of management, we decided to go with Nutanix.

The initial deployment was straightforward. It took less than a week, including doing the application migration. It was quite easy to create an image of the existing bare-metal infrastructure and migrate that image to the new solution. We always did it on a weekend or during a window of downtime at night.

We have it deployed in a single data center and we have under 100 users.

There is minimal maintenance. Upgrading is quite easy. Adding compute or storage on demand is also quite easy because we get a compute-only node or a storage-only node and add the nodes to meet requests for the CPU or storage requirements. These tasks are managed by the IT infrastructure team.

We used a reseller, and we had four or five people involved from IT and database administration.

The primary objective was to reduce downtime. That means we can't assess ROI  in terms of monetary value. It is more an issue of reliability.

It is slightly more expensive compared to a standard, on-prem, bare-metal configuration. There is about a 30 percent overhead there. That is the pricing in the Indian scenario.

The single dashboard is an additional cost option.

VMware is the only competition I can think of.

A standard SAN solution is quite fast in terms of storage, if you size it well, but the main challenge with a SAN solution will be scaling up. If it's not sized and planned well, it will be a big challenge and we would need to invest huge money in the SAN architecture.

It is quite comprehensive, all the toolsets are available, so there aren't many limitations. If you are looking for hybrid or on-prem virtualization, Nutanix is the preferred choice. The things that stand out are the scalability and ease of use. For a CIO, what is relevant is how scalable and reliable the solution is.

We have four Nutanix clusters at different sites and we are using it as our hyper-converged infrastructure solution.

By using more than one cluster, if any node is down, the VMs can be moved to a remaining node, and that helps us to work without any downtime. A node can be moved, online, to another node, which minimizes downtime as much as possible.

Flow Network Security for microsegmentation also helps in maintaining security. For example, we can protect servers with policies between an application server and a database server.

Previously we had our own storage, stand-alone servers, and stand-alone network. For any new project, it would take us at least six months until we could provide a new server. Now, when we have a new product, we can avoid that long wait and provide a server in hours. 

We have also moved all our servers to Nutanix and have been able to eliminate our legacy servers and infrastructure.

And it keeps our IT staff informed by email regarding any error or alert. They log in and get a full view of all our servers, including memory, storage, and CPU usage. It helps our IT staff to be more productive.

The most valuable aspect of Nutanix is the performance of the storage, which is excellent. And controlling compute, storage, the network, and security all together in one box is very efficient for us. It gives us a single platform to manage all our infrastructure.

It's so easy to configure anything on Nutanix. We have had Nutanix for more than five years and all our products are on it. It's really easy to manage them. We can monitor our servers and get notified if there is any issue with a server and correct it before a problem happens.

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

We have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for five years.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues with Nutanix.

It's so easy to scale out or scale in our infrastructure.

If we have any issue, we contact their support and they solve it within the SLA time. They are very helpful and respond to us as soon as possible.

Positive

We had another solution, VxRail. We did a comparison between Dell VxRail and Nutanix and we found that Nutanix is more compatible with our organization.

The initial deployment was easy.

We installed Nutanix in multiple locations: at three sites in Egypt and one in Indonesia. We have the main site and a DR site in Egypt. There are three people on our IT team who administer the four clusters.

We have had to do maintenance on the hard disk two times in the last four years. And upgrading our Nutanix servers takes one click. We have upgraded our firmware and AHV and it is so easy. It's also very easy to add compute and storage. We just click to expand a cluster and add new nodes.

Nutanix has helped us to reduce the cost of the operations in our company.

The price of Nutanix is lower than other products.

My advice is to purchase Nutanix. It will help with your infrastructure.