Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

• Overall performance of the platform
• Scalability
• Ease of implementation
• Management GUI Prism

On storage side, these features are very useful:

• Deduplication
• Compression
• Erasure coding
• Snapshots
• Asynchronous replication.

The One-Click upgrades are awesome and work well.

The standardized system check using NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) performs over 150 checks to determine potential issues.

AFS and ABS are just great!!

Green datacenter: Significant reduction in time provisioning as well as daily administration and management activities.

Hyper-converged: Storage, compute, and network are all in a single dashboard.

• More 10GB physical ports
• CVM resource requirement/consumption

Four years.

Nutanix Professional Services personnel are awesome. They make deployment seem so easy.

Not yet.

Scalability is very flexible as far as a compute or storage need is concerned.

Customer service personnel are very knowledgeable and work real hard to determine the root cause and provide a permanent solution, not a band aid approach.

A nine out of a possible 10.

I switched from my previous solution to Nutanix, because this is my first hyper-converged solution.

Very straightforward.

We implemented through Nutanix Professional Services.

ROI was seen as soon as we went live with the system. it has lower hardware maintenance costs and less power consumption,

Pricing and licensing are definitely not cheap, but not bad either.

SimpliVity and FlashStack.

Processes that used to take hours to complete have been drastically improved due to the nature of Nutanix. Data locality means things complete faster and our users now have more time to complete their work rather than having to wait for a certain job to finish before they can continue on.

• One-Click upgrades
• Software defined storage
• The capacity savings

One click upgrades are an absolute godsend. Being able to upgrade our entire cluster with the click of a button during business hours with zero downtime has made managing our infrastructure so easy. Previously, we had to schedule downtime to perform upgrades on our infrastructure and that quickly becomes painful and time consuming.

Because the entire Nutanix system is contained in a VM, we don't have to reboot physical hosts to apply patches. It's just a restart of a guest VM and we're off. This also brings amazing space saving capabilities (given that it's software-defined) across the hot and cold tiers by way of compression, deduplication, and erasure coding.

Given all the amazing features, there is room for improvement around the support ability of different hypervisors. Sure, Nutanix now supports four hypervisors but they are not all at feature parity. If you want all the benefits of Nutanix, you need to be on AHV. For some businesses, that's just not an option. I find we miss out on some of the great features due to being on ESX.

No issues at all with stability.

No.

Customer Service:

This is where my experience varies. Previously, I had deployed Nutanix with Dell hardware, and currently, I have deployed Nutanix on Nutanix hardware.

Customer support through Nutanix is excellent. Regardless of the level of priority, I usually hear back from Nutanix support in less than three hours from when I submit a support request.

With Dell kits, you have to call Dell support first who then liaise with Nutanix support. So, there is a bit of a breakdown and resolution that takes a little longer because you don't have direct access to Nutanix support.

Technical Support:

Again, my experience varies.

Nutanix support, amazing. I can't fault them. They know the product and can resolve your issues fast.

Dell support, not as great. Mainly because they aren't Nutanix employees. It's because of this that they aren't as knowledgeable and have to hand off to Nutanix support for more complex issues.

In both organisations where I worked, which migrated to Nutanix, we were on traditional 3-tier architecture. We switched over to Nutanix for the ease of management, scalability, and performance gains. In both organisations, we were on aging hardware and it needed to be refreshed.

It is very straightforward. The deployment process is extremely easy thanks to the 'foundation' process. A simple WebUI that guides you through the deployment process and imaging of your new nodes.

Both implementations were done by me. With the ease of deployment, I didn't feel it necessary to engage a vendor.

I haven't calculated it yet.

While cost may seem higher than your traditional 3-tier architecture, you need to look at the bigger picture. You're not just buying hardware here. You're buying a complete environment that not only is super-fast to deploy, it's amazingly easy to manage. I find that I'm spending less time managing my infrastructure and more time listening to the businesses needs and tailoring our infrastructure to their needs.

We looked at SimpliVity and VMware vSAN.

The Nutanix Prism interface is the most beautiful interface I had ever used in any software. The simplicity and fluency of the HTML 5 interface gives a one-of-a-kind user experience. It provides full visibility into and management of my complete virtual infrastructure. The integration to VMware vCenter gives added value, so you don't have to rely on different interfaces for basic VM management.

As I have been using Nutanix since 2014, I have seen approximately five major release versions. Each release provided improvements in performance and new features enhancements. The best part of it is that you just update to get the new features and improvements.

I would definitely love to see single and two-node cluster setup, as well native network virtualization/micro-segmentation capabilities. These are already announced features and much anticipated. I would also love to get application visibility within the Prism management console with more RBAC capabilities.

Since July, 2014.

So far I have not faced any major issues with stability of the Nutanix platform.

Although I have not scaled my current cluster, as it is enough for my company, as Systems Integrators we have implemented dozens of clusters and scaled without any issues.

One of the best things about Nutanix as a company is it's best of class support. The support model has no support levels and the assigned engineer is an expert not only in Nutanix, but in hypervisors and other components as well. They are correctly called Systems Reliability Engineers (SRE), and deserve an NPS of 90-plus.

Yes, we were using traditional server plus storage infrastructure. As we partnered with Nutanix we decided to evaluate it ourselves before we recommended it to our customers. And it’s worth it.

Foundation of the system initialization is provided by Nutanix. They take care of the complete installation and initial configuration, while you take a sip of coffee.

Although Nutanix cannot be compared directly with any other products on market, it’s worth every penny spent. Most of the features are available in the starter version, and the license can be easily upgraded to activate or deactivate more advanced features without any downtime, cluster evacuation, or rebuild.

Yes, we evaluated a few other hyper-converged platforms, but Nutanix was the obvious choice because of its software-only structure with no dependence on hardware components.

I would highly recommend considering Nutanix for any kind of workload, whether VDI, server virtualization, databases, Exchange or Big Data. I will say Nutanix gives system administrators their lives back; no weekend upgrades or issues. The one-click feature is truly a single-click for any upgrade, including Nutanix AOS, hypervisor, firmware, etc.

Hyper-convergence makes the whole datacenter simpler. I don’t need anymore to manage servers, SAN, and storage as I used to, but instead, manage everything from one simple and complete dashboard. I can manage my resources to I get any information I need to monitor and scale.

Hypervisor agnostic. I can use VMware or Hyper-V license, if I already have. But if I use a similar solution as Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) that comes embedded in Nutanix solution, I can manage all my virtual environments with everything I need without spending more money on licenses.

AHV is a great hypervisor but still limited compared to VMware. AHV is the one product they must improve.

I’ve implemented and operated Nutanix in several different situations. Never had an issue in all those cases.

I’ve just scaled such a solution twice and never had a problem. Sometimes I don’t find the new appliances through the web console, but I use CLI for that situation without a problem.

Never used it before.

I work either with Dell EMC VxRail, but this product is tied with VMware ESXi which requires expensive licenses. It is also a great solution if you have already those licenses. VxRail has a limit in scalability (64) in the 3.5 version.

Sometimes I had to install it twice to put on the solution. Errors in the middle of installation require you retry, then it goes well. Other than that, it is very simple and does not requires deep knowledge.

I know Nutanix and VxRail have similar prices and licenses. Nutanix is a go-ahead if AHV is used as hypervisor because it is already embedded in the price.

I have some customers who tried Cisco HyperFlex and HPE HC380 besides VMware vSAN. None of these were so attractive as Nutanix when they compared hypervisor flexibility, scalability, and support.

Nutanix is the first and the biggest hyper-convergence company in the world. VxRail is also a great solution as well as HPE SimpliVity, but regarding to scalability and TCO, I think Nutanix is unbeatable at this moment.

Regarding Dell EMC having a main hyper-convergence solution VCE as VxRail, Nutanix is the best seller.

It is now our single most powerful server that is easily scalable and has an HTML5 site that manages all aspects of the system.

Hyper-convergence is the most valuable feature for me as it allows me to scale the hardware according to project requirements.

It would be great if it could emulate some of the features that their competitor VMware has, for example port mirroring or Netflow output at hypervisor level.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability except for cost and feature requests.

Local support has been wonderful so far in my case, but I didn't have many support requirements for my projects.

I was using a standard server infrastructure previously and found an offer for Nutanix so we switched.

The setup was handled by our local IT vendor hence you can say it's convenient.
However I was there to observe how it was done and I can say that you need network experience to link the hardware together as the nodes inside the hardware communicate using TCP/IP.

The software is set up on the get-go (off-the-shelf) but due to my project requirements I have to customize the software, hence the complexity.

If you're willing to spend on hyper-convergence technologies be prepared to pay more and be locked down to a specific hardware vendor.

The basic license that comes with the box allows basic virtualization features but advanced automation features would require an upgrade of licenses.

Before the purchase we were evaluating VMware only.

Please be prepared to be locked down on the hardware.

There was a 30% reduction in CAPEX spending when we moved towards the Nutanix platform and we had a high ROI.

• Management is simple
• There is easy configuration
• The solution is scalable
• The product has a compact size that greatly reduces the HW/Datacenter footprint.

The product needs improvement in the areas of SAN attachment for high capacity and high I/O profile workloads.

I have not yet encountered any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical team was instrumental in resolving issues to our satisfaction.

We did not previously use a different solution on the hyper-converged platform. Apart from this solution, we converged infrastructures from EMC/HDS vendors.

The initial setup was very easy.

Pricing and licensing are easy if:

• You know which solution you are choosing the product for
• You provide the correct sizing

I did not evaluate other options.

I recommend this product for its easy implementation and its elimination of the silo approach.

We have a bunch of data warehousing servers that we have planned to migrate to the Nutanix environment, but the limitation is on the amount of capacity that is currently in the DW environment and its all traditional SAN attached. We couldn’t put the amount of data that is currently in our existing production (instead need to rework on the 10G copper connections with additional funding). That is the huge drawback, considering the infrastructure we have.

Most of the authentication processors/servers have a minimum transaction of 15k requests per second. For these types of workloads, we realized the solution doesn’t seem to fit well, leaving many of the requests either being dropped or transmission lost.

Our 125 seat VDI implementation went from barely usable, to a good alternative, to desktops. The performance of our server apps has never been better.

One-click upgrade and data locality are valuable features. The one-click upgrade provides simple management and upgrades. Data locality provides super-fast data access and ultra-low latency.

The focus on performance improvements over new features is more important to me. It is always fun to play with new buttons in the platform.

In reality, it is hard for me to find flaws in this platform because it is without comparing. For me, the fact that I run all of my workloads on Nutanix, which is a software defined datacenter platform, the biggest advantage for me is performance increases with updates. I was once asked what does "Software Defined" mean to me. My response was "a platform that allows for your next feature or performance upgrade to be as easy as a software patch or update."

To receive a performance enhancement by merely clicking the one button upgrade is the true value of the platform and what I look forward to the most. I do understand that new features provide the wow in the platform and I completely understand this value. However, for a datacenter admin, performance increases without cost, and sometimes unexpectedly delivered, is real wow.

There have been no stability issues so far.

There were no issues with scalability. It's built for scale.

Nutanix support is second to none. There has never been an issue when interacting with them.

We previously used Vblock, a converged solution. We switched for many reasons. Footprint, power, cooling, savings, and support time.

I did the setup myself in less than 45 minutes from box to data.

You get what you pay for here.

We evaluated VMware VXRail/Rack and SimpliVity. We did PoCs. The hands-down winner was Nutanix!

Do a PoC and judge for yourself. It costs nothing but time.

The Prism interface is valuable. It is very easy to manage, is based on HTML5, and all CVMs are able to assume the management role. They are not the SPOF.

Nutanix makes it easier for us to grow as the organization needs more resources. We can add more blocks and nodes in a granular way. This is unlike a traditional infrastructure that is initially invested in for four or five years.

I would like to see asynchronous replication in less than 60 minutes, or even in 15 minutes. I understand that they are working to lower replication times to one minute or less.

We have used this solution for two years.

There have been no stability issues.

There have been no scalability issues. On the contrary, it is easy to scale and approve new resources.

Technical support is fast, in our language, very efficient, and they have a great level of technical knowledge.

We used VMware vSAN. I did not change solutions for anything in particular. It was a decision of the organization, based on a corporate strategy.

The setup was very simple. It was simpler than any other solution.

If we compare prices with a three-tier environment, servers, and storage plus virtualization and licenses of VMware or Hyper-V, Nutanix has its own free hypervisor. It also natively incorporates backup and disaster recovery solution for free.

We evaluated VMware vSAN and HPE VSA.

Nutanix is a converged system with web-scale technology. The technology is invisible to the IT department. You can focus on your business, instead of making IT a problem in your organization.