Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

The consolidated storage: no need to use central storage that has a performance penalty. For example, while using central storage that enables file-sharing NAS services & SAN services, when one VM had an IO overload, all the VMs in the same data store in the VMware environment on the same LUN suffered from I/O latency. Now, in the new consolidated storage, this does not happen.

We can deploy VM as a service & we can perform updates on the nodes without downtime in a very simple, direct way.

The improvement needed is for elastic clusters, meaning the ability to depart and join nodes in an automatic way. We have a laboratory that needs to perform bare metal tests and therefore needs to unjoin the nodes from the cluster and later on join them back.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, but we are about to add another node to the cluster and it should be a very simple task .

Technical support is very good, and good with responsive time.

We were using central storage and suffered from bad performance latency.

Initial setup was straightforward.

At the time we checked, this solution was unique.

Perform resizing. Check the needs and deploy only what is needed. Check the memory DIMMs and make sure for the price you get, you have free DIMMs.

We Added a dedicated switch for this cluster so that all layer 2 networking will be in this switch and separate from the main routers.

Our company was in a high growth period, tripling in size within 30 months. Our demand was outstripping our ability to provide additional capacity.

With traditional converged infrastructure (Vblock), the length of our acquisition cycle (analyze, predict, design, justify, procure, manufacture, deliver, install, configure, and provision) was in excess of six months.

We were able to respond to demand more quickly and with less hysteria with Nutanix.

When I left the company, we had decided to use Nutanix to build out our non-production development environment and use the Vblocks only for production and bare metal.

• Speed of acquisition and ease of deployment
• Shorter timeline from PO, to delivery, to operation than converged infrastructure solutions like Vblock
• Able to grow with smaller, more linear increments of investment

Performance was not bad, but it could be better. I never fielded complaints from developers or users, but benchmark testing indicated that workloads did slightly better on our Vblock by a few percentage points.

This wasn’t a major concern, as our stated use case for Nutanix was purely non-production.

We did not encounter any significant stability issues that I was aware of at my level.

It scales nicely if your workloads are predictable and you build for the right mix of storage and compute.

I had no complaints from my engineers with regard to the technical support.

We previously used Vblocks for nearly everything, production and non-production, and we were in a high growth phase.

The large incremental purchase cycles of Vblocks in terms of cost and lead time were causing significant distress.

We had also struggled through some difficult RCM upgrades on the Vblocks. Nutanix was just so much easier to manage and deploy.

We were in the process of migrating non-production to Nutanix and keeping only production on the Vblocks when I left the company in early 2016.

My engineers raved about the ease of setup and configuration, especially when compared to a Vblock.

I wasn’t directly involved in the original purchase. My initial reaction was that we either overpaid or Nutanix was overpriced.

But our experience with the product was very positive and subsequent pricing from the VAR seemed more reasonable. Competition is a good thing.

The team that did the evaluation was not my team so I can’t speak about the specifics. I know they looked at SympliVity as well and there was some lively discussion around the merits of both products.

The market for hyper-converged is competitive and rapidly changing. Take a look around.

Prism and Clustering.

It can help my customers achieve their business goals in the simplest way. It’s simple and reliable.

Nutanix needs more development on DRC solutions embedded in Acropolis.

We have used this solution for five or six months.

For now, it is stable enough.

The scalability is great and simple.

Technical support is good.

The installation was straightforward.

Pricing and licensing are good.

We have tried VMware solutions: vSphere, vCenter, vSOM, and SRM.

• Compression, deduplication, and erasure coding
• Central management using prism
• Capacity management and planning using prism central
• One click upgrade to the Nutanix OS as well as for hypervisor
• Easily scalable with no downtime
• Provides WAN optimization for replication to remote sites

• Centralized monitoring of infrastructure
• Easy and quick deployment of VMs
• Single SME for all domains like storage, OS, and hypervisor
• Compression deduplication and erasure coding have improved storage usage by almost three times
• Protection domain allows you to compress data and transfer over WAN and helps you to move a VM to DR with a single click
• Centralized management helps you monitor storage and compute resources at the cluster and VM level in a single plane

I would like to see improvements in monitoring parameters, RTO, and access control. Currently, memory utilization does not show as per the actual. This is in pipeline for the next release. The current RPO for DC-DR is high due to the limitation of the replication strategy which will be fixed by next quarter.

We have used this solution for three months.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

As of now, we haven’t required support, but it is good.

The installation is simple. You can more or less plug and play.

Depends upon what OEM you factor for hardware and the relationship between them. The software license seems to be pretty simple.

We evaluated Cisco HyperFlex and SimpliVity.

You can have optimal results from ROI and the infrastructure deployment perspective if the solution is designed properly. I would suggest that you spell out your requirements clearly before Nutanix starts building the solution.

Nutanix provides an all-in-one solution for operating our datacenter. Nutanix also provides out-of-the-box redundancy, built in storage savings with compression, deduplication, and erasure coding. All administrative functions are clustered and require no other hardware or software.

Nutanix provides a more agile platform with the ability to spin up and down various workloads on demand, provision developer workstations from a master copy, and protect production workloads with built-in DR sync. Incremental capacity growth helps with budgeting issues as we only buy what we need, when we need it.

There is always room for improvement. One area Nutanix can improve on is DevOps automation. While there is some built-in capability via REST service exposure, a more robust automation controller would be welcome. The recent purchase of Calm.io seems to be a step in this direction.

We have been using Nutanix for just over three years.

We are three years into running Nutanix with zero downtime issues. We have replaced one disk.

Scalability is simple and linear with Nutanix. We have expanded our clusters with additional nodes, and each node provides both capacity and performance. We have also added an all flash cluster to run our heavy I/O workloads.

The initial deployment with Nutanix was quite simple. You just provide IP addresses, pick your virtualization platform (VMWare, Hyper-V, Acropolis) and in about an hour, you have a cluster online and ready to deploy workloads.

I would advise new customers to work with their local reseller and local Nutanix representative and negotiate the best deal they can. I think it helps to keep in mind not only the tangible benefits, but also the intangible benefits. The initial cost can appear to be steep, but when you consider the advantages to IT agility and simplicity, it begins to make more sense.

Before choosing Nutanix, we had looked at a few different options. Option one was to expand current SAN/Servers. We looked at a few others in the early days of “hyper-convergence” such as SimpliVity, Scale Computing, Maxta and Pivot3. The only vendor with a complete solution in our minds was Nutanix.

I would advise anyone looking for a complete in-house, cloud-like solution to consider Nutanix a prime player. The technology is solid, and the support (both sales and technical) are top line.

Prospective customers should use Nutanix sales and technical engineers to get a complete understanding of the product. I personally don’t see a lot of benefit for PoCs. The concept has already been fairly well proven in the IT industry.

• Small footprint: Our datacenter was already pretty full and we would have had to increase its size and add more electrical and cooling. None of that had to be done when we went to Nutanix. We now increase the capacity of our datacenter without having to add more square footage, while increasing its horsepower, allowing us to run more servers utilizing less space than before.
• High performance
• Many hypervisors supported: Supporting more than one hypervisor allowed us to test different scenarios and didn’t lock us into just one option, like VMware.
• Has its own Hypervisor Acropolis

We condensed four racks of physical servers into one rack taking up 2U of space.

It has the ability to connect to Azure or AWS for storing backups. I would like to have the capability to spin up a backup on Azure or AWS for disaster recovery purposes.
Right now, you can only send a backup to either Azure or AWS. We would like to take a backup and spin it up to an actual server that could be connected to by users from the outside. This is on their (Nutanix) roadmap but the functionality doesn’t exist at this time.

I have used it for five years.

NO issues with stability; had a few minor software bugs that were more annoying, but not disruptive.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. To date, I believe the biggest customer has 1000 nodes.

Support is fantastic and they will even help with issues related to VMware if that is the hypervisor you are running.

We switched from traditional SAN and servers because we needed a smaller footprint while dramatically increasing performance and scalability.

Five years ago, the setup was complex (everything was more manual, like upgrading the operating system), but today a large part is automated; for example, the OS upgrade is now a one-click upgrade.

Make sure you know what features you want, as they have three software licensing editions: Starter, Pro and Ultimate (https://www.nutanix.com/products/software-editions/).

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Simplivity, Stormagic SvSAN, and VMware VSAN.

Make sure you find a good partner who has extensive experience with this. Also, if you are just doing server virtualization, then evaluate their free Hypervisor Acropolis and you can save quite a bit on not having to buy VMware.

• One-click updates
• Auto-/self-healing

We had a real disaster back in 2014. Our customer data centre was hit by a flood that was about two meters. When the water level approached the data centre, we triggered the DR features. Once DR completely had taken place, we unmounted the production unit from the rack server and kept the 2U unit in a safe place.

They need to add features for software-defined networking and network security. The multi-tenant features need to add charge back/metering.

I have been using it since 2013.

We are currently maintaining Nutanix 2 cluster NX3350, 1 cluster 2 NX6235, 1 cluster NX 1460 and NX 3450; NOS Version 4.3 and AOS 4.6.

We encountered stability issues during NOS 3.0, but it was not a big issue as we get support from Nutanix.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

I previously used a three-tier design for virtualization. Managing three types of hardware vendors (server, SAN switch & SAN Storage) is troublesome.

Initial setup was complex. Our costumer has multiple clusters for production, development & testing. Each of them were use a different network segment. They also use multitenancy features to serve other departments.

Nutanix licensing and pricing is premium compared to other hyperconverged infrastructure vendors.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated VMware vSAN.

Leveraging the Nutanix Acropolis would save on hypervisor licensing.

With Nutanix, you can't mix up the OEM hardware with other vendors such as Dell or Lenovo. There are more issues on the commercial side. When it comes to support, a mixed cluster will create haywire between those hardware vendors.

My rating reflects comparing the experience of managing a three-tier architecture for visualization with a hyperconverged solution.

The most valuable features are Prism and Acropolis, as they simplified our jobs and give us the opportunity to lower operational costs without reducing the current day-to-day operation performance.

We are using VMware 3-TIER architecture since 2006. Up until this day we’re still using the architecture until we could not expand the cluster anymore. Thus, we need to find a way to migrate our VM servers before it’s too late. The architecture using old traditional SANS storage and AMD processors platform. We’re stuck with VMware version 5.1 and can’t be upgrade to latest version due to the hardware limitation. Maintaining this architecture is not cheap also, as we need to pay annual maintenance to hardware vendors and VMware. It keeps increasing every year.

Our customers demand more processing power and more storage, and then we came across Nutanix, which could solve all burden that we have.

1. We hosting a lot of SAP wintel apps, and this kind of apps is storage and processor hungry. We keep facing downtime when we hosting the VM servers on our old architecture. When we decide to migrate the VM servers to Nutanix , we no longer facing the issue and no more complaint from our customers.

2. The maintenance contract is lower compared to annual maintenance/support contract that we must pay to VMware and hardware vendors. We will get the ROI back in short time if we move to Nutanix.

3. Can be manage through one single console (PRISM) oppose to SAN switches , SAN , VMware , Hardware consoles on old architecture.

4. We experienced a nightmare in term of support on old architecture, where we need to gather VMware engineer and Hardware vendor to solve an issue, and it takes a long time to solve. Nutanix assure us that they can solve Hypervisor and hardware issues within a single call log.

5. Nutanix offer features like data deduplication on its storage, which are not available on our old SANS storage.

6. We hosted our DC on 3rd party DC (leasing based on square feet), we can decom a lot of old servers (which can fill up the space and increase the rental) when we moved to Nutanix. 3 racks of old servers with SAN storage can be consolidate to one rack (still have a lot of spaces to put Nutanix boxes).

As opposed to before, the Nutanix platform allows us to pay as we grow instead starting with a large scale. Management seems to like this idea, as it will save us from overspending the budget. We can improve IT utilization and reduce costs by consolidating application infrastructure.

We're thinking about hosting SAP HANA on the Nutanix platform, but we are still unsure about the path as SAP still has not certified Nutanix to host SAP HANA yet. Nutanix should make SAP a close partner and certify their product with SAP so that the consumer has a choice to migrate their existing platform to Nutanix platform.

As far as I'm concerned, and we already ran the test on an actual Nutanix box, Nutanix can host the HANA without issue. However, without certification from SAP, it looks like we don’t have a guarantee from SAP itself. That will cause us to question whether we should go with the Nutanix platform.

I have been using it for about five months, and we just got approval from our management to expand the cluster and buy additional hardware from Nutanix.

So far, the operation has gone smoothly without any big issues, although there was a small bug when we tried the one-click update to upgrade all nodes’ firmware. Some nodes did not finish the update. We are resolving it with Nutanix support, so it's fine. It did not impact system uptime.

I have not encountered any scalability issues at all. We can easily scale this platform as we need.

Technical support is 9/10; only one call to local support and then if it hasn’t been resolved, a Nutanix engineer will help to resolve either hardware or hypervisor issues. It gives us really good assurance and we can sleep peacefully at night.

Previously, we used three-tier architecture, which has lots of points for failure and a lot of consoles need to be attended. It's so tiring and most of the time, we are firefighting to make sure the operation can continue as business as usual. It required a lot of skills and a large sum of money to maintain and to scale, which were painful for us.

Initial setup was straightforward. It takes only one day or less to build up the cluster and provision the virtual machines.

The pricing is good for us and just what we are looking for. We can cut off the VMware license and maintenance support, and migrate to Acropolis instead.

We evaluated SimpliVity and HPE solutions. Both failed us in term of economical cost and did not offer features that Nutanix has.

You have an option to start small instead of going big at first, which will capitalize your budget. You can ask for a loaner unit from Nutanix to play with; to check and verify their performance and match it to your requirements.

Nutanix treats us well. We can say we are happy with the Nutanix offering.