Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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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.

The simplicity Prism/AHV delivers over other hypervisor solutions has dramatically alleviated the workload of our IT department without taking away granular features.

The level of statistical performance data it is able to report in real time is extremely useful. I can see what my VM’s hosts and guests are doing form a single pane of glass and identify issues before they would otherwise become apparent.

Site-to-site replication needs some work. It’s not as feature rich for a disaster recovery implementation as I would like to see, but my understanding is that it is slated for improvement in near-future releases. DRS-like functionality is also a much-desired feature that is also slated for future release. Third-party solutions are also few and far between as of right now since Nutanix is so new. In regards to third-party backup solutions, your only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex and requires intensive vendor training. We opted to use the built-in snapshot replication options to Azure.

This is so dramatically more stable than other hypervisor solutions I have used its almost hard to believe. I can do hypervisor upgrades on all my hosts with a click of a button while in production. No need to move or shut down guests or take hosts out of production, or plan off-hours maintenance windows. I don’t need to seek out updates or go extended periods of time because of a lack of awareness of updates. It’s literally as easy as you’d hope for or expect to have… probably more so.

Scalability is a non-issue, especially if you have Prism Central Pro. The only scale issue we ran into was right-sizing the environment we purchased for our existing needs. We over purchase by quite a lot only because we had no way to measure the deduplication and compression savings until the data was actually imported into the system. The storage savings we received from these features was substantial. We got better than a 2.5:1 ratio on compression, which took our storage usage from 12TB down to about 4TB.

Prism Central Pro has a feature called capacity runway that can estimate your growth and inform you when you will need to expand your cluster and even recommend the appropriate node to expand into based on your usage in real time. You can plan your next upgrade 6+ months out with high confidence you’re not over doing it, jumping the gun or purchasing too late and causing your environment to suffer performance issues.

The technical support is pretty stellar. Even when you get a tech that isn’t quite on par, it’s easy to get them back on track or escalate the case yourself with a click of a button, not that you really ever have to that often. The response time is very fast. The language barriers are almost nonexistent, and most issues can be resolved the same day with a couple emails and minimal effort. Most of the time, I just inform support that I have opened the support portal and they login and fix the issue without ever needing to try to make our schedules work together, and the next corresponsive is that its fixed already.

We are currently in the process of switching to AHV from ESXi. We felt the Nutanix solution was significantly easier to manage, has all the features we need, and comparable features to ESX already either exist or are on their way in the near future. We believe that the solution Nutanix offers is the way the market will continue to trend in the future. Finally, going with AHV cuts out ridiculously overpriced costs of ESXi. We were looking at over $100k in licensing with ESXi alone for what AHV will supply us for free.

Initial setup was easy. We could have set it up ourselves; however, Nutanix flew a technician out to use to set up the environment for us. All we had to do was mount our ESXi data pool on Nutanix and vmotion the VMs over to Nutanix, and we were up and running on the new cluster in under a week.

I would encourage you to heed the advice of your rep on what to purchase with one exception: Make sure the hardware you’re purchasing is the latest generation of hardware available. Also, Prism Central Pro is worth spending a few extra bucks. I’d also take into consideration that since Nutanix is fairly new, not all ESX-comparable features exist yet, but don’t let that discourage you away from Acropolis, as their development team is top notch and moving fast… the features are coming. If you must have ESX, it runs fantastically on Nutanix, but you’re probably spending more than you need to on licensing it over just using Acropolis and being patient. You’re also taking away many of the feature that simplify your environment by passing up Acropolis.

We spent a substantial amount of time evaluating many other options, including VxRail, EqualLogic and Compellent, the Dell M series blade chassis, NetShelter, Cisco UCS, as well as SimpliVity. Plus we evaluated Nimble vs Nutanix.

Do not dismiss Nutanix too hastily over one little feature or another. They are coming, and it is worth your patience. The value brought in simplicity, support and time savings is worth a good hard look. Also, consider purchasing Turbonomic with or before Nutanix. They pair and play well together. Prepping my environment with Turbonomic before migrating made the transition much faster and easier by right-sizing my VMs and it continues to offer great features in my new environment. If you do, make sure they know you intend to move to Nutanix to ensure you license the proper features.

The three-tier architecture is not that flexible and quick. Now, I can update or upgrade my whole datacenter with one click, the rest is done by Nutanix. No more reading and studying the HCL lists of controllers or disks. Each performance test with SQL, Exchange, Oracle, or SAP is better than on a three-tier architecture. I have one GUI for everything: for my VMs, my storage and my network.

Scaling is very easy and no limitations are set.

The file services that they also provide need some more features, like on the Windows file server.

I have not encountered any stability issues at all.

I have not encountered any scalability issues at all. It is easier than any other product I know.

The technical support is the best I have ever seen. They act quick and directly via Web session. No more first-level support and so on.

We previously used VMware for virtualization and NetApp for storage. We switched because we need to expand and that is not easy with NetApp. VMware only has the best features in the biggest license, which is expensive.

The setup of Nutanix is done in one hour. They say: “Start small, start quick, and pay as you grow”. That is really very easy.

Pricing is nearly the same, but don´t forget in this price I have included my storage and virtualization costs. And it will be much cheaper in the future.

We checked other options, too, such as EMC, EqualLogic, and Nexenta. But the easiest and the one with the most scalability was Nutanix.

If you have an old three-tier architecture that is more than three years old, check your contracts. Check your applications like Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SAP, or VDI, and if you have problems or you need better performance, then go to Nutanix and start a test with your application. I recommend a try-and-buy solution or go directly into a proof of concept. They will help you out.

It is the most flexible product for the datacenter.

• Distributed storage fabric

We don’t need to be SAN or virtualization experts J

• Manage virtualization layer with Hyper-V

I have used it for three years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used DataCore, but scaling it is too difficult.

Initial setup was too simple. Our datacenter was on in two hours.

Pricing and licensing is so correct compared with other solutions.

I have not evaluate other options because for the past three years, Nutanix has been the leader in hyperconverged solutions.

Choose Nutanix for the simplicity and performance ahead of other products.

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.

• Metro availability
• Fingerprinting
  

Metro availability with synchronous replication is most appreciable for my customer. Its benefit is high avaibility in production.

Maybe more functions for Prism with VMmware, for example, cloning VMs in Prism, exactly like Acropolis.

I've used them for almost three years.

One time, with IPMI not reachable for CVM. I troubleshot this problem with Nutanix US support.

It's at a high level.

No previous solution was used.

It is small but complex. Howerver, if you have a good skills with virtualization solutions, and Linux systems, you can install it without any problems.

I installed the solution alone. My advice is to read the Nutanix documents before your installation.

I have am immediately gain, as it has lower hardware maintenance costs, and lower electricity consumption.

I have evaluated SimpliVity OmniCube.