Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

March 2026

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Originally posted at http://vcdx133.com/

If you have just heard about Hyper-Converged infrastructure and Nutanix, read my Tech101 – Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform article.

First point, Nutanix has just announced the name change of their Virtual Computing Platform (VCP) to Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) with the release of Acropolis and their new “Invisible Infrastructure” paradigm during the Miami .Next 2015 conference.

If you are not a Nutanix Customer, Partner or Employee, it is going to be very challenging getting your hands on their technology, KB articles and documentation. They have released the Nutanix Community Edition to get you started, but it will provide limited value for their Enterprise platform.

Nutanix need to update their policies on who can access their binaries, KB articles and documentation. Particularly if they want non-customers to investigate and become familiar with their technology. I have been informed they are trying to fix this. For example:

• If you take the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform Administration 4.1.1 course for NPP, some of the training material links to Nutanix documents that require a valid support contract.
• You must be a Nutanix Partner or Employee to download the Foundation and Phoenix binaries.

The Nutanix documentation (HTML, EPUB or PDF) you want to get your hands on for NOS 4.1:

• Setup Guide (publicly available)
• Advanced Setup Guide
• Field Installation Guide
• Hardware Administration and Reference
• Upgrade Guide
• Web Console Guide (publicly available)
• vSphere Administration Guide (publicly available)
• Acropolis Virtualisation Administration Guide (publicly available – previously “KVM Administration Guide”)
• Hyper-V Administration Guide (publicly available)
• NOS Advanced Administration Guide
• Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) Guide
• Command Reference (publicly available)
• API Reference (HTML only – publicly available)

General observation, Nutanix documentation is very well written with an elegant font and format; very easy to read and understand.

The Nutanix Portal areas (HTML, EPUB or PDF) you want to checkout (if you have access):

• Knowledge Base Articles
• End of Life Bulletins (& Policy)
• Field Advisories
• Security Advisories
• Support (for Support Request creation and management)

General observation, Nutanix support is very prompt and helpful, even for low priority requests.

The Nutanix hardware, software, binaries and licences you will need to start your journey:

• Nutanix XCP block (any model), even as a PoC for a few months
• Foundation (2.1 at time of writing) with the embedded Phoenix images for ESXi, KVM and Hyper-V
• Nutanix Installer Package (2.1.3 at time of writing)
• Prism Central (4.1.3 at time of writing – separate Hyper-V and ESXi versions)
• Professional/Ultimate Edition Licences for your Cluster (for advanced features)
• Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC – 1.4.1 at time of writing)
• Nutanix Community Edition (with whitebox hardware or nested virtual)
• Nutanix supported version of ESXi ISO image from my.vmware.com
• Nutanix supported version of Hyper-V ISO image from microsoft.com
• Nutanix KVM Hypervisor upgrade bundle
• Various Tools and Firmware (eg. SCVMM Clone AddIn, SCOM Management Pack etc.)

What can you do to get started:

• Register for Nutanix Training and get certified (free and paid options)
• Register for the Nutanix Next Community to access Blogs, Activities and Forums
• Register for the Nutanix Community Edition and deploy it in your lab (nested or physical)
• Contact your local Nutanix office and request a PoC for your company
• Work with a Nutanix SE to witness and participate in the deployment process in your PoC
• Become a Nutanix Customer
• Join a Nutanix Partner
• Join Nutanix

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Originally posted at http://vcdx133.com

In my opinion, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is the future of Private and Hybrid Cloud infrastructure. If you are designing a greenfield data center and HCI is not on your list for serious consideration, then it should be.

With that being said, every technology has its Pros and Cons; nobody rides for free. The advantages of HCI are many and outweigh the disadvantages, here is what you need to watch out for:

• People – If your server virtualization, network and storage teams operate in silos and are constantly at war with each other, then HCI is probably not for you at this time. Successful HCI projects are built upon a very close collaboration between these teams. In fact, it makes more sense to merge these three teams into one “Enterprise Infrastructure” team. It is also very important to cross-skill these team members and let them evolve into “Enterprise Architects”, “Enterprise Administrators” and “Enterprise Operators”. However, make sure you keep your Backup/Recovery/Archive responsibilities separate (see RBAC point below).
• Data Center Facilities – A data center full of legacy, 3-tier infrastructure is not the same as one packed with HCI. The resource density ratio is around 4-8 to 1 depending upon your current legacy infrastructure. You need to design for 25+kW racks with a matching cooling system. If you use a traditional, legacy data center (designed for 5-8kW per rack), then you will have problems down the road (hot spots and power exhaustion).
• Switch Fabric – By moving to HCI, you need a scalable LAN fabric that provides non-blocking throughput for East-West traffic. Legacy network switch design (Core – Distribution – Aggregation – Access layers) is not going to cut it for large scale HCI, which is optimised for North-South traffic. You may get away with it initially, however you will need plans to migrate to a non-blocking leaf and spine switched LAN. HCI has made Fiber Channel infrastructure obsolete, but the same principles that drove SAN design now apply to your LAN with the move to IP storage.
• Controller VM – The storage processor of legacy storage arrays has now become a virtual appliance running on the host itself. Make sure your administration/operations staff, Standard Operating Procedures and monitoring systems understand the importance and give it the respect it deserves. The current version of NOS with ESXi still allows vSphere administrators to modify the CVM (Nutanix Acropolis does not allow this for CVMs with Nutanix KVM). For example, an untrained vSphere Administrator powers off all Nutanix Controller VMs and reduces the RAM from 24GB to 8GB to provide additional resources for adding new VMs across the entire cluster.
• Role Based Access Control – When I consider failure scenarios for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, my nightmare risk is not a natural disaster, but the disgruntled rogue administrator, who has all of the keys to the kingdom, taking out every system. With HCI and the “Enterprise Administrator”, this risk is compounded. So it is very important to separate the administration/operations responsibilities for operational data and backup/recovery/archive. This way if either one is wiped out across all data centers, you still have the other to recover from. Apply this concept to physical data center security as well.
• Data Locality and the Working Set – “Data Locality” is the amount of local storage resources (capacity and performance) presented via the Controller VM to the Hypervisor for serving your virtual workloads. The “Working Set” is the active footprint (capacity and performance) of those virtual workloads. As an organization (architects, administrators and operators), you need to make sure that the “Working Set” of your virtual machines have the optimum fit with respect to the “Data Locality” of each node in your HCI solution. Nutanix XCP has many different models, you need to make sure you select the correct fit for your needs.
• Processes and Procedures – In my opinion, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is the future of Private and Hybrid Cloud infrastructure. If you are designing a greenfield data center and HCI is not on your list for serious consideration, then it should be. With that being said, every technology has its Pros and Cons; nobody rides for free. The advantages of HCI are many and outweigh the disadvantages, here is what you need to watch out for:
• People – If your server virtualization, network and storage teams operate in silos and are constantly at war with each other, then HCI is probably not for you at this time. Successful HCI projects are built upon a very close collaboration between these teams. In fact, it makes more sense to merge these three teams into one “Enterprise Infrastructure” team. It is also very important to cross-skill these team members and let them evolve into “Enterprise Architects”, “Enterprise Administrators” and “Enterprise Operators”. However, make sure you keep your Backup/Recovery/Archive responsibilities separate (see RBAC point below).
• Data Center Facilities – A data center full of legacy, 3-tier infrastructure is not the same as one packed with HCI. The resource density ratio is around 4-8 to 1 depending upon your current legacy infrastructure. You need to design for 25+kW racks with a matching cooling system. If you use a traditional, legacy data center (designed for 5-8kW per rack), then you will have problems down the road (hot spots and power exhaustion).
• Switch Fabric – By moving to HCI, you need a scalable LAN fabric that provides non-blocking throughput for East-West traffic. Legacy network switch design (Core – Distribution – Aggregation – Access layers) is not going to cut it for large scale HCI, which is optimized for North-South traffic. You may get away with it initially, however you will need plans to migrate to a non-blocking leaf and spine switched LAN. HCI has made Fiber Channel infrastructure obsolete, but the same principles that drove SAN design now apply to your LAN with the move to IP storage.
• Controller VM – The storage processor of legacy storage arrays has now become a virtual appliance running on the host itself. Make sure your administration/operations staff, Standard Operating Procedures and monitoring systems understand the importance and give it the respect it deserves. The current version of NOS with ESXi still allows vSphere administrators to modify the CVM (Nutanix Acropolis does not allow this for CVMs with Nutanix KVM). For example, an untrained vSphere Administrator powers off all Nutanix Controller VMs and reduces the RAM from 24GB to 8GB to provide additional resources for adding new VMs across the entire cluster.
• Role Based Access Control – When I consider failure scenarios for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, my nightmare risk is not a natural disaster, but the disgruntled rogue administrator, who has all of the keys to the kingdom, taking out every system. With HCI and the “Enterprise Administrator”, this risk is compounded. So it is very important to separate the administration/operations responsibilities for operational data and backup/recovery/archive. This way if either one is wiped out across all data centers, you still have the other to recover from. Apply this concept to physical data center security as well.
• Data Locality and the Working Set – “Data Locality” is the amount of local storage resources (capacity and performance) presented via the Controller VM to the Hypervisor for serving your virtual workloads. The “Working Set” is the active footprint (capacity and performance) of those virtual workloads. As an organization (architects, administrators and operators), you need to make sure that the “Working Set” of your virtual machines have the optimum fit with respect to the “Data Locality” of each node in your HCI solution. Nutanix XCP has many different models, you need to make sure you select the correct fit for your needs.
• Processes and Procedures – Moving from legacy, 3-tier infrastructure to HCI is a big change, so do not underestimate or ignore the imperative to update all of your processes and procedures. HCI will simplify and improve your infrastructure, consequently simplifying your operational procedures, but you will need to change how you do things with respect to people, process and technology.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Originally posted at vcdx133.com.

This post provides a Tech101 breakdown of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. If you have heard the buzz-words “Nutanix”, “Web-Scale” and “Hyper-Convergence” and want to learn more about it, this post is for you.

The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform (VCP) is a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution. Termed the “iPhone” of infrastructure, what is the big deal?

Short answer: Ease of use, fast deployment, linear scaling of performance with capacity and richness of product features.

Why should you care? If you live in the world of monolithic and vertically scaled storage, you may have experienced the initial, massive cost of purchasing your storage solution with a 5 year ROI. Then comes the honey-moon period where you experience amazing performance as workloads are moved to the new array. Well before the 5 year ROI mark, you will probably experience performance degradation as the capacity of the array is consumed. Which then initiates discussions with your storage vendor about how you need to spend another boatload of money adding additional controllers, SSDs and disks to the array.

Furthermore, think about how long it takes for the storage team, the server team and the network team to agree on a particular design for a project and the time it takes to order, deliver, install, configure and test that solution. Have you ever asked yourself, “There must be an easier way to do this?”

Enter Hyper-Convergence, where you can now buy individual blocks of infrastructure at an entry price and quickly scale-out your solution (performance and capacity) one unit at a time as you grow.

What is it? Nutanix has taken the “Web-Scale” infrastructure model of Google and Facebook and made it available to the Enterprise. You buy a Nutanix Block (rack mounted chassis) that contains Nutanix Nodes (hosts), storage, power and cooling. This creates a Nutanix Cluster (Software-Defined Storage), which are comprised of Controller Virtual Machines (CVM).

How does it work? The Controller Virtual Machines connect directly to the physical SCSI Controllers on each node (Pass-Through mode) and the CVMs are configured to create a “Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) Cluster” (storage pool) via the 10GbE network. All of the pooled storage is classified as local or remote from the point of view of each CVM and VM data is protected based upon a Replication Factor (RF) policy of two or three, which replaces the concept of RAID. RF-2 means a local and remote copy is maintained and RF-3, a local and two remote copies of said data.

Where is the magic? Since each node has its own Controller VM, SSDs and HDDs, NDFS can provide linear scaling of capacity and performance for locally stored data. When a CVM goes down, a remote CVM will takeover serving data I/O to the local hypervisor. When the local CVM comes online, it resumes service. This fundamental concept is what allows Nutanix to provide a “rolling upgrade” of the Nutanix Operating System (NOS). What is the caveat? During periods of CVM failure, local workloads that access remotely stored data will experience degraded performance until the local CVM is restored.

The major components of the Nutanix VCP solution are:

• Nutanix Node – a single host with CPU, RAM, SCSI Controller and Network that resides in a Nutanix Block
• Nutanix Block – rack mounted chassis that contains nodes, storage, power and fans
• Prism – User Interface and APIs
• Prism Central – aggregator of separate Prism Clusters to a single UI
• Cluster Virtual Machine – Software-Defined Storage that supports NFS, iSCSI or SMB3
• CVM operating system is known as “NOS” – Nutanix Operating System
• CVM file system is known as “NDFS” – Nutanix Distributed File System
• Hypervisor – VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM supported
• OEM Hardware – Supermicro and Dell with PCIe SSD and HDD
• Licencing – Starter, Pro & Ultimate

It comes in a number of OEM Hardware flavours (Dell and Supermicro) with the following uses:

• ROBO, Test & Development – NX-1000, Dell XC 720xd A5
• EUC/VDI – NX-3000, NX-7000 (GPU & PCoIP Offload), Dell XC 720xd B5/B7
• Compute Intensive – NX-3000, Dell XC 720xd B7
• Data Intensive – NX-8000, Dell XC 720xd C5/C7
• Business Critical & Mission Critical Apps – NX-9000 (All Flash)

The major features of the Nutanix Operating System (current version NOS 4.1):

• One-Click Upgrades of NOS and Hypervisor (rolling upgrade)
• Data Protection Cloud Connect (to AWS)
• Data At Rest Encryption
• Metro Availability (<5ms RTT)
• Deduplication
• Compression
• Data Tiering
• Snapshots and Clones
• Advanced Data Protection

Alternatives

• Server-Side Flash-Cache Acceleration – VMware vFRC, PernixData FVP, EMC XtremSF/XtremCache, etc.
• Converged Infrastructure Solutions – NetApp FlexPod, VCE vBlock, HP ConvergedSystem, Dell, etc.
• Other Hyper-Converged solutions – VMware EVO:Rail, Maxta, SimpliVity OmniCube, Scale Computing, Pivot3, etc.