Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

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.

We are an airline company using NCI as a platform for around 20 Windows and Linux servers, including our web and data servers. We have one primary NCI platform and plan to set up another for disaster recovery. However, it's quite expensive, so we have not implemented that yet. 

We migrated all our services from a hypervisor server to NCI. Since implementing NCI, we have had zero downtime. Our servers run 24 hours a day, and we are running various application-based software worldwide. My company plans to set up a disaster recovery system to prepare for possible downtime, so we can immediately shift to our backup system if there is a catastrophic failure. However, we haven't had any issues so far. 

I like NCI's dashboard. If there are any infrastructure issues, we'll get alerts inside the dashboard. NCI provides a single platform for managing all of our databases. We are running SQL and Linux databases. 

The reporting section of the dashboard could be improved to include more detailed reporting about the servers. 

We have used NCI for the last three years.

NCI is stable. If the company continues to innovate and upgrade the product, I expect it will be a robust solution in the future. 

NCI is scalable. We can scale up sufficiently to meet our requirements. 

I rate Nutanix nine out of 10 for support. Nutanix support is robust, and we're completely satisfied. 

Positive

NCI is easy to implement. You can deploy NCI with one or two staff members. That's typically enough to deal with any issues that may arise. We haven't needed any maintenance so far, but the vendor is responsible for replacing or upgrading memory, hard disks, and other hardware. 

We have support from a third-party provider and our reseller. 

NCI is quite expensive compared to other products. It would help us if Nutanix considered affordability when releasing new products. We have an annual license and are considering extending it for another year. 

I rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure eight out of 10. I would recommend NCI to others if they are searching for a new product.

We use Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for SQL Server, VDI, general workload, and remote sites.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure allowed us to run our BDI a lot more efficiently, and the SQL servers worked up pretty well.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is running all of my business-critical workloads. In my area of the world, we'd have our test dev running on there as well, but we have our core applications that are critical to our operations 24/7 that are running on the solution

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together. They really help with the administration side of things. Rather than having a bunch of admins, only a few admins really need to work on it.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's LTS version needs to be more reliable. I've run into too many issues where I've found the bug, and it caused a lot of grief. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure should do more testing on its LTS version and get that straightened out.

Performance-wise, there is an upper limit on the number of nodes that Prism Element and Prism Central can handle. My two Prism Centrals are scaled for huge workloads, but I struggled with them for a better part of five or six months, where they were timing out on my admins and throwing random errors. The same thing was happening with Prism Element in our larger clusters.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for about ten years.

In the beginning, Nutanix support was top-of-the-line. When I had a problem, I would call them and get a knowledgeable engineer. As of late, it's been a bit of a challenge. I understand that Nutanix is going through some onboarding issues, and it takes a long time to get support people onboard and then get them trained in different situations they will encounter. I think Nutanix does not have enough support staff to care for all its customers.

Positive

We still have some VMware floating around, but it's considerably smaller. I used VMware when it was just VMware hosts, and I could throw that on top of Windows and have VMs.

We switched from VMware to NCI because we wanted to get rid of the three-tier solution. On top of that, our hardware was aging, and we didn't want to increase it. So we just started shrinking it down, and now the old hardware is going to end. We only have around 16 to 17 nodes of VMware left, but everything else is Nutanix.

I was not initially involved in the initial setup or deployment of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. It was handled by some admins overseas. However, after those initial VDI clusters, I got more involved with Nutanix and I did the conversions from VMware to Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's core licensing needs to have an upper limit since processors are coming out with incredible numbers of cores on them.

I wasn't involved with the original comparison for VDI, but I do recall that solutions like VMware and vSAN were reviewed.

We struggle with software licensing. Everybody's charging by the core. The larger nodes I put in, the more dense I can go, but my licensing costs are still going out.

I really like the whole LCM process in Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. The whole one-click isn't true. If I go into LCM, do an inventory, and then say patch everything, it will ultimately fail. However, it still works out all right, and we can patch the firmware, drivers, AOS, and all the nodes and do a rolling patch.

When considering NCI, the big thing is considering your entire infrastructure because you go from different vendors and different hardware to handling storage and computing. I think what Nutanix and NCI offer is far better than VMware and Red Hat.

We haven't used much on the security side with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. NCI being pre-hardened helps me a lot because that keeps the security team off my back. We do the encryption but don't use the micro-segmentation because that falls to our security team and their firewalls

I have run into problems with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, where I have an overabundance of one aspect of the infrastructure and then come up slightly short on another aspect. For example, somebody throws out a server and needs 20 terabytes of space. I buy nodes to fulfill that, but now I'm sitting there with a whole bunch of extra computing. I've tried using just the storage blocks, and I'll never do it again because it's just a waste of licensing.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) a six out of ten.

It's an infrastructure product that we mostly use to manage virtual services.

The DR solution in Nutanix has helped us reduce downtime. There are periods of downtime, intentional as well as unintentional, but because we have another site already replicated, our downtime is minimal. The protection policies have the greatest impact in reducing downtime because they help us replicate our data. We're able to do synchronous replication to the remote site and that keeps our machine ready there in case of the need for DR. We just go there and manually power it on.

Nutanix has also helped us free up IT staff. Since I joined this company, I have been the only one managing the solution. Prior to that, there were multiple people involved. The more we move toward Nutanix from vCenter, the more we reduce the number of resources needed. We have freed up almost half of the time we used to need.

There are a lot of things I really like. Perhaps the best part is taking a snapshot of a virtual machine. It's very quick. Another useful part is replication and creating a protection domain: using the protection feature to replicate a machine to a remote site for DR purposes.

I also like Nutanix Flow. It is quite a control mechanism. Other than external firewalls, Nutanix Flow is a good feature to control your traffic and not allow the infra to create two-way contact with any location other than what we specify.

Nutanix Files is also good. It's a little immature but it's still good. I use it more than Windows for files.

And the fact that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a variety of cloud operating models is also significant for us. Based on the good number of application products that we are using, having multiple options is going to be a benefit for us.

Nutanix Files is a new feature and, as I mentioned, it's immature, although it's a good tool. I have already given this feedback to the engineering team. 

In terms of automation, I know there are ways to do it, but it's not very user-friendly. I've been working for the last three years with Nutanix and I've managed to automate certain things, but it's a somewhat more complex job than it should be. I would like to see more documentation or knowledge base articles. There should also be some pre-built, basic tasks that are shared by Nutanix. That would be helpful. I understand the other side of the picture, that we might hamper production, but some basics that can be shared by Nutanix, for automation, would be good.

There are a lot of things to be worked on. They need to provide more features and certain features that have been released need to be made more mature.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for three years.

There have been one or two bugs reported in the past one and a half years, but other than that, I don't see any issues with the product. It's quite stable.

It is quite easily scaled.

The user base, the people who are benefiting from the product in our organization, is more than 25,000.

As soon we have issues, we report them and their engineering team comes in and works toward a solution. Their technical support is quite good. There are times when I would rate them a 10 out of 10 because there have been engineers who have very good knowledge and who know what they're doing. Other engineers have also tried to do their best.

Positive

Earlier, we were using VMware on Nutanix hardware, but for the last year we have been using the Nutanix built-in virtualization technology, Nutanix AHV.

The switch to Nutanix was a decision that came completely from senior management. Initially, we were using a different environment, HPE and then VMware, and then we moved to Nutanix plus VMware. We had licenses available from VMware so we didn't switch to AOS and AHV. But gradually, as the licenses for vCenter expired, we moved to Nutanix AHV. Most of our jobs are done using it.

Our deployment is on-prem. There are discussions happening about moving a part to private cloud, but that's future planning. As of now, it's just on-prem. We have it in multiple locations. It started with South Africa, then we added Germany, Italy, and Singapore. So it's now in multiple data centers.

The initial deployment was slow, to be honest. Before the day of deployment, there were a lot of tasks to be done, prerequisites that had to be fulfilled. But on the day of deployment, it went very smoothly.

We started with keeping vCenter in place, so at first, it was just deploying the hardware and getting the foundation set up done. It didn't take much time, although there was a lot of hardware to add. But it didn't take not more than three or four hours for the actual deployment part.

We did a lot of planning, obviously, even before purchasing the solution, regarding how much hardware and how many resources would be required. That was the most important consideration and, in the backend, there was the networking. We wanted to keep everything on the same network. We added the hardware, the engineers helped to deploy and move things so that everything was on the same network. The virtualization technology itself was the same. It wasn't a very difficult task for us to migrate our VMs from the old hardware to Nutanix hardware. We used the basic migration tools, either vMotion or SvMotion of vCenter. At a later stage, we moved to Nutanix virtualization and we're still migrating but we are now using the Nutanix Move tool.

Nutanix Move is one of the very good tools I've come across. I've been using it quite a lot for the last few months.

There were different tracks and technologies involved in the deployment, including the networking and data center guys, and we needed to have somebody from offshore with access to all the infra. Other than the Nutanix engineers, there were not more than seven or eight people on our side. One person was part of the planning, and one or two people from the networking, server, and virtualization teams. I was part of the virtualization and server teams.

We now have one person dedicated in each region to taking care of the solution. We do regular upgrades of the hardware. It has never incurred any downtime because it's always in the cluster. One of the best parts about Nutanix is that it automatically does all the upgrades and firmware one by one, so we don't have to bother about it. We just initiate it and go for a tea break or lunch. I've done it three times and I haven't found any challenges. It's quite easy and very smooth. It shouldn't be made so easy for such an experienced analyst like me. People like me could lose their jobs, that is how easy it is.

We did come across one scenario two years back in which we had to get additional storage. We are using iSCSI technology and it wasn't that difficult from a technical point of view. We had to purchase additional hardware because the demands from those specific applications were quite high.

Pricing is not my area of expertise. But the license is quite clear to me. It's much clearer than what we had with our previous virtualization environment. The licensing is not complex to understand. I have added some hardware recently and we got the licenses added for it. That was quite simple and very straightforward.

Evaluating other products was not my call, that was also for senior management. I was asked to review Nutanix only. Before we started implementing it or the sign-off happened, I did find the product suitable. When something is new in the market, you have to get used to it and you feel uncomfortable. That's normal for everybody and that happened to me. The only differences were that the GUI did not have certain features that were in vCenter, but I think we have everything covered now. There have been improvements while creating the current version of the product.

I have good friends in the field from different organizations because I have more than 12 years of experience. I've been recommending Nutanix to them. I'm not sure about the cost part, but I'm quite sure about the administrative part.

I have been using Nutanix products, like AOS, HPE, and Prism Central. I am managing a total of seven clusters with Prism Element and one instance with Prism Central.

We did a total deployment to all areas across multiple locations.

My environment is closed. It is not hosted on the internet. It is a dark site. So, if there are any issues, the Nutanix team lacks the ability to remote in because I cannot provide it. 

The Lifecycle Management (LCM) for upgrades is a very fantastic feature that I have observed from Nutanix.

It has centralized management. It is easy for an engineer to manage. More work goes to patching, upgrades, and maintenance. Nutanix is very easy to upgrade. It takes one click. Engineers do not need to spend additional time with Nutanix for upgrades. With one click, it will complete the upgrade and show the results. Other hypervisor solutions are not like this, specifically since you must do all the components one by one.

Nutanix is easy to learn for someone new to the system. It has more flexibility in its handling. If you are familiar with another hypervisor, Nutanix is easy to learn.

There is a cost for us with a Controller VM. For example, if you are purchasing a Nutanix node with 500GB, then 32GB of that node will need to be allocated for Controller VM. Therefore, we need to spend 32GB of RAM for Nutanix, which is not in our production requirements. This is an area that they need to improve.

Most other software comes as an OVF template. These kinds of OVF software templates are only supported in VMware. We technically can customize and use them in Nutanix, but the vendors tell us that there are technical issues that they will not support. So, they either have to improve this or software providers have to provide the proper software for Nutanix supported software.

It is a CentOS-based operating system, but CentOS releases security patches almost every week or every other week. However, Nutanix releases their upgrade at three or four month intervals. According to my organization's SLA, if a critical patch is released during that time, then I need to implement the patches within 30 days. If it is a standard patch, then I need to patch it within 60 days. Since that is my SLA, I cannot meet my SLA for security because Nutanix will not release the upgrade within these 30 days. Between the critical patch release and the Nutanix release, my customers say they are vulnerable and I am accepting the risk while the SLA is breached. Because of this SLA breach, I am rating this solution as eight out of 10.

I have been using it for the last five years.

When we started, it was not that stable. We were facing multiple issues. Now, Nutanix is very stable.

When Nutanix releases their upgrades, I then need to update to the latest upgrade and patch. Once I click the upgrade, it will automatically reboot the AOS one by one. There won't be any service disruption as well.

It is very scalable, especially if you want to expand.

Expansion is very easy. In Nutanix, additional node expansion is very easy. We can spin multiple VMs based on our business requirements very quickly. In this area, it is very good.

There are two engineers managing Nutanix now for four data centers and a lot of customers.

If I am comparing with the other technical support from VMware, the Nutanix server technical support is awesome because they promptly respond. Sometimes, when I call for an engineer, my call will be kept waiting. Other than this, they quickly respond. If the engineers are free, they will attend the call and help us. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

I was using VMware. However, VMware is more costly since Nutanix has cluster and storage management that creates storage free of cost. In the case of VMware, we need to pay the licensing cost for ESXI as well as purchase a separate license for the vSAN for storage consolidation and the HCI configuration. Nutanix is not like that. If you are buying their node, then you only need to pay for the AOS and Prism licensing costs. Cost-wise, Nutanix is very good.

It is very straightforward because there is a foundation option. From the foundation, we mount the devices on the rack and get the network to be connected. That is it. Then, we can use the foundation to configure and push the AOS and the hypervisor. The cluster spins up very quickly. It seems like everything is in a single window. 

Within one day, we can configure a complete cluster. It might not even take a day, but four to five hours to configure it.

Only two people were involved in the deployment. Once it is mounted on the server rack, then it is easy to manage. 

Mounting is a physical activity that took two people. For installation and configuration, we needed only one person. 

AHV is free of cost. If we went for VMware and other hypervisors, we would need to pay for the hypervisor license. Whereas, Nutanix is providing the AHV license for free.

Cost-wise, it is very good. It is like the hypervisor cost is not there. We only need to pay for the system and AOS licenses. 

Updating or configuring the licensing is very easy. We can take the licensed file and use it to update the portal. You download it, then upload it to the cluster. So, the management is very easy.

We only compared VMware and Nutanix, who are the best players in the virtualization area.

We already bought three Lenovo nodes and Nutanix licenses. We are going to expand the solution next month in October.

For most organizations, the first agenda is to look at the cost. If you are comparing Nutanix with any other solutions, Nutanix will be one of the best options. It is very stable now. You can reduce the manpower needed because even a single engineer can manage the maintenance.

Overall, I can rate it as eight out of 10 since there are few limitations.

One of the municipalities in Istanbul uses it for virtual servers in their data centers. They have about 150 virtual servers.

Before Nutanix, our customers were using VMware with external storage from HPE, IBM, and others. They have been able to consolidate all the external data in the Nutanix clusters. That has reduced their server footprint as well as power consumption, which is important for the environment.

Nutanix has a very rich feature set and product solutions that are good for our customers. Instead of using different types of solutions, Nutanix covers all of them. That is a very big advantage. Often, to get the best feature sets, you need a lot of vendors, each one having different products. Vendor management, in that case, is difficult. But with Nutanix, everything comes from the same vendor, making vendor management easy.

There are a lot of features but the main ones are related to storage. Nutanix provides a software-defined storage solution for virtual servers.

It also has a lot of available services when it comes to infrastructure, and our customers use most of them. It provides a redundant set of data. The snapshots, cloning, and replication are all effective in helping to reduce downtime. It can replicate cluster data for disaster recovery and it provides high availability in case a node or a disk fails. Nutanix's availability feature set is bigger than that of other solutions.

They could improve the graphical user interface. 

I have been working with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for two years.

It is a robust and very stable solution.

It's also very scalable.

They are very responsive and provide quick resolutions.

Positive

The setup is automated and very easy. The time it takes to deploy depends on the project, but in most cases it will take several hours. One person is enough to do the deployment.

Our deployment is on a private cloud, but you can use public cloud because Nutanix has agreements with Azure, Amazon, and other public cloud services.

In terms of maintenance, it's easy to update Nutanix because you can download hardware/firmware upgrade sets and deploy all of them. I worked with VMware for at least 15 years. You can upgrade VMware products, but you can't upgrade hardware firmware with VMware. You need to contact the hardware vendor or support sites. They are separate things. But with Nutanix, you can deploy hardware firmware and software updates together.

It is also very easy to add compute and storage on demand with Nutanix. You can put a disk into an empty slot and, in several minutes, it's working.

In addition, you can get training very easily with Nutanix University and there are certifications. When you complete Nutanix University courses, they provide free certification exams. If I can compare it with VMware, I attended a conference and I passed a VMware certificate exam, but they didn't give me a certificate and said I had to attend a VMware class that costs about $2,500.

Our customers see ROI with Nutanix. Using it, they have very efficient infrastructures. They benefit from the reduced footprint, lower power consumption, and easy management. It also gives them efficient data storage with compression, deduplication, and easy snapshot features to reduce the data footprint. All of these things make it worth the licensing costs.

It's a bit expensive, but it's worth it.

Nutanix has a lot of products and solutions to provide a complete cloud-integrated infrastructure. Our customers use some of them, but not all of them.

My advice is to use Nutanix, without hesitation.

We use Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for VDI, SuperMicro servers, hypervisors, and server utilization. We do have another use case in a production environment.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is an evolution of technology because it simplifies everything. It mitigates the operation risk because you don't have people handling storage, and you don't have to have storage solutions. It makes everything easier for the administrator and the company, not just because of risk but for stability. Our mission-critical applications are doing their best, running on this platform.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is an evolution of technology because it simplifies everything. It mitigates the operation risk because you don't have people handling storage, and you don't have to have storage solutions. It makes everything easier for the administrator and the company, not just because of risk but for stability. Our mission-critical applications are doing their best to run on this platform.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure helped our organization save time and cost. You can save time using this technology because it simplifies everything, including the process and the deployment. When I moved to NCI, I got rid of the SAN infrastructure or the storage network, which was very expensive. As a result, my whole team can do a better job now because they can focus on other things instead of managing the storage network

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable features are all the cloud facilities or benefits it provides for my data center. Everything that I do in the cloud, I can virtually do in my own data center. NCI provides other benefits like elasticity, upgrading, expanding the cluster, and growing the cluster. Since NCI is non-disruptive, we don't have any downtime when we add new nodes. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's stability and flexibility are just awesome.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's cloud platform management software could be improved so that I can manage my load between the cloud and on-premises.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for five years.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure’s stability is awesome. Stability is one of the things that we appreciate more in Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, as we don't have any downtime with the solution.

In our current environment, where we use NCI, we have seven clusters. Most of them are four to seven nodes, and the one we use for VDI is three nodes.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure’s customer support is great.

Positive

We have seen a return on investment with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure regarding availability, support with response time and knowledge, and peace of mind.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's pricing is higher now. I think Nutanix is trying to make the whole ecosystem look simple.

Before choosing Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, we evaluated other options like Cisco HyperFlex and VxRail VMware. We chose NCI over the others because it is cloud native. Unlike other solutions that bring software from other places and can't handle storage, Nutanix is a whole ecosystem.

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

We host our healthcare customers’ servers using the solution.

Previously, we used three-tier architecture. Now, we have everything on one platform. With Life Cycle Manager, we do not face any downtime during updates.

HCI and DR are very valuable to us. It is very easy to clone systems using the solution.

The product requires a lot of resources. We have to assign a lot of resources to the servers.

I have been using the solution for the last seven years.

The solution’s stability is excellent.

The product’s scalability is very good.

Whenever we call the support team, there is an SME present on the call. They resolve our issues instantly.

Positive

Previously we used VMware and Hyper-V. We switched the solution because Nutanix’s support is excellent.

The initial setup was straightforward.

A Nutanix engineer was present on-site during the deployment.

We saved money when we moved our cloud servers to on-premise.

The product’s licensing fee is moderately expensive.

My organization is the first company to deploy Nutanix in India. We deployed the solution in Gujarat, Sacramento, and Texas. The solution has beautiful architecture.

Our customers are from the healthcare industry, and they cannot afford to have downtime. With Nutanix’s robust solution, we never face any downtime. Everything we need is available within Nutanix. We do not need to buy any other product.

Previously, most of our workload was on Azure and AWS. Now we have a hybrid setup. We save a lot of money. We use around 4000 VMs in our data center. Upgrading hosts have to be done manually in VMware. Nutanix helps us a lot from a management perspective.

People planning to buy the product should evaluate their expenses in the current infrastructure and understand how much they will save from implementing the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

One of the components that we like about using Nutanix Acropolis AOS is its ability to interact with hardware. You don't have to go into different systems, all your locked files and everything for the hardware is directly available.

Our use cases are for data storage. We use the total Nutanix system in connection with Inuvika. We are busy phasing out all our work stations, where we basically go back to the principle of old bank terminals. When you boot up, you're going into the Inuvika environment, which runs five physical servers on the Nutanix. The accessibility of the performance and upgradeability of the system increase about five-fold where you don't have to upgrade workstation performance, you only add an additional Nutanix server node if you want to increase your performance on your users' workstations. An important feature for me that comes with a hypervisor, as well as the AOS in combination with everything, is the backup redundancy, as well as the encryption component on the server that we use quite extensively. Since we've installed Nutanix our downtime was about 40 minutes to an hour, and that was just to do a memory upgrade on the system.

In terms of how Nutanix Acropolis AOS has improved our organization, for starters, the one major thing that comes up again and again is stability. Our downtime is literally based on hardware upgrades that need to be done. Acropolis is very, very user friendly.

You don't have to physically have a super IT guy to manage the system. You can actually give it to a younger guy to manage and there won't be problems. And if he makes a mistake, it's very, very easy to fall back and sort out the mistake.

The features that I have found most valuable depend on the scenario. The nice thing with the Acropolis design is that in a specific situation where you've got either the problem or you need to adapt quickly in connection with the setup in the environment, they really work through everything. 

The total solution is valuable, you can't split it up. The nice thing with the AOS, as well as basically the entire Nutanix system is that you are not time bound to increase your entire node or service setup. You can add additional nodes as time goes past. It's not like VMware, for example, where it looks like you've got a time period where you have to finish your entire setup, otherwise the upgrades and the newer hardware and that kind of stuff become a problem. Nutanix is very, very backwards compatible, as well as forwards compatible.

In terms of what I would like to see improved, I would say the life cycle management. I don't know if it is because they changed to an LCM from the previous way of upgrading the hardware or software but sometimes it feels that it needs a wizard that says, "Check this, check this," telling you your options. The only thing that's a bit frustrating for me is the life cycle management interface. That's the only thing on the entire system that frustrates me. I'm very, very happy with the other stuff.

We've been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for roughly four years now.

We are currently using the full setup of the system and it's very stable.

We are using the latest version. We update our system on the LTX every time a long sported version comes out and it's very stable.

We are running on-premise. We're running roughly 40 servers on it, which is a combination from Linux, our PBX system, Windows Operating Systems and additional data software that we've built on our own distro's on the system itself.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is very stable.

Since we started it up, the only time that we had any problems on it or downtime, if I can put it that way, was literally to upgrade the memory. That's it.

In the last three years since it's been running, it was peace of mind. We didn't have any problems and even with Nutanix overseas, we had a faulty memory module and the system worked perfectly, and they sent us a new memory module. We sent the old memory module back and that process with Nutanix support was magnificent, zero frustrations.

It is very scalable. We see the scalability in two places. Point number one for scalability, if we need additional hardware by installing an additional node, it's not painful at all. You just put in the node, you tell your Acropolis to find it, integrate it with the system, and everything operates seamlessly. It automatically balances all your virtual machines between all your nodes that you've got at that stage.

Additionally, I used it in our environment a lot as an additional backup for our remote sites. Where we basically have two Nutanix nodes on each remote site and because data in South Africa is very expensive we don't have a lot of bandwidth between our sites. So during the evenings, I replicate everything to our primary server setup that we've got and it works perfectly, no problems.

We have 6,000 units or servers. We are running currently from high performance users right through to just Word and Excel people. We are in the area of 250 users that are running on the system.

Nutanix is at the core of our business. So if the Nutanix falls over, our entire company will go offline.

At this stage it is not necessary to increase usage, but they're talking about opening additional branches, then we will be looking at another two or three nodes within the next two years.

Technical support is excellent.

I'm thinking about the two situations that we had. One was the memory problem that we had, and this guy from America explained in detail everything that he did. How the testing principles worked, how the process operated and he put us in connection with all the correct people. The entire process in that case was extremely streamlined and extremely user friendly. Then our second scenario that we had was in connection with upgrade faults that I made, and they explained what happened and how to fix the problem. So yeah, they are excellent.

The initial setup is straightforward.

In South Africa, we've got this saying for the test principle, keep it straight and simple. That is the principle that I followed with it.

Our deployment took us longer to get all the cabinets prepared for the servers or for the nodes than it actually took to set up the entire Nutanix system. I think it took us about half an hour to 45 minutes since we started, and we started installing our first VM on the system.

In the setup, there are literally two people responsible.

I am the IT manager and we've got my 2IC, and we're the only two that work with the servers on all six primary sites.

We did it through Pinnacle Micro and the guy helped us extremely well and was extremely knowledgeable about the Nutanix product and the systems around it. They were extremely knowledgeable in the Nutanix environment and with the processes and risks that need to be assessed. It was an excellent experience and not only the fact that they actually came out and talked to us, it wasn't all over the telephone.

We were running a stand-alone service originally. So we saved a lot of money on hardware upgrades that we needed to do. We saved a lot of money on energy consumption. As you know, power or electricity in South Africa is getting extremely expensive. We are now running at about 20% of our original power consumption and that also includes cooling the server room, reduction on security (physical security not cyber security). So all those components played a major role in ROI. Except for our hardware upgrades and that kind of stuff, we've saved about 200,000 Rand.

Our license is Rand based. I can't remember because we bought the license with other software as well. We did the licensing and it includes the support and everything over a five year basis.

We previously looked at VMware to build our hyperconverged environment. We started looking at costing and lifetime of products and it was quite shocking from my point of view. Because I feel a server must at least have the ability to run for five to seven years and then have scalability. And the thing with VMware is you've got quite a short shelf life on the setup. Meaning, you've got five years and if your system is not fully built, you start from scratch.

VMware versus Nutanix - number one, the cost is much lower with Nutanix. The hardware needed for operating the system is much cheaper and that played a major role in the choice that we made between Nutanix and VMware. The other major thing is the support that we got from the Pinnacle Micro guys. Actually, that's one of the major points why we made the choice for Nutanix. They were very, very intuitive with your company, they knew what we needed, what possibilities to look at, what risks to assess, that kind of stuff.

Before choosing Nutanix I also played with VMware's ESXi open source setup. I also played with Nutanix's open source setup. When we setup Nutanix, it was a lot more intuitive and a lot more user friendly, versus the setup from VMware, which is not bad either. I'm not saying it's a bad product, don't get me wrong. It's just different.

The biggest lesson I learned from using Nutanix Acropolis AOS was that at the stage when we looked at it, Nutanix was still relatively young - so don't underestimate the underdog.

My advice to anyone considering Nutanix Acropolis AOS is that you won't go wrong. It's an easy, maintainable system, it's user friendly. They designed quite an excellent product and with the support and the knowledge from the guys, you're not going to have problems in setting up a system like Nutanix.

On a scale of one to ten, I would put Nutanix Acropolis AOS in the area of eight to nine.

It is so high because for starters, I have not really had problems with Nutanix at all in the greater picture. We've had one or two incidents, which were mostly from our side, except for the memory situation, which was hardware related and not software related. They were always before the schedule on turnaround time for repairs and getting everything sorted out and repaired and up and running. I know a big thing is that local suppliers play a big role in support of hardware and so forth, but we didn't have any problems right through the bank.