Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

Our client was using ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V clustering, but patching and upgrading ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V clusters was very tedious. That was their pain area. We understood their pain area and positioned Nutanix there. Instead of the orthodox three-tier architecture, they chose Nutanix. The benefit of Nutanix is that there is a very simple upgrade path. It is done with a click. The storage part is simple. It has a very easy UI, which is a USP of Nutanix. The client is very happy.

We have multiple such clients, and our clients are happy with it. For more than 10 clients, I myself have done the deployment of the Nutanix cluster. One of them had a cluster with 24 nodes.

In a single pane of glass, you get all the insights about your infrastructure. Earlier, in the orthodox three-tier architecture, you had multiple UIs. You also needed multiple expertise to take care of things. It used to take more time to troubleshoot and identify where exactly the issue was. You had to get your analytics, get your logs, and then troubleshoot. All this is avoided with the Nutanix architecture. It is hardware agnostic. For example, if an organization has a contract for the HPE hardware or they have an HPE footprint or a Dell footprint in their DC, they can go with that particular hardware and have Nutanix on top of it. Nutanix does not force you to buy only Nutanix hardware. Other vendors, such as VMware, make you buy their hardware so that their product works fine, but that is not the case with Nutanix. It is hardware agnostic. 

The applications that are run on Nutanix are client-side applications. There are banking or financial applications. They also have Citrix on Nutanix for the virtual desktop. They also have Oracle Database and SAP running properly on the Nutanix hardware or architecture. You can put any application available in the market, such as Oracle Database, MySQL, or NoSQL, and you will not have any slowness or anything like that with that application. Every application works smoothly on the Nutanix platform. It is all tested. 

It is much easier to deploy Nutanix as compared to other solutions. It saves you deployment time. Usually, in a big organization, the planning itself takes around a month. You also need permissions, and then you deploy a solution, so deployment takes time, but that is not the case with Nutanix, which is an advantage. You can get all necessary permissions from your management and then in one day or half a day, you can have your cluster. If you purchase the whole Nutanix portfolio with Nutanix Karbon, Nutanix Flow, and other solutions, deployment is very easy. You can put it into production.

It reduces the downtime. A cluster has multiple nodes in the backend. If you want to upgrade the firmware or you want to upgrade AHV or the hardware, it will do that one by one. It will put some nodes into maintenance mode. It will move some of the virtual machines to other nodes in a cluster. It will take care of the redundancy part. It will take care of your data. The data also gets migrated to those nodes so that it is available locally. You avoid all the hops that are there in the three-tier architecture. It reduces the hops and the time to access your data and gives you the output. All this is taken care of in the Nutanix architecture.

Snapshot is one of the key features that reduce downtime. It gives clients more power to define their RTO and RPO, which is a valuable aspect of the Nutanix architecture. Even in the case of DC/DR, if your DC goes down, you can use the data protection domain and get your DR site up and running. It helps clients achieve their RTO and RPO.

Our clients could realize its benefits in a week. I have worked on more than 10 major deployments. They already had some pain areas, and they wanted to mitigate those areas. We positioned Nutanix and did the PoC, and they were already happy with this solution at the PoC level. We did not have to do deployment and put it in production for them to see its benefits. Based on my experience with Nutanix, in a week's time, they get to know its features and the fact that it works smoothly.

All applications have dependencies. They have some hardware or networking requirements. You need to have the hardware accordingly in your DC. By buying Nutanix, our clients have managed to avoid all these requirements. In a single box, they get all the things, so they do not have to worry about the backend. Their applications work smoothly. They can have any application. They can even have VDI applications such as Citrix VDI or VMware Workspace on top of Nutanix. It supports all the platforms. Our clients are very happy with Nutanix. They do not have to do any hardware upgrades. 

It eliminates the legacy infrastructure. That is the main purpose of HCI. For HCI, Nutanix has been in the number one position for many years. In the three-tier architecture, there used to be a frontend application, a middleware, and a backend database. On the hardware front also, you had to put your servers, your SAN switches, and your backend storage. You had multiple footprints in your DC. You also had more power consumption. Nutanix reduces power consumption, troubleshooting, and maintenance. You do not need a separate team for maintenance. Irrespective of the hardware, you get a single point of contact for any support. All these solutions are consolidated under one roof, which is very beneficial.

We have done the whole DC migration to Nutanix. The client had five to six racks, and they got reduced to two racks by using Nutanix. It takes very less space. It helps to reduce your DC footprint and power consumption. Troubleshooting is very easy. You can also reduce the number of hops. It eliminates the whole process where the front end puts the request to middleware, which then goes to the backend and fetches the data from the storage. You can have your data locally, and then there is just a single hop. You get the output faster. It makes your applications run smoother and faster as well while responding to a request.

Single-click upgrades are the most valuable feature. In the sector in which we work, it is tough to have downtime and arrange firmware upgrades. If something goes wrong, you need to do a fallback or troubleshoot more. That can be totally avoided if you are using Nutanix in the backend for your hypervisor or clustering part. That is one thing.

Another thing is that you get CVMs similar to the number of nodes. CVM handles your backend storage infrastructure. It is underlying your hypervisor. If you have seven nodes, you will get seven CVMs, which is a good thing.

The availability of your data is also valuable. Whenever you shift or migrate your virtual machines inside a cluster, your data also follows that. It creates multiple copies of the data and keeps it ready in the backend for redundancy, which is another good point.

With Nutanix Prism, you get a single dashboard for everything. It shows you whether your data resiliency is okay, whether your nodes are okay, or whether your networking part is okay. It is another USP.

Our client had some old Citrix Xen servers for which there is no direct migration. Nutanix has a move utility for Microsoft Hyper-V clusters or VMware clusters. You can easily migrate them using the move utility, but the Xen clusters cannot be migrated in a simple way. That is the only thing that is lacking, but nowadays, no one uses the Citrix Xen server for their clusters. Everything else is already there. Nutanix keeps on upgrading its hardware's or hypervisor's capability to be able to support new technologies. 

I have been working with Nutanix for more than four years. 

It is quite stable. It is very robust. You can compare it to any old three-tier architecture solution. It is a much better solution. It is a much better approach. 

It is very easy, and it is very scalable. You can scale it vertically and horizontally. It has good scalability. If you have proper resources but only the storage needs to be upgraded, you have that flexibility where you can only purchase a storage node and add it to your cluster. If you want more compute resources, such as more CPU or RAM, you can put more nodes and add them into the cluster. There is no downtime. It is very simple and smooth.

In terms of the end-users, there are more than 3,000 users at a single location. There are multiple locations. There are about four locations in India and then for DR, they have two or three locations. This is basically a banking client, so there are multiple locations where they have put the Nutanix clusters. Even on the DR site, they have Nutanix. They have a six-node cluster where all the data is replicated. It is a multi-site deployment with about 16,000 users.

Their support is also very good. If something goes wrong, they will provide support. You just need to raise a case with their support. They come online and fix the issue as soon as possible and get your production going. 

They also support you at the deployment level. Many times, we faced some challenges because of networking, which plays an important part in deployment. If something is not proper in networking, the deployment does not happen. In such cases, you can raise a case with Nutanix support, and they will help you with the deployment. 

I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We did not use a different solution. There was mostly the three-tier architecture, and people used to replace or upgrade at the storage level, networking level, or server level until HCI came into the picture. With HCI, all those things went away. It reduces your DC footprint and gives you a powerful solution. There are different HCI players in the market, such as VMware vSAN and HPE SimpliVity, but wherever we have positioned Nutanix, clients have been happy. We had positioned HPE SimpliVity for a client, but in the next tech refresh, they got it replaced with Nutanix. 

We have had some clients who had their workloads on Azure and for their Oracle Database and SAP environment, they had purchased a Nutanix box from us. They had put their on-premise applications on Nutanix. When they saw those applications working so smoothly, they brought their Azure workload on-premises and bought another Nutanix box. I was a part of that migration.

Nutanix Prism dashboard and one-click upgrades are the points that make Nutanix much better as compared to other solutions. They give you a single pane of glass. The UI is very good. It gives you an experience similar to Azure or AWS UI. You can have all the insights about your hardware in a single pane of glass, and it is very easy for management as well to do regular reporting. They can make fast decisions regarding their futuristic plans.

Most deployments are on a hybrid cloud. Some of the deployments are on a private cloud. Our clients have Azure. They also have Nutanix Cloud.

The initial setup is very simple. You only need to get your foundation VMs set and then you can have it deployed. You need to get your appliance switch and connect all your client's servers to that switch. It is very simple. You can even start it and leave it. It will format all those nodes and make them ready. The networking part is also easy. Whether it is a plain network or you are putting in a VLAN, it is very easy. There are only a few commands, and then you can deploy it. 

For a 24-node cluster, it took us only about six hours, which is not the case with the three-tier architecture. It takes six hours just to plan how to position or get those nodes up and running in production. That is at the very initial level, and then it takes about a month's time to get the node cluster into production. That time is saved with Nutanix. In just six to seven hours, you can get it going in production.

We have a single person for deployment. I myself go to DC and do it. There is one more person to do the rack stacking of all the hardware. A single person is enough to get the clusters ready and put them in production.

In terms of maintenance, it does not require any maintenance that requires any downtime. It is very simple. If some new features get added, it will show them on your dashboard, and then you can upgrade to the newer version.

There is an ROI. With the three-tier architecture, you have to purchase separately for the storage, database, applications, etc. There is a software-layer investment, and then there is a hardware-layer investment. In the software-layer investment, you have to take backups and create a backup infrastructure. You also have to pay for the expertise. You need people for monitoring and taking care of your hardware. You need storage administrators and network administrators. With Nutanix, everything gets consolidated in a single box, and you also save the cost of expertise. There is a good return on investment.

Its licensing is fine. They provide the flexibility to choose from different options. You can go with the standard plan. You can go with the pro or platinum plan. Generally, our clients go with the pro licenses, but if you go for the platinum license, you get even more capabilities. Their starter license is also quite good.

About 95% of our clients go for the pro license, but we also have some clients who do not need enterprise-level features, so they go for the starter or standard license. They do not need to pay anything extra in addition to the standard licensing fee.

Clients usually evaluate a product when they have a pain area, they have a tech refresh, or they want to adopt a new technology. For example, if they are on the old three-tier architecture, they might be curious about HCI. We explain all the benefits of not only the HCI technology but also specifically of Nutanix for HCI. We explain how it addresses their pain area or needs. It has low overheads, so the cost of ownership is also low. They get a robust environment, and it is very easy to handle. It saves time. You do not have to go to DCN, mount storage, deal with SAN switches, etc. All those tasks are time-consuming. The maintenance and configuration take time. Nutanix saves you time. You can fulfill your needs or your clients' needs. The deployment is easy. Sometimes, our clients get astonished at the speed of deployment because they were expecting it to take weeks or months. It is simple but powerful. It is very easy.

Overall, I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10.

I use it for the app DB and infra-related services like Active Directory and file servers. And we run our Verint Enterprise Recording application on the platform.

I set things up for my internal customers who are the end-users.

The number of servers we need has been reduced with NCI's performance, and it reduces the space we need and provides energy savings on top of that. The major benefit is the consolidation of all the physical and VMware servers into the Nutanix AHV platform. That's the baseline of the entire application, the core platform. We no longer use our old HPE and Dell servers. The three-tier architecture has been eliminated. NCI has eliminated that complexity and the costs associated with it.

The architecture of Nutanix is the best, and the virtualization we get, out of the box, is an advantage. Also, dedupe and compression are done natively, inside the platform, so there are no additional licenses. That adds value to it.

In addition, it provides us with a single platform, which is pretty user-friendly, to manage our databases. It doesn't take much to manage the console.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for about five years.

It's stable. The design means we get an N+1 architecture for node failures. We haven't had any major downtime until now. We are good with the performance.

We have it deployed in multiple locations. It's a distributed architecture.

Their technical support is good, but they do have third-party system integrators. If you get one who is not that great, you will have problems.

Positive

I have worked with Cisco Hyperflex and HPE Simplivity but they don't have software that is equivalent to what Nutanix has. The others are still developing their software.

And Nutanix is far better than a standard SAN solution because it is an all-in-one solution. The read/write speed is far better than in three-tier architecture.

The initial deployment is pretty straightforward. One person can handle it.

There isn't much downtime due to maintenance. And updates are pretty easy, they're just plug-and-play. It's not complex. Adding compute and storage on demand is not a problem for me because my deployment is on-prem.

The ROI is definitely there, based on the consolidation. It reduces the workload footprint. That's the benefit. There aren't too many servers or storage. Nutanix becomes an all-in-one and enables us to accommodate more workloads because it has built-in dedupe and compression.

If they could further reduce the cost, that would be great. I would like to see the cost be less than the equivalent three-tier architecture.

My advice is to get away from the traditional approach and think in forward terms about an HCI model. Nutanix stays ahead in the market.

I haven't seen any drawbacks that would lead me to suggest any improvements to the functionality of NCI.

Our customer is utilizing Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for a significant project involving VDI and servers.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure runs on an SQL server. Customers utilize it as a private server. However, it cannot be considered a true cloud service since it operates on virtual infrastructure without provisioning orchestration.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure provides a unified platform for managing databases. We used this platform to install numerous virtual machines, including SEBD, and never encountered any issues.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has helped reduce downtime.

We have migrated various services into Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for our clients.

The administration console, automation, and the first cluster are all valuable features.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure lacks compatibility with certain older processors. When a customer purchases five or six nodes and two or three of them intend to buy two additional nodes, there can be compatibility issues with the hardware configuration.

The price is high and has room for improvement.

The maintenance can be improved.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for ten years.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is stable.

Based on my customers' feedback, the technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward, and the deployment is quick, taking only a few days to complete.

All of our clients are satisfied with the returns from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is expensive.

I give Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure an eight out of ten.

Upgrading is easy but modifications can be difficult. 

We utilize Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for customers who intend to replace their VMware environment infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a user-friendly unified platform for managing our databases. Prism Central enables us to oversee multiple systems through a single interface, making it convenient for administrators to learn.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's clustering features aid in minimizing downtime by incorporating redundancy factors, such as the capacity to accommodate a certain number of node failures.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has helped improve our customers' organizations by reducing the cost of ownership in cases where a customer does not want to depend on a VMware environment due to having non-VMware environments that are not supported.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has helped our clients consolidate their applications by migrating from VMware to their platform, which is beneficial. Additionally, there has been an increase in the number of nodes. The consolidation is important for our clients because it is a part of their expansion roadmap.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises environments, which are important for our customers because they reduce their CapEx costs.

The scalability, performance, and licensing model are the most valuable features.

Although Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is adding features that can enhance the solution, there is still room for improvement in terms of functionality. 

The licensing cost could be lower.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for four years.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is stable.

Scaling Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is easy. To scale, we just need to add the node and expand our cluster.

The technical support is good.

Our customers previously used VMware but switched to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure because they desired to consolidate their environment.

Our customers experience a return on investment by consolidating their server storage networks and benefiting from increased performance.

The overall cost depends on the contract of each customer and the discounts they have, but the price for the three-tier architecture can be slightly lower.

The license cost increases based on the log capacity.

I give Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure a seven out of ten.

The reason our customers choose Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is that the total cost of ownership is lower compared to implementing a traditional three-tier architecture.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is deployed in one primary location and is easy to maintain.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is a viable alternative to VMware. If the price is suitable for an organization, they can consider implementing this solution.

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.

We use it for the setup of multi-cloud infrastructure. Nutanix offers enterprise cloud, and then there are other clouds such as AWS and Azure.

It is a single platform to manage services. It starts at the infrastructure level, but Nutanix also offers other products that are more about services, not about infrastructure. Typical IT organizations know a lot about IT infrastructure, VMs, storage, and network. Nutanix is trying to reduce this workload and give you more time to think about services that are of benefit to your business because knowing about infrastructure is not of benefit at the business level.

Our clients run SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL databases, Oracle databases, and even MySQL databases on Nutanix. There are no limits. In 2012, they started with a high focus on VDI use cases because they were able to solve the problem of the traditional infrastructure solutions. Server virtualization and enterprise or mission-critical applications are also among the broad portfolio of use cases. I am sure you can run any use case on the Nutanix platform.

NCI’s features have helped our clients' organizations reduce downtime. One of the most impactful aspects is that once the SLAs of your services are declared or you know what your SLA requirements are, you can just implement or move the services to match the SLAs. This is one thing, and then you also have runbooks. High availability is not something you do once and it is done. It is a constant process of changes. You need to look at things, fix them, and test them. With Nutanix, you are able to do all of that. You have the ability to have runbooks where if there is an impact and something is down, you can specify how to start it again. This can be written in a runbook, so you have not only the technical ability but also the operational ability to recover from failures.

It helps to know the resource consumption. You know which resources are being consumed and which systems are over-provisioned. You can right-size them. You see the applications that are affecting other things. There is machine learning or artificial intelligence running at the backend telling you, "Look, these are the things we see." If there are any anomalies, you get messages saying that something is strange or going above the expected limits or below the expected reserve usage. You get to know if there is something going on that is different from the past. You can also do capacity management and planning. For example, if you have to run 20 more databases, you can assess if there are enough resources in your environment. In the end, you simplify things. You do not have to do the things that you did in the past but are of no value to the business, such as capacity management. If you are good at it, you will spend less on hardware, but it is not the business. It is just efficiency and consumption of resources, and it is automatically done for you with Nutanix. You do not have to do it.

For a client, we moved the complete IT infrastructure to the Nutanix infrastructure based on NCI. We moved hundreds of virtual machines or services. There is also a tool to do this, which belongs to AHV, not to AOS. AOS is for multi-cloud infrastructure. It is hypervisor agnostic, which means you can run the hypervisor you want such as AHV, Hyper-V, vSphere, etc. You can even select different hypervisors for different infrastructures. Generally, you move services at the hypervisor level, and it is easy to move services within the same hypervisor. If you want to move services across hypervisor where, for example, you decide on Nutanix and you also decide to switch from vSphere to AHV, there is a tool called Move that allows you to plan the migration process and deploy. 

This is a way into cloud consumption. Because the cloud is not about a vendor; it is an operational model, you can have your cloud in your data center, and later on, you can extend to a public cloud, which is a different approach. A few customers say that they have a cloud-first strategy, which means everything from the data center is brought to the cloud. Another approach is lift and shift, but it will cost you a lot of money in the public cloud. If you want to leverage and use a cloud, why not start with a data center? You can implement your cloud use case there, and if you want to extend your multi-cloud or hybrid cloud to public cloud suppliers or CSPs, such as Azure, GCP, or AWS, you have the same workbench in their cloud, so what Nutanix offers us is that in their public clouds, there is dedicated hardware, and they run the same infrastructure links that are in your data center. This way, it is easy for you to move workloads from your own data center to the cloud, which is a real benefit because there is no cloud login. It is not easy to move from AWS to Azure if you use their products, but Nutanix offers this flexibility and scalability.

It is easy to use. One of the things they have as a design goal is to reduce complexity and simplify things.

One of the improvements I would like to have is related to naming. It gets confusing because they are using three-letter acronyms, which are more or less misleading. What I do not like is that they changed names and reused names. They had a meaning in the past and they are still using the names for something similar. It is not related to the product. It is related to the naming conventions thing because this is driving partners and even customers crazy because the name is still the same, but the product in the backend is a completely different product. 

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for ten years. 

I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability. It is rock solid. It is not made by god. It is still man-built, so there are errors, but their support is excellent. If there are flaws in the new functions, they improve it really quickly. Afterward, it is okay.

The thing with the software is that you can test and test and test it, but in the end, the reality is that most software solutions get better after reaching the first customer. They get better and better by detecting errors. This is the same with Nutanix and other vendors. They track where the problems are, and if errors accumulate in a specific area, they have their task force internally focusing on these problems and fixing them. Pretty soon, in about three months' time, the problem is solved, and the fixes are released.

It is scalable. It is not difficult to add compute and storage on demand. If you run it in your own data center, you need extra hardware. If you need more resources, you have to add hardware and the whole process of adding this new hardware is simple. Mostly, we support scaling by adding more nodes to the cluster. There is also the possibility to scale up, for example, by adding some more disks to the existing system if there are free slots. It is also possible to get an extended RAM. It depends on the hardware. Some hardware vendors allow you to change CPUs.

Nutanix runs on hardware from different vendors, such as HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Fujitsu, or Supermicro, so you are independent of the hardware. You do not need any special hardware, so there is no RAID control. The idea is to use x86 servers, so you do get rid of all of the special hardware. You just buy what is available from Intel or AMD. You buy what is actually available, and all the functionality is made in the software. The resources are made in the hardware from existing vendors. It is a cloud-built and run-on-your-own setup. If you go to the cloud infrastructure, you also have hardware provided by the cloud provider, and you install Nutanix NCI software on this hardware. That is the way you can scale. If you want to have it in your data center, you can even have it run by a local MSP. We offer something like this, so it is more flexible. It is like traditional hardware, but you can add to the actual existing hardware if needed. They do not have to be the same types of nodes, so you can mix and match the way you need them.

Their support is extraordinary or exceptional. It is good. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

In terms of the deployment model, there are options for on-premises or on the cloud. You are free to choose. A lot of customers start with on-premises and add a cloud later on, but we do have customers who started directly in the cloud.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises, edge, as well as multiple hosted, managed, and public clouds. On the strategic consulting level, this is one of the key benefits because you do not have to run or select different cloud vendors. You can have one platform that helps you to run applications everywhere. However, most customers we work with still come from the approach of making their own IT infrastructure and not buying it. They are moved to the buy model, from the make model, by the C-level to reduce the cost. C-level mostly thinks that the cloud is cheaper. Another reason for the move is to get rid of multiple technical levels in their IT organizations.

In terms of maintenance, everything you run needs maintenance, so there are updates going on. Most of these updates are done with a simple click, but you should know what is running in the backend, and you should know what you are doing. A fool with a tool is still a fool. It is not as simple as the marketing statements are, but it is much simpler than the old traditional way of running IT infrastructure.

It is not cheap, but if you look at the return on investment and the total cost of ownership, it is worth the price.

In our selection and evaluation process of various solutions, we found that Nutanix is the best solution on the market, so the decision was made to only support this solution with our customers because other solutions do have more or less drawbacks.

The main benefit of Nutanix is that they are doing things in a simple way. For example, Nokia had smartphones, and then came Apple with a smartphone. Apple consolidated and simplified the use of a smartphone. Nutanix is inheriting these principles of convergence and making things simpler.

In terms of comparison of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure application and database performance versus a standard SAN solution, in most situations, Nutanix is above the expectations of our customers. They are surprised by the better performance. You can have the same performance as its competitors, but you would need more resources, which means more hardware. It is not that they cannot do it. It is possible, but you need to buy more hardware.

There is a culture of over three to five years of planning in most organizations. They know there is a budget of one million dollars, and they want to use it to the maximum for the next five years. Most of the time, customers buy too much hardware or too many resources. Nutanix offers them a change in the way they consume hardware and licenses, but changing a customer's business culture takes time. Most customers do not realize this in the first use case, but you can help them if they understand better what they really need. After the first implementation, most customers realize that they are over-provisioned. They bought more than what they needed. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure allows you to buy as you need. You do not have to buy for five years, and you always can add resources based on your need. You also have the information about when you need them. For example, the systems will tell you that if you add more, you will need more resources. This is the benefit, but most customers do not trust these statements in the beginning. This is a learning process, and the lesson learned is that instead of over-provisioning, how to use resources wisely and how to discuss things with the procurement department so that they give you the money when you need more resources, not every five years. It might be every year and so to have a fixed growth. There are a lot more benefits. For example, there is no aging hardware. If your hardware is aging, you can just replace it or add additional hardware to the infrastructure when you need it. There is also no loss of value where you buy something and it loses value over time. When you spend one million dollars on the hardware, its value is reduced every month. At some point in time, it is at zero.

This solution is different from the way we did things in the past. My advice is that if you are feeling the pain over and over again, that means that you are doing something wrong. If you want to change things, you have to do different things. You cannot do the same thing over and over again hoping that the outcome will change. Nutanix is one way out of this. They help you to reduce the time to run your own infrastructure and increase the stability and availability of your infrastructure.

Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten.