Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

We have only made use of the virtual machine. 

We are very satisfied with the speed, compression and duplication. The solution is transparent. The speed of the operations and of creation of VM is fantastic.

Storage utilization and optimization should be better. 

While the product is great, in certain situations we find it less easy to deal with than how it is presented. 

In the next release, I hope to see a certain and easier means of doing updates, since we have encountered many problems in this arena. 

While the solution is stable, we find it difficult to update. I thought this should be easier to do, but we have encountered difficulty with updating the ESXi and Nutanix versions.

We are currently using Nutanix Acropolis AOS. 

While the solution is stable, we find it difficult to update. I thought this should be easier to do, but we have encountered difficulty with updating the ESXi and Nutanix versions.

I cannot, as yet, address scalability, as we have not expanded the cluster thus far. 

I did not handle the installation. This was done by a system integrator.

We don't use the hypervisor of Nutanix, but only take advantage of its hyperconvergence system. We also use VMware Hypervisor.

We deploy the solution in our organization on-premises. This is because we have ERP on-cloud and a VMware infrastructure satellite server, meaning this server is on-premises, but our ERP is on-cloud.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS as an eight out of ten. 

I advise my customers to have a unique management operation center for the three layers. The primary reason is to convert the storage, computation, and hypervisor into one frame. Of course, you have to replicate the data between all the nodes to have redundancy, so you have two or three nodes in case of failure, depending on the resilience you want. I advise my customers to use this kind of technology when they want to focus on their business and don't want to talk about the layers of the subsequent infrastructure that is matched to their business.

The technology has a lot of room for improvement. For example, when they want to segment applications in conjunction with NSX, which VMware uses, Acropolis is not compatible with the competitors. The integration in the security layer is not compatible with NSX for the application segmentation that uses VMware. And the licensing has a lot of room for improvement also.

I've been using Acropolis AOS for about four years.

Acropolis AOS is stable.

This solution works in small companies with 10 users and large enterprises with 100,000. Acropolis can scale vertically and horizontally by adding more CPUs or nodes. It's quite easy to scale, and you have the option to have distributed nodes everywhere around the world that work as one. You can also have a solution for small branch offices with only two nodes for redundancy, and that's good enough to start. You could even deploy it on a ship or a car or whatever unit.

It's quite technical, so IT departments are the main driver of expanding usage. However, it's an easy sell to decision-makers because it tries to abstract the technical things to the business. When a managing director of a company knows about the benefits of this kind of solution, they give the green light and focus their IT department on the technical business requirements, solutions, and innovations layers, instead of managing the technical layers, like network, storage, and computations. 

We have a contract with Nutanix for 24/7 support, and it's excellent. They contact the customers directly when there is a failure or they need to replace a disk. You only take action when you need to evolve the platform, like installing a new model or a patch because you need preventive action. If we need to patch to the latest firmware of the solution, then they call us. However, that's something that is scheduled well ahead of time. For example, we schedule with the customer to install the latest firmware every six months.

I don't have a lot of hands-on experience with Acropolis because I'm a sales executive, but I can say Nutanix solutions are easy to deploy. The only hang-up is compatibility with other solutions like OM, Lenovo, HP, Supermicro, etc., because sometimes the drivers change.

For example, sometimes you could have a different release of the driver that isn't compatible with the latest release of the software, so you need to match the release with the nodes that support the Nutanix software. You could also have problems with the support and matching all the nodes to the software release that makes the work correctly. I've had a lot of problems with customers trying to match the software with the hardware layer. You have to choose the right vendor for the hardware to avoid problems. Otherwise, the setup is straightforward. 

However, you always need someone with technical expertise. We usually handle the deployment ourselves, but we occasionally ask for support when we have to deploy an uncommon configuration, like Oracle. For example, Acropolis has different ways to support Oracle databases, so we sometimes need Nutanix support to configure the Oracle rack.

We only need a small team of around 10 people to deploy and maintain because 

Return on investment happens when the customer realizes relative value. For example, if the customer is comparing cloud computing to an on-premise server, on-premise Nutanix is always going to be more expensive compared to AWS or Azure if you use it in a typical way. You have to consider the hours that the technicians spend maintaining the solution. Also, if the technicians are spending less time, they could start doing things that create more value for the company.

It's not easy to see a return on investment for this kind of solution, but you need to solve this problem at a higher level of management because the IT department is not involved in innovation at the company, so they might feel the solution is doing the job for them.

Also, they might have a personal stake in keeping the solution because they could see a risk to their livelihood if the company decides to switch to the cloud. It's something to sell to the upper management because even the CIO might not see it because they think their position is at risk. These solutions are like a robot that makes everything by themselves. The return on investment is a reduction in the time spent managing the infrastructure, and you could start seeing that time savings in six months to a year.

Many of my customers have issues with Acropolis' licensing model because they are charging the customers based on two things— the CPUs and the capacity in the solid stack disk — and that's a problem. Nutanix's competitors are not licensing that layer, so this is something that they should change. They should abandon this licensing model because it's too complex. Technical support is bundled with the subscription.

I rate Acropolis AOS seven out of 10. 

We deployed Nutanix Acropolis for a school system in a recent use case. One of our clients uses Nutanix for three campus sites. They've implemented multi-site replication, so there is protection on the data center end. Another client is a hospital that uses Nutanix HCI for its medical systems, like PACS imaging servers. We also have clients in financial services and banking.

In addition to the hyper-converged infrastructure, most of our clients are pleased with Acropolis' built-in replication in terms of the DR setup. Our clients also like Prism Central's advanced management and analytics, and many find Nutanix Flow and playbooks incredibly useful.

Nutanix could streamline Acropolis' advanced management to keep pace with its competitors. For example, in VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor, you can directly put a host into maintenance mode via the GUI. However, it takes several steps to do this with Nutanix Acropolis, and you need to use the command-line interface for most of the steps.

We also faced another challenge in version 5.15. It wasn't easy to upgrade the firmware. You need to set permissions in your cluster to download it from the Nutanix repository and do it offline. After that, you need to create a dark-site web server and put all the repositories or installers to update there. However, I think they enabled upload mode in the new release, so you can download the firmware directly from the website and manually upload it. I haven't tried it yet, but that should be available in the latest version, according to the press release. 

I also think Nutanix Flow has some room for improvement. It currently only protects east-west traffic — like a mini firewall. You should be able to set a security policy that will let you disallow some ports and subnets. That's the only feature that Nutanix Flow lacks right now. Competing products like VMware NSX and Sangfor are more robust in security at the networking level. I think that's the crucial part, given the security concerns we face. It's not only on Layer 2 but down to Layer 3 and the routing aspects of networking.

We're a Nutanix partner in the Philippines, and we've been working with Acropolis for around five years. We started in 2017.

In terms of stability and performance, Acropolis is excellent. We've never gotten any negative feedback from our users. 

We've deployed Acropolis for clients of all sizes, but most are small or medium-sized businesses. Some are on the enterprise level. We have some major banks or financial service clients who also acquire Nutanix. 

We offer different levels of support to our clients. When they experience a problem, they go directly to us. If we can answer the question, it's all good. However, we sometimes face a hardware or software issue, so we need to open a case with Nutanix or the hardware vendor.

Nutanix support is excellent. Their support engineers are well trained. But the resolution speed often comes down to the communication between Nutanix and their OEM partner. For example, if Nutanix support finds a problem with the hardware, they need to report it to the OEM vendor, so that can take time. But in terms of experience and skills, the Nutanix support specialists are outstanding.

Deploying Acropolis is straightforward. I can implement it by myself in one day. 
After installation, we do some preventative maintenance, like checking the hardware and upgrading the firmware and software for the hypervisor as well as the OEM hardware, whether it's Dell, Supermicro, or Lenovo.

Acropolis is priced similarly to competing solutions. In my experience, as long as we have properly sized workloads on the Nutanix cluster, Nutanix's price can even be lower than other HCI brands. Some of the features are licensed separately from Nutanix Acropolis AOS. For example, Flow has a separate license. Nutanix Files and Objects are licensed per terabyte.

If you are thinking about implementing Acropolis, my advice would be to properly size your workload and forecast performance utilization so your sizing will be accurate and you can predict the cost.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS nine out of 10. 

We have a very large deployment of our own, and we also sell a fair amount of it to our clients.

We deliver VDI systems over this and other similar technologies. We only work with hospitals. This is all in healthcare. We've essentially created private CloudOp architecture that we sell to hospitals for specialized VDI environments, and this is the product that we use.

In terms of the version, we have very significant installations of it for our clients. It is part of a product and service for which we work with our clients. I would assume we have the latest versions.

It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us. 

The software-defined networking should be improved. It is quite substandard as compared to the VMware variant. The software-defined networking is quite limited, and we usually use other products to do that. We're aware that Nutanix is working on that and will be coming out with better solutions, and we can't wait because to do a fully software-defined architecture, the abstraction layer needs not only software-defined storage, which you have, but also the software-defined networking piece.

We have been using this solution for about four or five years.

It is quite stable. We had no problems with it.

So far, it hasn't been a problem for us. It is able to do all the expansions that we've needed.

It is adequate. It is no better or worse than VMware's support.

It was straightforward.

We started with a combination of consultants and Nutanix's professional services group, but now, we're supporting it all internally.

It is less expensive than the VMware alternative.

You need to understand abstraction and virtualization properly to be able to deploy it properly. You should look at it as a real alternative to VMware.

I would rate it as an eight out of 10. It is less expensive than the VMware alternative. I wouldn't say it is better than the VMware alternative. If you consider VMware's software-defined networking piece, VMware has an advantage, but its cost is significantly less. For that reason, I would give it a high rating.

I use Nutanix Acropolis AOS to host all of our electronic services in the university, such as e-services, e-learning system, registration system, library system, finance system, HR system, and clinics.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has helped our organization run a lot better by allowing us to manage everything from one single location.

The best feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the central management of all of our resources. Additionally, it is easy to use

The solution has been more than enough at the moment to manage all of my services.

I have used Nutanix Acropolis AOS within the past 12 months.

The solution is very stable at the moment.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is highly scalable. This is the most important factor that we went to this technology.

Every cloud distributer went to hyper-converged because of the scalability.

All of our users have migrated to the new cloud, which is the new hosted at the university. We have approximately 2,000 students, 300 administrators employees, and 150 faculty members. The total is approximately 2,500 users using this solution. The university is still expanding, it is a young institute and we plan to increase usage of the solution.

We are still new at using this technology, and till the moment, we did not have any problems. I think you cannot tell if there are any issues with the product for a couple of years. When we start to upgrade our framework, upgrade the main OS, we will see if then we might have issues. At this point as an administrator, everything has been stable, we do not need any support.

We were using Citrix for our servers previously. However, it is hard to compare to Citrix because it is a different technology.

When comparing Nutanix Acropolis AOS installation to the traditional solution, you have to bring the servers, deploy the operating system, and then attach them to SAN storage. This newer solution was much easier than the old technique that we used, the installation is very straightforward.

Once you start it up from out of the box you can start creating virtual machines and migrate your servers. It is very straightforward. The virtual concept is simple, you create the virtual machines and book the resources.

The one disadvantage is relative, financially Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a little bit more expensive than the old solution.

Nutanix owns the hosting, servers, and licenses. You purchase the whole product as a bundle,  and you can have support for it.

We did our homework and we did study the technology in Nutanix Acropolis AOS before choosing it.

We have contacted more than one partner regarding the hyper-converged system. They sent us their solution from HP, for instance, they have their own hyper-converged system. They are using the DL Series DL380 and I went back to Gartner reports and other review sites, and then compared the specs to others. There is a hyper-converged solution from Dell but I think the leader in this technology right now is Nutanix. It is important to do a proof of concept.

The Patriarchate that owns the university is also in charge of multiple educational institutions. What we are thinking is to migrate all our services, to have our own private cloud, instead of being hosted separately into multiple hosts in our university. That's why we are planning to increase our nodes and to move all of the nodes, and all of the e-services related to our institute, inside our campus.

My advice to others is this solution is great and I highly recommend it. It's much better than the other technology or the deployed traditional solutions.

I rate Nutanix Acropolis AOS a ten out of ten.

We have used Nutanix Acropolis for deploying a private cloud. We are using the latest version of Nutanix Acropolis AOS.

The feature that I have found most valuable is its software Move, which we use to migrate virtual info from another platform to the Nutanix platform.

Then you have the Prism Central Core, the user management consoles, for managing most of the VMs. And there are a few options which I bought, including for the reporting.

In terms of what could be improved, they keep updating the product and releasing new features. They are quite up to date with the product. But the fact is that the new features are not free. You need to pay for each feature.

Since it is a high convert solution, we don't need any downtime because all the VMs are being moved to another node. So no downtime is required.

It is very stable and reliable.

Nutanix Acropolis is very easy to scale.

It requires about two people.

We have the technical support. If you pay for maintenance, you have a subscription with maintenance and you get support from them.

We were satisfied with the support. We have been able to resolve any technical issue.

We are still using Palo Alto NG firewall, which we have been using for the last 10 years.

Installing Nutanix Acropolis was quite easy. It took one day.

There was no downtime.

We did not implement with the vendor, but we have a local integrator.

The pricing has been very expensive. Previously, the prices were okay, but now the price has increased since you have to pay additionally for all the features that they are making.

Overall, I would recommend Nutanix Acropolis to other users. On a scale of one to ten, I would give it a nine.

We are using the hyperconverged Cloud software and I manage Nutanix. I was responsible for the planning, management and the architecture. It was then given to the structural team.

We updated the internet software so when we migrated the workload we could compare from previous examples.

To have internal stability, we needed to network the solution ourselves. Performance depends on the application. Performance could be the lack of IOPS, memory and CPU and configuration issues. 

We are not going to increase our usage of Nutanix Solutions. We are migrating to the Cloud because of the cost.

We have been using it for about one month.

Stability depends on the type of application you are running. If you are running complex applications you should run them one at a time.

We have a Nutanix vendor that provides maintenance. We escalate to support if it is beyond the control of our in-house support team.

Our company already had a license for Nutanix so we wanted to us Nutanix Acropolis Solutions before any licensing costs. 

It is not straightforward to install, you need to follow the installation steps. The installation took about one to two months to complete the entire process as it took workloads from our existing developer platform.

We have about 25 people managing the application deployment.

The maintenance software is straightforward because you do not need to do any configuration.

The installation was carried out by the vendor.

We did not require licenses because we already used Nutanix, so we only need to buy the software.

I recommend certain applications but not this solution. There are certain limitations due to the lack of storage. If you need high performance, heavy applications you need to consider hardware and storage.

I would rate this solution a 6 out of 10.

My primary use case for Nutanix is for running Windows servers. Nutanix is deployed on-premises. 

Nutanix was a very good business solution for our site. It's an expensive system, but it provides power savings, in terms of the low costs for running it, and it was a good business investment. 

One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect. 

I'm sure there are a lot of things that could be improved, but I'm actually very satisfied with this product. There may be some possibilities to move the virtual server dismounting points or to move the server from one group to another, but I can't think of any special improvements or update features. 

I have been working with Nutanix for the past two years. 

I'm very satisfied with the stability and performance of Nutanix. This solution is easy to maintain. You use the LCM module, press update, and it's done for you. It's wonderful because you don't have to do anything—it's almost too easy. I am the only one handling maintenance for and managing Nutanix. 

This solution is scalable. I just added some extra discs to the system because we were running out of space and all I had to do was put the discs inside the service—Acropolis took care of the rest. It added volume and said that everything was done automatically, so it's difficult to make the process any easier. 

Whenever I have had a support case, Nutanix has always helped to solve it the first time around. I have never had to wait for an extra or false opinion on the product or problem; it has always been solved within first contacting Nutanix. Compared to what I've seen of other technical support, it's hard to get better than this. 

We worked with VMware for some years before switching to Nutanix. We had a problem with our SQL servers, which were running on VMware, and the performance wasn't good. There was a product called Pernix that we installed to VMware, to speed up the storage process when it was saving files and data. Pernix worked very well.

They implemented that technology from Pernix into Nutanix, which is why I think Nutanix performs so well. There is an internal storage service, rather than a storage center, so you don't have to spend time waiting for the network. That was what Pernix did: it moved the storage, or part of the storage, inside the server, which then took care of saving to that storage. It's a little complicated to explain, but that was why our SQL servers were working as a traditional server with a separate machine. This is the way that Nutanix works as well. You have the server you are running always located on the local stores and it will make sure to back everything up. Instead of looking at VMware, I would advise looking at Nutanix or something else that's similar. However, it's IP, so it's always evolving. 

The initial setup was done by Lenovo at delivery, but it seemed to be quite easy. There is always some setup in the beginning, but once the setup's done, it will only take a few minutes to add an extra node or anything. It's done almost automatically—you don't have to do anything, just put them in and then they're up and running. 

We implemented through a vendor team. The initial setup was done by Lenovo Professional Services, but on a day-to-day basis, I handle the running of Nutanix. I only contact Nutanix if there is an error I cannot solve myself, which has only happened three or four times. 

This product is expensive, but they do have discounts. At one point, I saw that they were giving a 70% or 80% discount, which is a good thing, but maybe they should have a more realistic price and then a 5% to 10% discount. 

I rate Nutanix a ten out of ten. I recommend this solution to any companies considering implementation. It was a good business investment for our company and as an extended working system, it is easy to maintain and use. The costs for running it are also low. For most companies who are already running some system at a certain scale and on-premises, I think a lot of them could benefit from this solution. 

I'm an end user and don't have any direct business connection with Nutanix—I only contact them when I need technical support.