We performed a comparison between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Nutanix Acropolis is the clear winner in this comparison. In addition to being a powerful and reliable product, it is easy to deploy, has excellent customer support and a significant ROI.
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"Most beneficial feature is simplicity, ease of use."
"We are suggesting Nutanix to the management because of scalability and time efficiency."
"Prism Central allows managing the cluster from a single pane of glass, and it allows a deeper dive into the solution."
"We have had good feedback from our customers about this solution."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS has very good stability."
"They have one of the best technical supports in my experience."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the solution's ease of upgrading."
"vSAN that has been most effective in streamlining storage operations. For data recovery alerts, it uses tools like snapshots and vMotion."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features."
"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."
"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."
"If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"The solution has high performance."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high."
"Nutanix should improve AHV to support migration VMs between clusters and storage containers. Migration between containers is possible, but it requires shutting down the VM. The procedure is long and there is no migration between clusters at all."
"While their overall Nutanix Bible is good, they are lacking good descriptions for particular scenarios that might be helpful to many users."
"The documentation could be improved."
"The name of the solutions offered by Nutanix does not indicate what the tool does."
"The One-Click Upgrade process could/should offer the ability to integrate with 3rd party drivers. For example, we use NVIDIA Grid graphics cards. It would be amazing if, during the One-Click Upgrade process, we could "slipstream" additional VIB drivers for ESXi into the upgrade process."
"In the next release of this solution, they could improve by being more competitive with VMware. I would like all third-party solutions to work well with Nutanix Acropolis AOS."
"I would like them to update their licensing to provide more features with their basic license."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."
"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."
"The quality of the customer service and support depends on the vSAN case. For example, if I open ten cases, maybe two or three get resolved quickly. But the other cases have a slow response."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere, Dell PowerFlex and Hyper-V, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware vSAN report.
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Hello Edwin, I am posting this answer on behalf of Daniel Wetter, one of PeerSpot's community members: "Hello, Edwin, first, it would be good to receive more information about your needs and concerns. Would you like to use existing local storage equipped with your Hypervisor servers, it seems you maybe already running on ESXi? Do you already earn fibre channel switches? How fast is your current network? Would you like to easily expand your storage environment? How fast should your storage perform, GB/s , IO/s , average response time / ms (ns)? .. and so on…. Maybe also other HCI Storage vendors like DataCore could gain additional efforts. What is your environment like? Do you need a kind of block storage or maybe you already got S3 aware/ready applications like SAP, document management systems, structured unstructured file services, big data files, databases…. All these topics and a lot more … were needed to give you a good for your special needs a related answer. With such a globalized question, you will earn/receive suggestions and opinions, but not an answer which fits your needs. Maybe my above little questionnaire will help you a little bit. Best regards Daniel"
Both can get you the performance you might want, however, you should also consider what else you get with the solution. For Nutanix, you're stuck on Acropolis if you start with that. It would be best to run either VMware or Hyper-V on top of that so migration isn't a gym show, plus the renewal cost will be very high.
vSAN is a fine option, just ensure it is designed well with enough nodes to tolerate any amount of disk failure.
Both options have their unique value but the most important thing is the data. You'll need data protection solutions like Veeam, Nakivo, or Zerto.
For an all-in-one high-performance solution with built-in data protection consider HPE SimpliVity with VMware. You'll also likely buy fewer nodes than the others with SimpliVity.
In the early days, Nutanix had the better solution, by now especially when you use a vSphere hypervisor I would go with vSAN for better integration and with ReadyNodes no complex config anymore. Also, I had several customers who complained that Nutanix got very expensive on the first renewal vs. massive initial discounts, however, I can't judge if that is true.