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.
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together."
"The tool is simple, stable, and easy to upgrade. It also requires few resources to manage, which simplifies our work. The solution's ease of upgrading is its valuable feature. AHV, provided by Nutanix, is excellent in performance and ease of use. It's based on an open-source product called KVM, which I also use for other services."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has a simple, user-friendly GUI, and I also like the remote recovery capabilities. It provides a single platform for managing databases."
"The most valuable features are the RBAC, role-based access control, and the reporting. NCI also provides a single platform, a single pane with a dashboard, to manage the entire infrastructure. We have complete information about overall utilization, performance, and a forecast for our platform in that single pane."
"It is very easy to clone systems using the solution."
"The product is easy to manage."
"It has been stable so far."
"The flexibility of this system is very good. It's also faster than others, and has skilled technical support who showed more initiative than a competitor, e.g. VMware."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"The most valuable feature is that it is software-defined storage. Also, being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes. The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"In terms of the IT different categories, I would like for the governing sections to be able to use it in the IT department. If they can have something like a one view management portal or software similar to VMware that would be an added value."
"Pricing and varieties of options could be better."
"It already has the capability to integrate with the major cloud providers but, in an upcoming release, if there is a possibility to have it integrate with other cloud providers like IBM, Alibaba, and other moderate-level cloud providers, that would be good."
"It would be great if they could improve the GUI features."
"The self-service side of the product needs to be improved. We should be able to add two-factor authentication and more security layers to it."
"While their overall Nutanix Bible is good, they are lacking good descriptions for particular scenarios that might be helpful to many users."
"Compatible with third party hardware, but it's still very limited."
"There is room to enhance the micro-segmentation."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"It can be very expensive."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
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, VMware vSphere, Dell PowerFlex, Hyper-V and HPE SimpliVity, 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.