We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable."
"The fact that there is only one interface to deploy a complete solution for maximum storage is fantastic."
"In terms of scalability, adding a number of nodes, I find that it will not be any issues."
"It is a good solution and it is easy to work on their platform."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"In general, being able to patch and not having to pay for SanDisk is the best thing about hyper-converged."
"Acropolis AOS's networking concept is excellent."
"I can use VMware or Hyper-V license, if I already have. But if I use a similar solution as Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) that comes embedded in Nutanix solution, I can manage all my virtual environments with everything I need without spend more money on licenses."
"It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas."
"The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great."
"The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well."
"The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CICD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications."
"The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves."
"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."
"Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues."
"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."
"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"Nutanix can be a bit complex to understand."
"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."
"I would like better integration of XenServer into the AOS and Prism Central."
"We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process."
"We could always use a performance upgrade, or simplified management."
"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."
"They need to improve the look and feel of the interface. The functionality is fine, but the appearance could be better."
"In terms of what I would like to see improved, I would say the life cycle management. I don't know if it is because they changed to an LCM from the previous way of upgrading the hardware or software but sometimes it feels that it needs a wizard that says, "Check this, check this," telling you your options. The only thing that's a bit frustrating for me is the life cycle management interface. That's the only thing on the entire system that frustrates me."
"It's not cheap."
"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."
"There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end."
"The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better."
"vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into every once in a while."
"Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration."
"It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined."
"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. 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 Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Dell PowerFlex, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
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