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 is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” accessible by all hosts. StarWind cuts down virtualization cost and complexity by eliminating the need for a physical shared storage (SAN). -StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured . we get technical support from star wind team when implementation software and after setup if we face any issue."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"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."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"It has been stable so far."
"It is very easy to clone systems using the solution."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, integrates with other hardware configurations, and is simple to manage."
"I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software."
"The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV."
"The most valuable aspect of Nutanix is the performance of the storage, which is excellent. And controlling compute, storage, the network, and security all together in one box is very efficient for us. It gives us a single platform to manage our all infrastructure."
"There are a lot of features in Nutanix that are different from other hyper-converged solutions, such as site-to-site replication. VM-based site-to-site replication is bundled with the software licensing. For the DR, it has the availability groups, which is one of the key features that Nutanix provides."
"The stability is good. This is the number-one product in that regard."
"The valuable features of vSAN are that you can get it up and running quickly, you get redundancy built-in, and it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree."
"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."
"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."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"The solution has high performance."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"When we have issues with the solution, they tend to be around networking."
"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."
"In the licensing, it needs to be clear about features because it is not clear whether Flow is integrated or not."
"The new features are not free. You need to pay for each feature."
"An area for improvement would be the cyber security features."
"It would be fantastic if there was a built-in layer, in Nutanix, that acted like a cloud interface. So far, we need to integrate a cloud interface on top of Nutanix for billing the usage for specific customers' domains. It would be great if a cloud gateway was built-in, inside Nutanix."
"Storage utilization and optimization should be better."
"Reduce its power consumption."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them."
"It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure."
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.