We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and VMware vSphere based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"The features that I have found most valuable include its HA facility, viability, robustness, flexibility, it's time to go live is very short, and it has a friendly user interface."
"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 is 100% stable. It's the most stable infrastructure that we have."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS makes it easy to use and manage projects and it has a good reputation."
"We have had good feedback from our customers about this solution."
"To receive a performance enhancement by merely clicking the one button upgrade is the true value of the platform and what I look forward to the most."
"It consolidates our servers, and improves our electricity consumption and cooling as well."
"The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues."
"Once you have everything configured, it is relatively straightforward."
"This solution's most valuable feature is its High Availability."
"The main benefit of the version 6.7 is that it makes end-users able to use the interface much more effectively. They don't have to install a client on their machine, they can do it from their phone, their laptop, their tablet, any OS, anytime. It's a better experience for the end-user."
"It's not a particular feature, really, however, I can say that the solution is just easy to maintain, and makes it easy to backup all those VMs. We can easily save our data and we can deploy VM machines very fast and create the delivery of the server in a pretty simple, dynamic way."
"The virtualization, the remote management user interface, and the web console are most valuable."
"The most valuable features are the seamless HA with vMotion and being able to run vCenters in HA mode."
"The free ESXi hypervisor was a great way to get started, as it allowed us to introduce virtual machines so that users could start to experience the advantages."
"The stability of the solution is excellent."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"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 documentation could be improved."
"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."
"The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's LTS version needs to be more reliable."
"There is a lot of functionality in Prism Central, but sometimes you want to see those features in Prism Element."
"There are other services that Nutanix has that could be improved, but I'm not very familiar with the other services of Nutanix, such as Era and Flow. However, they seem a bit hard for us to implement and integrate with the Nutanix Acropolis AOS and other Nutanix tools. We would not dare to implement those other Nutanix solutions into Nutanix Acropolis AOS right now. The implementation of that tool could be the problem, I am a bit hesitant to implement the other tools into Nutanix Acropolis AOS."
"While the customer support is truly incredible, for Spanish speakers it would be appropriate to have support in their native language to further improve problem-solving conditions."
"I would like better integration of XenServer into the AOS and Prism Central."
"From my point of view, my advice is to design the solution properly the first time."
"The integration with containers should be addressed."
"The quality of support could be better."
"The price could be better."
"I’d like to see a better web console or rather, transform the web console in a real single pane of glass for the whole infrastructure instead of having to go for vRealize Ops Manager."
"Given that I've been using version seven, it seems that some of the bugs I faced during that version have already been addressed in subsequent updates. Although I haven't personally tested them yet, it appears that these issues have been resolved. In version seven, there was a problem with the network interface not responding due to certain configurations not being properly filtered. However, in version eight, this requirement has been minimized, so the mentioned bug is less likely to occur. Instead of solely addressing these fixes in newer versions, it might be beneficial for them to consider applying these improvements to the older versions as well. This approach could prevent users from feeling compelled to upgrade to version eight solely to avoid encountering the issue, and instead provide updates for version seven users."
"I do not find it to be simple and efficient to manage. The tools, the interface to manage it, are a pain. In the latest version, they moved us to web-only, the Web Client and it's terrible. It's slow. It crashes. It's annoying. I used the Web Client in the older version and was happy. I would go back to the regular thick client but I don't have that option anymore, so I am always fighting it."
"The performance of the solution could be better and there could be an extra level of security."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. 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 vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and Hyper-V, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware Aria Operations.
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Nutanix Acropolis has been specially designed to respond to the problems of hyper-converged infrastructures.
We believe that Nutanix Acropolis is more flexible and better suited to respond to the issues of very high availability.
Question one:
Does the customer already have vSphere because than I would suggest not to use Acropolis? Nutanix wants to control the entire platform with its HCI solution like VMware.
Question 2:
Do you want to use NSX now or in the future? Use VMware, because if it will be supported and it would always give issues with the integrations with Acropolis.
Question 3:
Is the growth of the customer low? Then Nutanix can be a choice if it is bigger than VMware. Nutanix is not flexible in big site setups and can give big problems with updating.
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We found the erasure coding, deduplication, and on-demand scaling extremely valuable. The feature our team liked the best was that Nutanix Acropolis AOS is core-centralized on the UI - you don’t have multiple interfaces that you have to handle. It’s better integrated for the complete management of the infrastructure.
We would like to see more operating systems included, though. If you require high-end or lots of compute, Nutanix Acropolis AOS may not be a good fit for those large databases. We would like to see better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators. The solution’s integration with other platforms could also be improved.
VMware vSphere is very good from a recoverability point of view; everything can be stored much easier on a virtual server than a physical one. VMware vSphere is very good with memory sharing between VMs and CPU scheduling between VMs. The command-line tools integrate well with Microsoft products, so it’s easy to manipulate them. VMware vSphere is very stable and very scalable.
The initial setup with VMware vSphere can be a bit complex. You need to have a good understanding of VMware. Hard partitioning is not permitted with VMware vSphere. We found there were occasional bugs and errors and that the HTML5 is not up to par. The pricing and licensing options can get expensive.
Conclusion
After researching both Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere, we chose VMware vSphere. We felt that they were more reliable, offered better scaling capabilities, and had very good documentation. We also feel VMware vSphere has better integration with other platforms than Nutanix Acropolis AOS does. VMware vSphere has very high availability and allows us to easily save our data and deploy VM machines quickly and we can create the delivery of the server with tremendous ease.
I think VMware vSphere is more mature as a hypervisor than Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). it is more capable to serve almost most of the workloads. having said that if you are talking about a standard workload both of them can do the job, but your workload is sensitive or even newly released you most properly find it will be certified to work vSphere before becoming certified on AHV.
in addition most technology providers and one of them Nutanix they first certify their solutions to work with vSphere before certifying any other hypervisor.
Nutanix is running AHV. There is no need for a VMware license.
Acropolis in itself is no product.
Do we speak AOS or AHV Ort both?
AOS is the intelligence on Top of a hypervisor making AHV Or Vsphere an HCI Solution.
AHV is Nutanix own KVM-based hypervisor managed completely within Prism from AOS, so there is no standalone offering, it always comes with AOS.
This seems to contradict the statement above, but since you can have AOS without AHV, you can make a clear distinction between both.
AHV has the advantage of being optimized tightly with AOS. Together with ESXi, you still have to use two management tools for AOS + ESXi. AHV + AOS utilizes the same prism element web management. So, integration is the biggest difference between AHV and ESXi
For AOS and ESXi the answer is quite simple: you would have to compare VSAN with AOS. Then you see, the integration of products and resiliency in Nutanix is better by a magnitude.
if your comparing features you have AHV on Par with ESXi.
AHV is the predominant hypervisor on nutanix systems deployed. Vmware would mostly be used for customers who already have vsphere licenses or want to keep their standard hypervisor.
I dont think there are stability issues with AOS or AHV. We tend to update more frequently our AHV systems than we do with VMware. With Nutanix you leverage the update process conveniently with LifeCycleManagement (LCM) integrated into Prism Web Management supplying everything from native nutanix products to firmware for your hypervisor hosts. There are also regular customer notifications to warn of detected misconfigurations in the field and check for your own setup and howto act on that. I never got anything from VMware regarding such a thing. And I do know what a purple screen of death looks like...