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."It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"Best features are around data locality, compression, and deduplication."
"A great feature involves real-time hardware changes."
"The most valuable features are the user-friendly dashboard and that we don't need to move resources manually when adding new nodes into running clusters."
"One of the most valuable features is the One-Click Upgrade. When I need to update the system, I do it with one click. This product is amazing because everything is easy to manage, from network management to snapshots."
"It's much easier and faster even when you want to create a server from a template or clone."
"It offers very useful data protection."
"I like NCI's dashboard. If there are any infrastructure issues, we'll get alerts inside the dashboard. NCI provides a single platform for managing all of our databases. We are running SQL and Linux databases."
"The ease of deployment is very good."
"The technical support is good and they are available over the internet."
"It's a very useful solution. It's easy to set up, and it's pretty stable."
"From the interface, you see how much CPU utilization and RAM utilization that each one of those hosts is giving you. You can tell ahead of time when you need to start expanding the environment. And with VMotion, you expand the environment and then let DRS have at it and walk away."
"We have seen an improvement in uptime. The whole hardware lifecycle process is easier."
"We use it to virtualize our server infrastructure. Virtualization has made it easier for us to manage our environment. We can manage it from location, the vSphere web client."
"In the past, we struggled with VM encryption. We couldn't encrypt the virtual machines with older versions of vSphere without some kind of third-party tool. Now, with 6.7, it's all in the application itself, in vSphere. We no longer have to procure additional products to meet that requirement. We can just do it on the fly, and pass our audit with no issues."
"It is very versatile. All features are beneficial and very good, especially DRS and resource pooling."
"Workloads; We use vSphere for mission-critical apps including SAP and and part of our internal development in C+, for the solution that collects everything for the buyers."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"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."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"The name of the solutions offered by Nutanix does not indicate what the tool does."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by having an auto-update feature. At this time I have to update each system manually. However, I bought the standard license and I did not buy the maximum license they have available. There could be a certain license that does the updates automatically."
"In the future, I would like Acropolis to add support for publishing external storage."
"I'm not very technical, so I don't know if there are any features that are really lacking. Our customers seem pleased with it, and I haven't heard of any downsides."
"This product would be improved if it included a hybrid cloud solution."
"They could improve the graphical user interface."
"Nutanix now supports four hypervisors but they are not all at feature parity."
"I would like them to update their licensing to provide more features with their basic license."
"When we talk about the overall private cloud stack, I would prefer for it be a lot more seamless."
"Reporting on vCenter needs to be improved."
"The installation is complex and you need to have a good understanding in regards to what you are doing when you are setting it up."
"I met with the lead solutions architect for vSphere, and one of the things that I really kind of sat him down on was, "What's the deal between these Custom Attributes and these Tags? What are you trying to do with that?" He said, "So here's the deal. I know that they're halfway done and we have a vision of where they're all going, but we'll get it there." That that would be a great ability, to keep all that metadata about your virtual machines inside the solution and staying with the machines."
"The price could be better. The licensing is definitely expensive and tech support is sometimes frustrating."
"VMware vSphere is perfect for the on-premise solution, but we are in the cloud era, so I think maybe VMware needs to invest more in the cloud and the microservice chain. It would be better if VMware offered more cloud solutions and continuous applications."
"There should be more stability in the updates. They had an issue with the last release."
"Pricing is starting to get a little high-end."
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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 VxRail, VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, Hyper-V and HPE SimpliVity, 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...