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."StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"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."
"It has been stable so far."
"In the world of IT operations, there is a lot of noise. Traditionally, systems would generate a great deal of alerts, events, and notifications, often leading to the operator either a) not seeing critical alerts since they are lost in the noise or b) disregarding the alerts/events."
"In addition to the hyper-converged infrastructure, most of our clients are pleased with Acropolis' built-in replication in terms of the DR setup. Our clients also like Prism Central's advanced management and analytics, and many find Nutanix Flow and playbooks incredibly useful."
"One of the most valuable features is that it can be applied at any scale."
"The most valuable feature I have found to be the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)."
"The ease of deployment is very good."
"The snapshots, cloning, and replication are all effective in helping to reduce downtime. It can replicate cluster data for disaster recovery and it provides high availability in case a node or a disk fails."
"Data locality provides super-fast data access and ultra-low latency."
"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."
"Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention."
"We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process."
"The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves."
"In terms of scalability, vRA has connections to a lot of different systems. It's very flexible and an impressive product."
"We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just had another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity."
"We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins."
"We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track. Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"Nutanix has a complex infrastructure, we have customers that consider VMware instead. Additionally, the performance could be better."
"The One-Click Upgrade process could/should offer the ability to integrate with 3rd party drivers. For example, we use NVIDIA Grid graphics cards. It would be amazing if, during the One-Click Upgrade process, we could "slipstream" additional VIB drivers for ESXi into the upgrade process."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is new technology in a competitive market. Pricing is too high for a new product and requires better discounts to be able to compete with IBM, Dell EMC, and HP."
"In terms of automation, I know there are ways to do it, but it's not very user-friendly. I've been working for the last three years with Nutanix and I've managed to automate certain things, but it's a somewhat more complex job than it should be. I would like to see more documentation or knowledge base articles."
"Limits on increasing space with the inability to have or attach external storage."
"One disadvantage of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it doesn't support external storage. Connecting external SAN storage to Nutanix, it's not supported."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with external storage using the fiber channel"
"The only problem is that not many operating systems are supported on the AOS hypervisor. They need to probably increase the support on multiple operating systems. As of now, a very limited number of operating systems and patch levels are supported on AOS."
"The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lacks the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... There might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end."
"7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product."
"The initial setup is very complex because we have a bunch of customization workflows. They were built-in features that we had to program as code with Orchestration."
"It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
"When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically."
"VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want."
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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 VxRail, VMware vSAN, VMware vSphere, Dell PowerFlex and Hyper-V, 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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