We performed a comparison between Nutanix Acropolis AOS series and VxRail based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the solution our users prefer when looking for an HCI solution. It is user-friendly and offers simple operating system features, easy installation, and excellent centralized administration. VxRail users are happier with that solution’s pricing, however.
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"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.""
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"The stability is good. This is the number-one product in that regard."
"One major thing that comes up again and again is stability. Our downtime is literally based on hardware upgrades that need to be done. Acropolis is very, very user friendly. You don't have to physically have a super IT guy to manage the system. You can actually give it to a younger guy to manage and there won't be problems. And if he makes a mistake, it's very, very easy to fall back and sort out the mistake."
"The initial setup was quite straightforward."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, integrates with other hardware configurations, and is simple to manage."
"The most valuable features are its ease of use and its good performance."
"Acropolis AOS's networking concept is excellent."
"This is a very flexible solution that you are able to run however you want."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together."
"Initial setup is straightforward, as everything is pre-installed."
"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly."
"This is a good solution if you want to deploy an ACI Environment but don't have all the necessary resources."
"The initial setup is simple."
"I would recommend VxRail, it works for most of the use cases."
"When we have a resource contention, we can easily increase the capacity."
"The compute is good and we have not had any issues with the vSAN."
"The VxRail is built on two specific platforms that have been in the industry for the last 15 to 20 years: the 1-U socket and the 2-U socket platforms from Dell. They're in their sixteenth generation of those platforms, I believe, so they're very stable."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"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."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"Nutanix can be a bit complex to understand."
"Pricing and varieties of options could be better."
"Benchmark testing indicated that workloads did slightly better on our Vblock by a few percentage"
"Deployment could be more user-friendly - currently, it requires certain skills with the network and nodes."
"As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface which can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as a parallel execution. What happens then is that I have to work in two different environments within my data center. Practically, they are two different data centers but physically and logically, they are one. If they cannot talk to each other that creates a lot of issues. That is something which Nutanix has to develop because for Nutanix it is very simple. For example, Oracle is using a function called GoldenGate. They have a feature called GoldenGate which allows them to talk to various different environments which must really help."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure lacks compatibility with certain older processors."
"In the future, I would like Acropolis to add support for publishing external storage."
"Nutanix has a complex infrastructure, we have customers that consider VMware instead. Additionally, the performance could be better."
"This solution needs to have the capability where even older versions of hardware can be seamlessly utilized and additional expansion becomes so much easier."
"One area of the product that could be improved is the support."
"The solution is vendor-locked and Dell is the only supplier of VxRail."
"What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail."
"Technically speaking, the vCenter and the administration of the integration of the vCenter could be improved."
"The initial setup between the different Dell departments is fragmented. The engineers who come to rack/stack and do the initial config should be trained on all the areas and work with the different Dell departments whilst they are onsite to give a smoother install and better experience for customer."
"The technical support is good but could be better."
"When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere, Dell PowerFlex and Hyper-V, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Hyper Converged and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VxRail report.
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"Nutanix node you will be running vSphere on top on the underlining Nutanix software" This description is incorrect.
There is no "layer" between the hardware and the OS which is ESXI hypervisor on both cases.
While both systems do a very good job within the nodal limits for scaling a compute environment - it is the networking layer that has the most impact on GPU sharing across a cluster. From a practical perspective, VxRail nodes will typically offer a discount over native Nutanix nodes. With Nutanix you also need servers, disk, networking and GPU's. VxRail will be more integrated with sized nodes, Dell, Cisco or other networking and often the VSphere 7 licenses can be integrated - achieving a lower net cost.
Testing for optimizations on either VSAN or Nutanix to see which favors a vGPU system would be something I would like to see quantified. My guess is they are network constrained and differences between VxRail and a build your own Nutanix environment will be negligible for the same network. Would be good to confirm if there is an optimal point - say 40Gbps vs 10Gbps or 100Gbps for the inter-GPU message passing.
Best option for vSphere 7 is the VxRail as it designed on VMware technology and built in integrates with vSphere, on a Nutanix node you will be running vSphere on top on the underlining Nutanix software.
Ok, I have no hands-on with vxRail.
But we have vGPU running on Nutanix with ESXi (vsphere). I am not aware of something like vGPU sharing across nodes/hosts. You did not mention which solution you have in mind as you would be about to choose in the process.
We have Citrix XenDesktop running. It works really smoothly most of the time. We only encountered a lagging problem once every few weeks which we are yet to solve. Perhaps something running in the back of our net.
With Nutanix you would have a solid base to work with.
You did not mention what automation is to be used. You could use something like Nutanix Calm as an automation solution.
further reading: Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop on Nutanix
Dev-Test: Cloud Development Environment & Testing Solutions | Nutanix
Let me know which platform you have in mind to narrow down suggestions.