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, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"We have had good feedback from our customers about this solution."
"The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Acropolis' main advantages are high performance and availability."
"The most valuable feature I have found to be the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)."
"The most valuable feature is the integration of all parts in Prism Element, the browser-based management tool."
"The simplicity when it comes to building your own automation has been excellent."
"Data locality provides super-fast data access and ultra-low latency."
"Since it is riding inside of a multi-hardware environment, downtime is virtually nothing."
"VMware vSphere has a lot of features that are valuable, such as multiple clusters, VM mobility, VDI, and virtual desktop."
"The emphasis isn't specifically on a particular feature, but rather on the ease of use. For instance, when building a test lab or setting up an entire environment from scratch, VMware products are notably more user-friendly compared to alternatives like Nutanix. I've had prior experience with Nutanix. From my personal perspective, I found it easier to adapt to using VMware than when I started using Dynamics. This ease of use is a strong point. It's largely about how straightforward it is to navigate through VMware's user interface. In contrast, with Nutanix, there's a need to delve into smaller configurations and navigate vendor-specific settings. VMware, on the other hand, offers a more accessible management page. This difference primarily centres around usability and the overall user-friendliness of the interface."
"Security-Features; vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that."
"Performance; We have seen a performance boost because we have been able to more dynamically allocate either memory or processors."
"The most useful features are ESXi, DRS, Auto Deploy, and the Lifecycle Manager."
"Valuable features include VHA, DRS, VMotion, and redundancy and failover; any DR situation."
"Valuable features really depend on different projects. We are using the traditional infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. We are also using the high availability (HA) and Distributed Switch features to extend our network and switch between different hosts. The VMotion and SVMotion features are very essential for us to relocate the storage of virtual machines to different storage or vSANs. We are using VMotion and SVMotion features several times of the day. We are also using another VMware product to replicate a lot of solutions to a second replication site."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"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."
"They require more media visibility."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"Notifications could be improved as they're not currently very useful."
"Usually, there are separate administration teams that take care of servers, but in our organization, servers are usually looked after by the application owner. However, the application owners cannot reinstall the software, OS, and other things. That only aligns with the role of the HCI administrator. If these rights can be provided, it will be very easy."
"Could have better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with external storage using the fiber channel"
"We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process."
"Nutanix could streamline Acropolis' advanced management to keep pace with its competitors. For example, in VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor, you can directly put a host into maintenance mode via the GUI. However, it takes several steps to do this with Nutanix Acropolis, and you need to use the command-line interface for most of the steps."
"An area for improvement would be the cyber security features."
"In the future, I would like Acropolis to add support for publishing external storage."
"When we talk about the overall private cloud stack, I would prefer for it be a lot more seamless."
"My biggest suggestion would be some kind of a mechanism - and it's almost an AI-type thing, a Siri/Cortana - for where to find how to do certain things. If there was the ability to just type in a basic question and say, "How do I change the VM settings for this?" and it could bring me right there, that would be really awesome."
"Generally, the user interface needs to be improved for non-technical people."
"VMware has amped up how frequently they release new versions and that adds instability to a stable environment."
"The solution is stable. It has some small bugs which are not influencing the main functions but every software has some bugs."
"The installation can take a long time, they need to improve on the simplicity and length of the installation."
"It could be more scalable."
"They have multiple components required for the setup. It would be better to integrate it into one solution, especially for small business companies."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd 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, Hyper-V and Dell PowerFlex, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, VMware Workstation, Oracle VM 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...