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.
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"Single-click upgrades are the most valuable feature. In the sector in which we work, it is tough to have downtime and arrange firmware upgrades."
"Best features are around data locality, compression, and deduplication."
"Technical support is okay."
"Scaling is very easy and no limitations are set."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS has very good stability."
"The most valuable features are easy cloud administration and management."
"Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability."
"Cost-effective and easy to install."
"VxRail can be used for application modernization."
"The most compelling aspect of VxRail lies in its unwavering guarantee of sustained performance for my systems, regardless of their geographical distribution."
"VxRail alleviates the operational constraints within an organization."
"We are very happy with the purchase, and it works well. It is fast. We went with the full-flash version, meaning that we have SSDs. So, we can build a Windows virtual machine in two minutes. We were surprised when we first tried to do that."
"I like the new releases that Dell EMC is doing with VMware. They are allowing for flexibility across the hybrid cloud. This allows organizations to use containers and to be able to move into the public cloud, but also not have lock-in. They can come back to the private cloud when they want to, so it's creating a lot of flexibility across the stack."
"VxRail has high performance and has great efficiency. There is a single place for us to manage all of our virtual machines. The ability to right-size instead of overcommit VMs is a large benefit."
"This is a good solution if you want to deploy an ACI Environment but don't have all the necessary resources."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"There is a lot of functionality in Prism Central, but sometimes you want to see those features in Prism Element."
"As Nutanix Acropolis AOS is on the expensive side, one of its areas for improvement is the price. It would also be better if it can be integrated with other cloud providers, because currently, it's only for private cloud deployment."
"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."
"The productivity and work efficiency of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve."
"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."
"Notifications could be improved as they're not currently very useful."
"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."
"There could be better documentation and they should allow everyone to access the simulator."
"It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM."
"What I find very valuable is VxRail's life cycle management. The life cycle management takes care of everything from firmware to the actual upgrading of the hypervisor and keeps everything up to level."
"The SCL database sends out a warning and you have to download the adjacent file from the Dell website. You have to upload it and retest it. We cannot always connect our systems to the internet which means we sometimes miss these important updates."
"I would like it to tier to the cloud effectively, making sure that cold data can be pushed out to some sort of Bitbucket."
"It would be an improvement if VxRail could be integrated with some other hypervisors and not just with VMware."
"Its price could be better."
"There are still some features which aren't built into Cisco, like virtualized networking, that use its applications. However, these can be purchased through another product as an additional licensing cost to us."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 115 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, Hyper-V and Dell PowerFlex, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged. 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.