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 StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"This is a complete, very user-friendly product."
"Karbon is a must-have as it drastically simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes."
"The pricing is pretty good."
"The most valuable feature I have found to be the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)."
"It's much easier and faster even when you want to create a server from a template or clone."
"Being able to upgrade our entire cluster with the click of a button during business hours with zero downtime has made managing our infrastructure so easy."
"Single click actions is definitely the most important. They were not even aware that they wanted this."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability."
"The most valuable feature is that it is VMware-embedded. VxRail HCI is on VMware, and we can use VMware vCenter and vSphere. Our infrastructure consists of servers and VMware, and by using VxRail, our experience and familiarity have not changed because VxRail HCI is on VMware."
"It's a simple product, fast, and reliable."
"Its ease of administration is extremely valuable. It allows me to make better use of my time for other tasks instead of maintaining systems through multiple administration consoles."
"I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller."
"The technical support from Dell was very good."
"The assurance that my systems would not suffer a performance drop no matter where they are is valuable. I do not need any extra hardware."
"I have found the vSAN is highly flexible. The documentation is good and the interface of the solution is responsive and fast. The interface has everything you need to manage the solution, such as the VxRail and VMware integration. You can manage the hardware from within the VMware plasma pan."
"Being able to perform upgrades and check the system through the VxRail Manager has been very helpful."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"I'm sure there are a lot of things that could be improved, but I'm actually very satisfied with this product. There may be some possibilities to move the virtual server dismounting points or to move the server from one group to another, but I can't think of any special improvements or update features."
"In the licensing, it needs to be clear about features because it is not clear whether Flow is integrated or not."
"There is a feature that exists used for disaster recovery, but it requires an extra license. It should be included with the regular normal standard license."
"The storage and back-up facilities could be improved. We need day-to-day encrypting of the database."
"We'd like to have more resource management."
"I would have liked it if Nutanix were a hardware as well as a software platform."
"The process of migrating from old hardware to new could improve."
"Limits on increasing space with the inability to have or attach external storage."
"If they continue developing their product regarding VMware, it will be one of the best products in the HCI space. In terms of additional features, there is nothing missing because, for data protection, they also have the CDP option for VM. They can protect the VM at any point in time."
"The scalability is limited to a single cluster with 64 nodes."
"We do not use the storage part of VxRail, we use Pure Storage to map out the VxRail because the disk performance from Pure Storage was far better than the performance of the disk on the inside of VxRail."
"The tool needs to improve its price."
"VxRail could improve by having domain protection."
"You cannot install another operating system such as Microsoft or Hyperflex or Nutanix. We have also had a hardware problem."
"The solution should offer more integration with other virtual software. VxRail runs just with VMware, however, maybe it should integrate with Hyper-V or with KVM as well."
"In the version that I was working with, the integrations are in need of improvement."
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 117 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, VMware vSphere, HPE SimpliVity, 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.