We performed a comparison between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Nutanix Acropolis is the clear winner in this comparison. In addition to being a powerful and reliable product, it is easy to deploy, has excellent customer support and a significant ROI.
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"Best features are around data locality, compression, and deduplication."
"The most valuable features are the RBAC, role-based access control, and the reporting. NCI also provides a single platform, a single pane with a dashboard, to manage the entire infrastructure. We have complete information about overall utilization, performance, and a forecast for our platform in that single pane."
"It's easy to use and has a very smooth onboarding process."
"It offers very useful data protection."
"Its low maintenance is a key feature. It is easy to install, upgrade, and scale by adding more blocks."
"The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV."
"The solution is easy to use and the pricing is affordable."
"The simplicity when it comes to building your own automation has been excellent."
"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."
"vSAN that has been most effective in streamlining storage operations. For data recovery alerts, it uses tools like snapshots and vMotion."
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array."
"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"As far as what could be improved, they have some built-in backup functions already, but any built-in isolation features like vision security features and free LAN features become a security concern."
"The one note of improvement I have for Nutanix is that the installation should be easier."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's LTS version needs to be more reliable."
"Nutanix should improve AHV to support migration VMs between clusters and storage containers. Migration between containers is possible, but it requires shutting down the VM. The procedure is long and there is no migration between clusters at all."
"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 that can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I can create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix."
"Nutanix can be a bit complex to understand."
"I'd like it to be more API-based."
"NCI's pricing is expensive."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"This solution is not great for large file shares/object/rich media repository."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"The quality of the customer service and support depends on the vSAN case. For example, if I open ten cases, maybe two or three get resolved quickly. But the other cases have a slow response."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere, Dell PowerFlex and Hyper-V, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware vSAN report.
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Hello Edwin, I am posting this answer on behalf of Daniel Wetter, one of PeerSpot's community members: "Hello, Edwin, first, it would be good to receive more information about your needs and concerns. Would you like to use existing local storage equipped with your Hypervisor servers, it seems you maybe already running on ESXi? Do you already earn fibre channel switches? How fast is your current network? Would you like to easily expand your storage environment? How fast should your storage perform, GB/s , IO/s , average response time / ms (ns)? .. and so on…. Maybe also other HCI Storage vendors like DataCore could gain additional efforts. What is your environment like? Do you need a kind of block storage or maybe you already got S3 aware/ready applications like SAP, document management systems, structured unstructured file services, big data files, databases…. All these topics and a lot more … were needed to give you a good for your special needs a related answer. With such a globalized question, you will earn/receive suggestions and opinions, but not an answer which fits your needs. Maybe my above little questionnaire will help you a little bit. Best regards Daniel"
Both can get you the performance you might want, however, you should also consider what else you get with the solution. For Nutanix, you're stuck on Acropolis if you start with that. It would be best to run either VMware or Hyper-V on top of that so migration isn't a gym show, plus the renewal cost will be very high.
vSAN is a fine option, just ensure it is designed well with enough nodes to tolerate any amount of disk failure.
Both options have their unique value but the most important thing is the data. You'll need data protection solutions like Veeam, Nakivo, or Zerto.
For an all-in-one high-performance solution with built-in data protection consider HPE SimpliVity with VMware. You'll also likely buy fewer nodes than the others with SimpliVity.
In the early days, Nutanix had the better solution, by now especially when you use a vSphere hypervisor I would go with vSAN for better integration and with ReadyNodes no complex config anymore. Also, I had several customers who complained that Nutanix got very expensive on the first renewal vs. massive initial discounts, however, I can't judge if that is true.