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.
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"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."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"Their Google operating system is more mature, so their results are much better."
"The technology of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the most valuable feature. You don't need multiple screens to manage."
"The features that I have found most valuable include its HA facility, viability, robustness, flexibility, it's time to go live is very short, and it has a friendly user interface."
"It has centralized management. It is easy for an engineer to manage. More work goes to patching, upgrades, and maintenance. Nutanix is very easy to upgrade. It takes one click. Engineers do not need to spend additional time with Nutanix for upgrades. With one click, it will complete the upgrade and show the results. Other hypervisor solutions are not like this, specifically since you must do all the components one by one."
"Scaling is very easy and no limitations are set."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable features are all the cloud facilities or benefits it provides for my data center."
"Most beneficial feature is simplicity, ease of use."
"One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect."
"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."
"The tool's price is competitive and it is easy to use."
"You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."
"VxRail's integration with VMware environments is very good. Our VxRail is built on VMware, and the integration is seamless. We haven't faced any challenges. We can migrate VMs between servers in real-time and replicate them to our DR site without any problems."
"This product has given us clear visibility into what we need technology-wise to grow."
"VxRail has improved out organization because we are trying to be a little more proactive and elastic. We are trying to change our conventional approach to development."
"For me, the most valuable feature is in relation to the software updates."
"It helps our servers and it is very efficient."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"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."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"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."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see Acropolis add the ability to migrate VMs between storage containers. I don't know if they've added this in the latest versions, but I haven't seen it yet. It's mainly about AHV. When we use VMware, we can move between storage containers. In VMware, it's just like regular storage, and we can move it."
"The technology has a lot of room for improvement. For example, when they want to segment applications in conjunction with NSX, which VMware uses, Acropolis is not compatible with the competitors. The integration in the security layer is not compatible with NSX for the application segmentation that uses VMware."
"We would like to see a cloud version of Acropolis AOS. Currently, we're trying to implement an AWS environment for some solutions, but we would like to use another technology also to enhance our organization, so we are looking for another technology for this, especially a cloud solution."
"It was not a great fit for really large databases that required high-end or lots of compute. They might already have addressed this concern around very high-end databases that require high-end compute. In the past, it wasn't a great fit for them."
"The documentation could be improved."
"The scalability of the solution had some issues because there were many VMs and the replication ran into some bottlenecks. It was an issue that was known to Nutanix and it was not disclosed to the customer."
"The support charges for VxRail should be optimized and made cheaper."
"When we have a vulnerability or we need to upgrade VxRail, it takes a long time. It takes eight hours each time we upgrade."
"It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM."
"Some of the features of the hyperconverged infrastructure could be integrated with external storage. Right now, for example, if I have surveillance going, I need to purchase very cheap storage. So, an integration between the hyperconverged infrastructure and external storage would be good."
"It's not really flexible with different use cases."
"The full solution is not completely included as a bundle, such as we see with SimpliVity."
"The way that the VxRail is licensed could be improved."
"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."
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 119 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.