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.
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"We like that the size of the box is 1U or 2U only, and all the servers are fit into that box. The ease of operation is there. All the servers and the SAN storage are inside the box."
"Acropolis has a great interface and lots of management features packaged with it at an affordable price."
"Most beneficial feature is simplicity, ease of use."
"One major thing that comes up again and again is stability. Our downtime is literally based on hardware upgrades that need to be done. Acropolis is very, very user friendly. You don't have to physically have a super IT guy to manage the system. You can actually give it to a younger guy to manage and there won't be problems. And if he makes a mistake, it's very, very easy to fall back and sort out the mistake."
"The scalability, performance, and licensing model are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV."
"Karbon is a must-have as it drastically simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes."
"One-Click Upgrade and Foundation is the most valuable feature. One-Click Upgrade makes upgrades and LCM a breeze. Prior to Nutanix One-Click Upgrade, upgrades and LCM were overly cumbersome and time-consuming. Foundation provides an easy, yet very structured, approach to cluster modification (adding or removing nodes)."
"Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s."
"It easily integrates with all types of storage."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"It would be great if they could improve the GUI features."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure lacks compatibility with certain older processors."
"The latency needs improvement"
"The storage and back-up facilities could be improved. We need day-to-day encrypting of the database."
"I would like to see more Kubernetes and container-related workflows and multiple cloud-partner management. I would also like to see how they will synergize all these AI/ML functionalities that are available on other platforms."
"The product requires a lot of resources."
"We ran into an issue as a managed service provider because Acropolis isn't designed to be used the way we are running it. For example, if we want to deploy a Kubernetes service, the customer networks need to reach our protected cluster network. We have isolated our customers in separate VLANs. However, our customers' networks must access our cluster network to get features like iSCSI or Kubernetes to run. It's challenging."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's LTS version needs to be more reliable."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there."
"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."
"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."
"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd 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, Hyper-V and Dell PowerFlex, 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.