We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and VMware vSphere based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” accessible by all hosts. StarWind cuts down virtualization cost and complexity by eliminating the need for a physical shared storage (SAN). -StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured . we get technical support from star wind team when implementation software and after setup if we face any issue."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"Most beneficial feature is simplicity, ease of use."
"Great flexibility and scalability."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable features are all the cloud facilities or benefits it provides for my data center."
"It has been stable so far."
"Prism Central allows managing the cluster from a single pane of glass, and it allows a deeper dive into the solution."
"Single click actions is definitely the most important. They were not even aware that they wanted this."
"The management interface of this solution is great."
"It is a powerful solution that enables us to take a snapshot and clone any version of machine."
"The solution is very scalable."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the overall good ease of use and the good interface which makes it very easy to migrate from one bare metal to another. These are the two things which I like about it."
"The tool comes with scale-out capabilities. Deploying new infrastructure became much quicker, saving significant time previously spent sourcing hardware for each installation. It also has the ability to downscale on rack spaces, reducing the number of rack units needed to accommodate our servers."
"It is very versatile. All features are beneficial and very good, especially DRS and resource pooling."
"The most valuable feature would be the slight changes they've made to VMFork instant cloning, in which they have abstracted out the parent-child relationship in cloning, in which certain features, like HA and DRS, are now usable on that parent virtual machine. That is wildly amazing and something that wasn't available until 6.7."
"The most valuable feature of the solution would be the basic feature of server virtualization, we use it everywhere."
"The documentation is very good."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"I would like to see them utilize the spare storage that they use as a redundant space. I feel that now a lot of resources are wasted just for standby purposes because we are using data protection. Instead of utilizing those resources only when something happens, they can have an alternative so that we can utilize these resources all the time."
"The only problem is that not many operating systems are supported on the AOS hypervisor. They need to probably increase the support on multiple operating systems. As of now, a very limited number of operating systems and patch levels are supported on AOS."
"Native File-Services are under heavy development and Container Services just came out."
"The product needs improvement in the areas of SAN attachment for high capacity and high I/O profile workloads."
"It's lacking in some features but overcompensating in others."
"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 one note of improvement I have for Nutanix is that the installation should be easier."
"Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high."
"They need to further develop graphics virtualization."
"The cost could always be lower."
"Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log onto different physical servers to do technical tasks. I don't fully understand why this is the case."
"It could improve the hyper-conversions."
"The solution could benefit by expanding the CPUs and memory from different physical nodes."
"There are some challenges around ESXi hosts — converting them into VMs."
"vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately it's always the little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want."
"It lacks a snapshot feature."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. 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 vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, Hyper-V and Dell PowerFlex, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, VMware Workstation, Oracle VM and VMware Aria Operations.
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Nutanix Acropolis has been specially designed to respond to the problems of hyper-converged infrastructures.
We believe that Nutanix Acropolis is more flexible and better suited to respond to the issues of very high availability.
Question one:
Does the customer already have vSphere because than I would suggest not to use Acropolis? Nutanix wants to control the entire platform with its HCI solution like VMware.
Question 2:
Do you want to use NSX now or in the future? Use VMware, because if it will be supported and it would always give issues with the integrations with Acropolis.
Question 3:
Is the growth of the customer low? Then Nutanix can be a choice if it is bigger than VMware. Nutanix is not flexible in big site setups and can give big problems with updating.
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We found the erasure coding, deduplication, and on-demand scaling extremely valuable. The feature our team liked the best was that Nutanix Acropolis AOS is core-centralized on the UI - you don’t have multiple interfaces that you have to handle. It’s better integrated for the complete management of the infrastructure.
We would like to see more operating systems included, though. If you require high-end or lots of compute, Nutanix Acropolis AOS may not be a good fit for those large databases. We would like to see better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators. The solution’s integration with other platforms could also be improved.
VMware vSphere is very good from a recoverability point of view; everything can be stored much easier on a virtual server than a physical one. VMware vSphere is very good with memory sharing between VMs and CPU scheduling between VMs. The command-line tools integrate well with Microsoft products, so it’s easy to manipulate them. VMware vSphere is very stable and very scalable.
The initial setup with VMware vSphere can be a bit complex. You need to have a good understanding of VMware. Hard partitioning is not permitted with VMware vSphere. We found there were occasional bugs and errors and that the HTML5 is not up to par. The pricing and licensing options can get expensive.
Conclusion
After researching both Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere, we chose VMware vSphere. We felt that they were more reliable, offered better scaling capabilities, and had very good documentation. We also feel VMware vSphere has better integration with other platforms than Nutanix Acropolis AOS does. VMware vSphere has very high availability and allows us to easily save our data and deploy VM machines quickly and we can create the delivery of the server with tremendous ease.
I think VMware vSphere is more mature as a hypervisor than Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). it is more capable to serve almost most of the workloads. having said that if you are talking about a standard workload both of them can do the job, but your workload is sensitive or even newly released you most properly find it will be certified to work vSphere before becoming certified on AHV.
in addition most technology providers and one of them Nutanix they first certify their solutions to work with vSphere before certifying any other hypervisor.
Nutanix is running AHV. There is no need for a VMware license.
Acropolis in itself is no product.
Do we speak AOS or AHV Ort both?
AOS is the intelligence on Top of a hypervisor making AHV Or Vsphere an HCI Solution.
AHV is Nutanix own KVM-based hypervisor managed completely within Prism from AOS, so there is no standalone offering, it always comes with AOS.
This seems to contradict the statement above, but since you can have AOS without AHV, you can make a clear distinction between both.
AHV has the advantage of being optimized tightly with AOS. Together with ESXi, you still have to use two management tools for AOS + ESXi. AHV + AOS utilizes the same prism element web management. So, integration is the biggest difference between AHV and ESXi
For AOS and ESXi the answer is quite simple: you would have to compare VSAN with AOS. Then you see, the integration of products and resiliency in Nutanix is better by a magnitude.
if your comparing features you have AHV on Par with ESXi.
AHV is the predominant hypervisor on nutanix systems deployed. Vmware would mostly be used for customers who already have vsphere licenses or want to keep their standard hypervisor.
I dont think there are stability issues with AOS or AHV. We tend to update more frequently our AHV systems than we do with VMware. With Nutanix you leverage the update process conveniently with LifeCycleManagement (LCM) integrated into Prism Web Management supplying everything from native nutanix products to firmware for your hypervisor hosts. There are also regular customer notifications to warn of detected misconfigurations in the field and check for your own setup and howto act on that. I never got anything from VMware regarding such a thing. And I do know what a purple screen of death looks like...