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 license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"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."
"I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"The cloud features in-site offering, which I found to be very interesting."
"Simplified management: It provides us more time to work on other tasks."
"It allows us to have a cloud-based ecosystem."
"The ease of deployment is very good."
"It gives us a single dashboard to control multiple sites and multiple zones. It helps to do things on a single platform and data sharing is quite easy. The network and the security are easy to manage."
"It is very easy to clone systems using the solution."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is flexible and has helped people to work from home during the pandemic."
"Management is simple"
"This solution optimizes our clients' resources."
"It is the most valuable Software Defined Storage ever to manage all storage workloads, and also offers high availability."
"Cost-effective and easy to install."
"VxRail performs well in the VDI environment."
"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."
"Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks."
"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."
"The stability of VxRail is good, we have not had any issues."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"Limits on increasing space with the inability to have or attach external storage."
"The licensing cost could be lower."
"An area for improvement would be the cyber security features."
"I would like better integration of XenServer into the AOS and Prism Central."
"The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates."
"We had a few problems with the foundation machine that you can use to build your systems out. We've got it working now, but it should be improved."
"AHV is a great hypervisor but still limited compared to VMware. AHV is the one product they must improve."
"I would like to see official compatibility with Red Hat in the future."
"Pricing could be improved."
"The product could support and have more compliance with other vendors."
"Sometimes during the upgrade process of VxRail, we experience errors that have nothing to do with reality and I cannot troubleshoot them without calling Dell and bringing in an engineer to figure it out."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."
"What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail."
"A disadvantage is that the initial first deployment can be complicated."
"There could be better documentation and they should allow everyone to access the simulator."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 115 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, Hyper-V and Dell PowerFlex, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VxRail report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
"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.