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 ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are storage and hyper-converged. The solution is easy to use and the administration is very good."
"This is a complete, very user-friendly product."
"Their Google operating system is more mature, so their results are much better."
"One-click setup is a valuable feature because it allows us to set up a server automatically with a single click."
"Performing a Nutanix software upgrade is a very simple and non-disruptive process."
"It consolidates our servers, and improves our electricity consumption and cooling as well."
"The HCI environment itself is very intuitive. Everything is centralized under one solution. And, they also have fast server built in in addition to a network analyzer."
"Technical support is okay."
"VxRail can be used for application modernization."
"The solution is easy to use. When turning on a server or a machine that is required for, deployment or quality assurance, the dynamic deployment of resources is good."
"I have found that the admin deployment, monitoring off-premises, and the many services important features. Additionally, the solution has good integration."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the automation and integration points with other automation tools."
"I like the new releases that Dell EMC is doing with VMware. They are allowing for flexibility across the hybrid cloud. This allows organizations to use containers and to be able to move into the public cloud, but also not have lock-in. They can come back to the private cloud when they want to, so it's creating a lot of flexibility across the stack."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature."
"We have seen ROI using this solution. It has simplified the work of the staff that we have which allows us to do more work with the same number of people, without having to incrementally grow the staff. The reliability of the product has been exceptional."
"You don't need to think about compatibility of components."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"I'd like it to be more API-based."
"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."
"Make it easier to manage."
"There should be a little more access to Nutanix files."
"Could have better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators."
"The look and feel of the web GUI of this system needs improvement, when compared to other systems. Its hardware integration also needs improvement."
"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."
"It would be great if they could improve the GUI features."
"They need to keep upgrading the environment and improving automation so that the solution keeps getting better and better."
"The initial setup between the different Dell departments is fragmented. The engineers who come to rack/stack and do the initial config should be trained on all the areas and work with the different Dell departments whilst they are onsite to give a smoother install and better experience for customer."
"While VxRail offers compatibility with AMD processors, its capabilities in this area could benefit from further development."
"It would be nice if the update process was shortened and that patching would be simpler."
"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."
"It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM."
"The price should come down a little bit. It has become better than it was at the beginning. There was a really big price difference between a hyper-converged infrastructure and the classic servers and storage. The gap is lessening, however, it's still there."
"The price could be better. The backup mechanism could also be better. Some of our clients prefer to work with backup software from a different vendor. They don't do a built-in backup solution. It would be better if they had guidelines on proper sizing and the whole life cycle from the requirement collection. If there aren't any proper guidelines, how do I go to the customer and evaluate their existing infrastructure? How can you do appropriate sizing to migrate to a hyper-converged environment? I think this is a requirement because most of our clients are migrating to a hyper-converged environment. In the next release, they can improve absolutely anything you can think of to improve the product in general—for example, the clusters and backup software."
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.
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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.