Nutanix AHV is presented as a modern and secure virtualization platform that powers VMs and containers for applications and cloud-native workloads on-premises and in public clouds. Its tools and automated workflows simplify the day-to-day administration of VMs and containers.
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VMware ESXi
Score 9.0 out of 10
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A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.
Nutanix AOS and VMware ESXi are both products for IT virtualization, but they differ substantially. VMware ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor intended as the foundation of a virtualized server system. By contrast, Nutanix AOS is a comprehensive hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution that combines a hypervisor with software-defined storage and networking. Mid-size and enterprise-level organizations make up the bulk of customers for both products, probably because smaller businesses are less likely to need or have the budget for IT virtualization products.
Features
Although both VMware ESXi and Nutanix AOS provide virtualized hardware benefits such as minimal physical footprints and reliable server uptime, they differ heavily in their scope and feature set.
Most customers find VMware ESXi to be a rock-solid hypervisor. Users report that it’s reliable and stable, with some users enjoying years of consistent server uptime in spite of hardware failures. It’s also efficient in its use of hardware resources, taking up a very small footprint on its host machine. VMware ESXi makes it fast and easy to deploy new servers, whether you use an existing configuration file or configure the server from scratch. VMware also provides detailed hardware compatibility guidelines to help choose the right hardware when it’s time to upgrade.
Nutanix AOS, on the other hand, is a complete HCI solution with software-defined storage, compute, and networking functionality. Nutanix provides a one-click upgrade system for their platform, making upgrades a painless experience for most users. Its single-pane-of-glass management interface is useful for IT administrators, and customers report solid server uptimes, a high degree of hardware fault tolerance, and reliable disaster recovery options. When customers do encounter problems, they generally report fast, useful assistance from Nutanix’s support team.
Limitations
Both Nutanix AOS and VMware ESXi are strong in their own categories, but they’re not free from problems. It’s important to consider their drawbacks before implementing one or the other.
Nutanix AOS can suffer from a rocky setup experience. Users migrating from existing HCI systems report an especially rough start, even with support from Nutanix. Although many users appreciate the one-click upgrade system, it’s not perfect, and can encounter unexpected failures with certain drivers and hardware. Additionally, the GUI and command-line interface aren’t at full parity, forcing users to switch between interfaces for specific functionality.
VMware ESXi, of course, isn’t a complete solution on its own. It’s most effective as part of a larger virtualization ecosystem, and that costs money. Licensing VMwareESXi can get expensive fast, especially when you need higher subscription tiers or additional VMware products to get the features you want. Users also commonly have issues with its web-based management client, which may not work properly on all browsers. And while VMware’s hardware compatibility guidelines may be comprehensive, they’re detailed for good reason: VMware ESXi can be very picky about the hardware it can run on, which could bump up the price of implementation if existing hardware doesn’t fit the bill.
Pricing
Nutanix AOS offers a free Community Edition with limited functionality intended for internal and non-production usage only. Pricing for Nutanix AOS is available via a quote from the vendor.
VMware ESXi is available as part of VMware’s vSphere product, which has a free vSphere Hypervisor edition limited to a single physical server. vSphere has multiple packages, tiers, and subscription levels with differing capabilities, ranging from $510 to over $20,000. For full pricing information, refer to the vSphere pricing page.
Features
Nutanix AHV
VMware ESXi
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
I think Nutanix AOS is a great product and, I would recommend it to anyone. The only reason I did not give it a 10 out of 10 is because I don't do that for any product. Every product has room for improvement.
If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
Resource management. The automatic load balancing works very well to ensure no host is taxed disproportionately compared to the others.
Templates and cloning. It is very easy to set up a template and spin up new servers based on a specific setup. This makes server management very streamlined.
VM management. The vSphere interface is very easy to use and navigate. Everything is responsive and it works when you need it to. The options are also robust while also being arranged in a straightforward manner.
Nutanix has a huge learning curve. We purchased the on-line training course when we moved to the platform and it was literally weeks of instruction. It was so extensive, in fact, that we ran out of time to complete it before the test.
Operations that cannot be done from the browser require running commands from a terminal emulator; perhaps owing to the newness of the platform, documentation is not robust. I highly recommend you buy the tech support.
Software updates are sometimes rushed to release. I've gotten to where I wait at least a few weeks after release before installing them, as I've run into significant issues with buggy software. Such installations have required time-consuming tech support calls to resolve.
While the promise of perpetual VM uptime is being fulfilled, the dashboard frequently reports issues that need to be resolved.
Because of significant hardware redundancy, the cost per byte of storage capacity is high.
VMware ESXi can improve on the UI that is installed on the bare metal machine. The menus can be hard to navigate when looking for simple configuration items.
VMware ESXi can improve on the stability of their overall hypervisor. There have been a few times we had to reinstall due to corruption of VMware ESXi.
I would like to see VMware ESXi do better at adding more standard free features in their consumer version of VMware ESXi. For example, having the ability to back up virtual machines is good practice and something that would be very nice if offered in their free version.
We made a huge financial investment with this platform (four clusters, all-flash storage array), so we're in it for the long haul. Luckily it's a beast. I've had to use support more than any other platform I've administered, but the help has been very good. Nutanix continues to add features and innovations which increase the ROI
It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
While you are going to have to comfortable with CLI to perform a lot of functions, the truth is most of the day-to-day work is done right through the web interface. That's one area that has improved a lot in the two years I've had it: how much can be done through the browser as opposed to the command line. And I still would like to see the system better documented. The articles often seem to presume a high level of knowledge about the system, making it difficult sometimes to complete tasks that I would like to be able to perform without contacting tech support.
The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
Due to the cool DFS architecture, Nutanix has good read performance for loads. In general, everything works well. We only ran into problems with very specific workloads that did not allow multithreading. It is also worth noting that loads should be tuned according to best practices for best performance, which is not always an easy task.
We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
Nutanix [AOS] is a leader in the HCI industry and it becomes evident after deploying the software. The solution runs effortlessly and can scale seamlessly. We ran the Nutanix solution on Lenovo Servers and since Lenovo has a close working relationship with Nutanix, you can procure the Nutanix software directly from Lenovo as part of your Lenovo HCI solution. The advantage of going this route is that the hardware has been tested and verified by Lenovo that it is thus certified for Nutanix. The support is then also directly with Lenovo for both hardware and software.
I can't say enough good about VMware's support team. To an individual they take ownership of the case, provide thorough answers, and follow up regularly. On one occasion, a problem we experienced with NSX Endpoint was escalated to development for a permanent resolution after a workaround was found. In my experience, most companies would have tried to find a way to close a case like that instead of taking it all the way. Most importantly, when production is down and every second counts, they VMware teams understand that urgency and treat your issue as if it were the only one they had to deal with. You can't ask for better.
Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
We looked at both Simplivity and Cisco HyperFlex. Both are pretty good in their own right. Simplivity was very 'efficient' in the way they handled data, but we didn't like the idea of a propitiatory hardware card. Cisco's HyperFlex was our second choice, but we were so impressed with what Nutanix had done for us already, that we were already leaning toward that.
As long as you're using Nutanix AOS on Nutanix hardware and are paying their software support fees, AOS is a valid competitor to VMware and can save money due to not needing a license and having their server management system built into the base host management system. If you aren't using Nutanix hardware, however, VMWare is in most cases the best way to go. I cannot comment on HyperV, but most IT people I know either use it because they have to (most) or they like it better (not many).
it has been fair and easy to understand. I know VMware is looking at wanting to change from CPU to core pricing so we will see what that looks like when it happens.
We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
VMWare ESXi licensing is affordable for our business - and the licensing model is simplistic. Not like that of Microsoft with having to keep track of server licenses and CAL licenses for users.
VMWare ESXi also has hardware-monitoring built-in, so that further saves us money from having to be spent with another vendor.
As much as I hate the saying "a single pane of glass" does fit for this product. You can manage your servers, monitor hardware status, create and export backup snapshots, manage virtual NICs, connect to various storage devices. We're very happy with this product.
