Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure vs. SUSE Harvester

For an organization that requires top-notch performance HCI, Nutanix is the best. You may start with 3 nodes and expand the cluster as required. The management through Nutanix Prism Central and Element was so easy that even a Junior Engineer was able to handle it. The Nutanix platform is not suitable for organizations with a small budget and fewer requirements for high-performance infrastructure, as the Nutanix solution itself is suited for enterprises.

Incentivized

It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.

• One-click upgrades; whether it's hypervisor, firmware, disk or other updates. This feature has drastically decreased complexity and administration time.
• Data Locality. Not all hyperconverged technology is created equal. When I first purchased Nutanix they were the only vendor (and as far as I know, still are) that made sure the storage a VM used was on the same host that VM was running on. Given a normal operating state, the [storage] network is literally only used for replication data.
• They got rid of traditional RAID. Nutanix uses software to determine where a VM's storage should be written and replicated to. This dramatically decreases I/O when changing the number of nodes in a cluster, be it on purpose or during a failure scenario. Ex. adding a new node: If one uses RAID arrays then enough space has to be set aside to create a new array that includes the new node, then all the information has to be copied over, and the old array destroyed. RAID arrays do not grow and shrink gracefully so Nutanix has designed a better solution.
• The Nutanix management interface was built on HTML5. No more flash headaches!

Incentivized

• Fast to deploy new virtual machines
• It's easy to use
• Stable and ready for production
• Free and open source
• Has a strong community

• Can be priced high at times.
• The one downside I have working with Nutanix is the sales team. They seem to try to add in extra goodies to sales quotes or push for extras that you don't really need and you have to tell them to take them out. Don't be afraid to push back on them.
• Need to analyze sizing with sales team to ensure right sizing.

Incentivized

• It takes expertise to set up SUSE Harvester for production
• You need to get used to SUSE Harvester to be as "fluent" as in VMWare ESXi
• You need to well prepare for system upgrades

AOS definitely make our dev/test virtual environment management much easier than before. And the consolidation the test/dev environment from Azure and Cisco UCS, we have less need to transfer large amount of data between different hardware platforms which was very big challenge. To expand the capacity is very easy to archive as well.

Incentivized

It's not out of the box easy, but once you get the fundamentals the steep learning curve flattens out and the processes to get things done and how it works becomes very apparent. It's wrapping the slight change in workflow from prior VM management methods took time to unbox and apply the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure way

Incentivized

So far no issue on availability during no issue on network or power outage

Incentivized

The performance is nothing short of amazing. This is an HCI solution, and as any all-flash HCI solution is amazingly fast, Nutanix AOS fills local IO requests until its local IO is saturated before reaching out over the network. This lowers latency substantially compared to vSAN.

Our implementation team were great and worked with us and got the program up and running very easily. Every time we called post implementation we immediately talked to an Engineer, which is so unusual in dealing with companies. Everything they have promised they have full filled. I think their support is top notch.

Incentivized

We requested more training than typical which was very in depth

Incentivized

A lot of online training courses, most of them are free.

Incentivized

IPv6 is needed for link local discovery. We do not have IPv6 configured on our network so the easiest way to get our nodes configured and discovered by foundation was to configure the IPv4 addressing within the node prior to trying to discover with foundation.

Incentivized

Nutanix integrates very well with Rubrik for backup and protection of the environment. Nutanix gave us simplicity and scalability compared to VMware and allowed us to extend our infrastructure into the cloud using EC2. One unified management pane for all our workloads, unlike VMWare.

Incentivized

We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.

We have scaled our products over the years and continue to do so very easily.

Incentivized

• We find that return on investment is probably a better metric in most cases.
• ROI analysis is more than an exercise. Companies must outline what their future looks like, even if it’s vastly different from what they’re used to and comfortable with.
• As good as your financial analysis might be, displacing status quo infrastructure has a lot of emotions tied to it.

Incentivized

• We can provision more virtual servers
• It's cheaper than competitor products (tbh - it's free, if you don't need support)
• It's easy to manage when you get used to it