Likelihood to Recommend I would highly recommend using Nutanix HCI for any of your infrastructure needs. I would highly suggest saving money and using the free included AHV hypervisor. The performance is incredible, and the data reduction capabilities are on par with vSAN. I would only recommend using ESXi with Nutanix AOS if AHV does not yet support some one-off configurations or if you still want to use horizon while the frame is still growing.
Read full review VMware is well suited to a business where there will be many remote users needing to connect to the companies desktop. The installation on a remote computer is simple and is easy to use remotely but can be complicated to set up on the back end on the office system. It may not be worth the effort for a company that has few people who need remote access.
Read full review Pros 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! Read full review It provides a robust, secure, rich desktop environment that is able to access all internal network resources. Addresses security and compliance concerns as all data resides within the internal network. All data accessed stays within the internal network and does not need to traverse a VPN to the local desktop where it may be cached, etc. The connection is thin client that does not require large amount of bandwidth. Client application is available for all common devices and O/S’s. No need to install, configure and maintain applications on local desktop. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Move away from Adobe Flash version in UI, currently on the path but they need to hurry up Speed up the boot process of the environment when servers need maintenance Provide clear steps on what should be upgrade path in terms of components, the order price! A bit too much Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review We are committed to VMware Horizon and we plan to stick with it for the future unless something drastically changes.
Read full review Usability The learning curve on it is very low and easy to use. It is very user friendly and easy to understand.
Read full review VMware Horizon is very easy to use. It is very easy and quick to log in remotely. It is very easy to install remotely. It is usable easily on many different operating systems. It is easy to set up which tools are available to each remote user so that each user has just what they need to perform their work without any extra tools cluttering up their space or bogging down the system.
Read full review Reliability and Availability So far no issue on availability during no issue on network or power outage
Read full review Performance Nutanix AOS performance is light years ahead of HPE. We were nervous about using Nutanix AHV but it has been a vast improvement and saves on cost. Applications has been much improved and end users have commented. It has also freed up time for our Network Administrators and made their lives easier.
Read full review Performance is excellent of you provide the needed hardware to support the sessions/connections. Pages load very quickly at the client end as the thin client application does a very good job and requires very little bandwidth. All applications function well, as they are running on a session on an internal server that is accessing data directly on the network
Read full review Support Rating Modernizing with HCI, which creates private cloud-like data centers, is, for many organizations, the first step in their digital transformation. Companies that have kept their eye on the long game and made decisions based on a fully-developed ROI analysis have found themselves uniquely positioned to make the critical operational changes the COVID-19 situation has demanded.
Read full review It is surely way better than Citrix, but it could improve a bit. Usually, they send us the solution without saying what was the root cause so we can avoid breaking something in the future. Besides that, VMWare support answers in an OK time-frame and even speaks our language (Portuguese).
Read full review In-Person Training We requested more training than typical which was very in depth
Read full review Online Training A lot of online training courses, most of them are free.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We've decided to go for both VxRail and Nutanix AOS to make sure we can get the best deals from both sides. I appreciate this may not be a path most companies can go down, but always good to have a bit of healthy competition between vendors to ensure you're getting the best pricing from both sides!
Read full review Although I really prefer Microsoft Remote Desktop for accessing Windows servers (from Windows machines especially), and this can be done from off-site with a VPN, this entails much more effort, namely getting everyone's Active Directory in the correct group to have access. VMWare Horizon is a much simpler solution in terms of granting access.
Chrome Remote Desktop and
TeamViewer are really not viable solutions for remotely accessing servers in business settings, although they work alright for home servers and such, especially from off-site.
Read full review Scalability We have scaled our products over the years and continue to do so very easily.
Read full review Return on Investment We save money with an all-inclusive pricing model and cut out of extra pieces we no longer need The management of this product is minimal and save time and resources. We found that the N+1 portion is working well but not identified well. Read full review Saved money on PC purchases. Save a lot of man hours by not having to image new PCs. We just create one Template VM and clone the others from that. Bit of a learning curve to get the deployment right for the environment. Ability to make sure VMs always turn back on once they are shutdown. This speeds up load times for users. Less management for our PCs. If one gets a virus or something corrupts we just refresh it and within 5 minutes the user is back to work. Read full review ScreenShots