Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN

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.

The product is a must for enterprise & SMB segments as this gives a good value for money and the licensing policy is very well defined and cost effective for the feature set it provides. This is very well suited for organization which have multiple brand storage systems and would like to consolidate them all together, thus providing a huge storage capacity for the organizations data growth. The product becomes less appropriate in organization where they have single storage platform as the service provider would have the ability to consilidate all the storage systems. Hence this products may be under utilized.

Incentivized

• 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

• VMware runs VSAN certification programs to make sure the OEM sells validated nodes. It helps customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes like Lenovo ThinkAgile VX which comes factory configured and easy to set up.
• Hyperconverged solutions reduce real estate space and networking costs when compare with shared storage. The host overhead also less.
• Supports All-Flash (SATA and NVMe SSDs) and Hybrid vSAN with HDD and SSD. So customers can choose cost-effective solutions appropriate to their workloads.
• Supports different storage policies, RAID and duplication, and compression features and it makes a complete storage solution.

Incentivized

• 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

• We were a fairly early adopter of VMware vSAN and as such experienced several growing pains.
• We experienced a few bugs that took a few software versions upgrades to go mostly away.
• The biggest issue we had overall was with host drivers. Even with vSAN ready node compatible hosts, you have to be very careful that the drivers for NIC and RAID controllers are right.

Incentivized

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

Deploying and configuring VSAN is a relatively simple process for people that are already used to working in virtual environments, primarily for those that are familiar with vSphere. The compatibility of those two products is amazing. You shouldn't really encounter any issues and if you do, you surely did something wrong.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Support is (as always forVMware) top notch and easy to work with. The majority of computer companies are outsourcing their tech staff, and it seems they do as well. But their guys know the product well and are quick to respond to your ticket (if the severity is right!).

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

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!

Our VMware solution is built in-house for the organization's private application, we don't want to put our data on cloud premises. Also, vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment. We have done the POC with both products to understand the Flexibility, Management, and cost. After the successful POC, we have chosen the VMware vSAN.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• we have realized savings in the licensing compared to traditional storage (over $500,000 over the last 5 years)
• we have realized ROI through efficiencies in our staff of approx $1MM (over the last 5 years)
• also, positive impact on the time to value/speed of implementation allowed us to realize business objectives (Over $1MM of ROI)

Incentivized