Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure vs. VMware vSphere

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Nutanix in San Jose, California offers their software-defined Enterprise Cloud as a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution combines the Nutanix Acropolis virtualization solution, Nutanix AHV hypervisor (though Acropolis works with other hypervisors), Prism cluster manager, Nutanix Calm and Nutanix Flow server management, and is available on the Nutanix NX series of server hardware appliances, as well as third-party OEM appliances.N/A
VMware vSphere
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
An enterprise workload platform, vSphere is used to improve the performance for a data center. It is used to boost operational efficiency, supercharge workload performance, and accelerate innovation.
$995
per year
Pricing
Nutanix Cloud InfrastructureVMware vSphere
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$995.00
per year
Enterprise
$3,995.00
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Nutanix Cloud InfrastructureVMware vSphere
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Nutanix Cloud InfrastructureVMware vSphere
Considered Both Products
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Chose Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
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 …
Chose Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
When we evaluated, VSAN was not nearly as stable or mature as the Nutanix platform was. Capacities and upgrade operations were more flexible/mature on Nutanix.
Chose Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Nutanix is more expensive than VSAN. There's no getting around this. But the value of a Nutanix system far outweighs the value of VSAN. Nutanix will give you data locality, VSAN will flood the network with disk reads & writes. Nutanix wrote their own replication factor …
Chose Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
  • Simplicity, fewer components, scale out architecture
  • No fabric interconnects, fibre channel, no san, no fcoe needed whatsoever
  • Another benefit: you can manage everything using one HTML5 interface
Chose Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
We evaluated numerous different solutions from traditional three tier architecture, to "hyper-converged" like Nutanix or VSAN, and felt that Nutanix offered the best blend of features/capabilities, ease of use, reliability, performance, and cost.
VMware vSphere
Chose VMware vSphere
I have never used another product like vSphere.
Chose VMware vSphere
Requires specific set of hardware where VMware works on everything
Features
Nutanix Cloud InfrastructureVMware vSphere
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
-
Ratings
VMware vSphere
7.3
67 Ratings
9% below category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings7.162 Ratings
Management console00 Ratings7.167 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings6.160 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings8.165 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings8.062 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Nutanix Cloud InfrastructureVMware vSphere
Small Businesses
StarWind HCA
StarWind HCA
Score 9.3 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
StarWind HCA
StarWind HCA
Score 9.3 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
VMware vSAN
VMware vSAN
Score 8.9 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Nutanix Cloud InfrastructureVMware vSphere
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(77 ratings)
7.1
(70 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(6 ratings)
7.0
(7 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(9 ratings)
8.0
(11 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.5
(51 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(54 ratings)
8.0
(25 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Configurability
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.4
(5 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
5.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
5.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Nutanix Cloud InfrastructureVMware vSphere
Likelihood to Recommend
Nutanix
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
vSphere is well suited for multiple VMWare hosts and can be very useful in larger enterprises where vMotion is used to load balance and failover running virtual machines. In smaller businesses with one or two hosts then the features can be overkill. The addition of virtual TPM support is a very nice addition to provide vm security in a more Microsoft supported methodology.
Read full review
Pros
Nutanix
  • 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
VMware by Broadcom
  • vMotion that provides seamless movement of Virtual Machines between physical hosts and datastores.
  • Ease of Manage: vCenter provides very good management experience to the users.
  • It provides hassle free upgrade of versions, which requires good planning.
  • Easy to manage datastore, networks, CPU and memory resources.
  • It also allows to convert the physical machine and bring it to vSphere Environment with minimum effort.
Read full review
Cons
Nutanix
  • 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
VMware by Broadcom
  • Allow enable EVC without requiring host shutdown
  • More detail in recent tasks. Instead of just showing a task called "Reconfigure virtual machine" also have a link to more detailed information as to what was reconfigured, changed or removed.
  • Allow searching tasks or events
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Likelihood to Renew
Nutanix
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
We are constantly looking for change that will benefit our company. We are not ones to stick with a product simply because it is what we know, but rather looking for what fits us best. We can't imagine another product on the market today doing a better job of handling our infrastructure than vSphere.
Read full review
Usability
Nutanix
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
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VMware by Broadcom
Very useful for environments where space and energy consumption are issues and management is not very keen on upfront spending on hardware every time whenever requirement comes from any dept for provisioning a machine for their occasional use, easily can be done in case of VMware vSphere in few clicks. Backup, security, monitoring and management everything is covered but at additional cost.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Nutanix
So far no issue on availability during no issue on network or power outage
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Performance
Nutanix
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Nutanix
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
I rarely ever have to contact support and when I do need to resolve an issue, there is always an abundance of kb articles and research information available that can help quickly resolve the issue. Depending on the type of support contract you have, you may get support from some offshore group in another country and this could be a little challenging because of the language barrier.
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In-Person Training
Nutanix
We requested more training than typical which was very in depth
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Nutanix
A lot of online training courses, most of them are free.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Nutanix
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
Just make sure that when you implement, that the person implementing truly knows what they are doing and has a plan of action coming in. Since our initial implementation using a consulting service, I have implemented a few vSphere just from what I learned at the initial implementation and use over time, and the person implementing really needs to know what they are doing or you will miss out on features that may help you down the line
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Nutanix
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
vSphere has a lot more feature sets than Hyper-V but at a much higher cost of entry versus MS Hyper-V. I have not been able to play with Hyper-V as much as I would have liked, but the setup and ongoing maintenance seems to be easier in vSphere than with Hyper-V
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Nutanix
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
The contract terms are very clear and can be updated as per the project requirement. Customer support is also included in the contract which help us to troubleshoot critical issues very easily. Training included in contract will really help the client team to empower and hands-on on the latest updates and enhancements
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Scalability
Nutanix
We have scaled our products over the years and continue to do so very easily.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Nutanix
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
As I said earlier, they're always ready to understand our issues and propose the best and most appropriate solution for issues all the time. The security patches solution is accordingly to the business needs. Another scenario is their Knowledge Base where
they're many articles that help you in order to solve something which
is wrong.
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Return on Investment
Nutanix
  • 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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
  • Having vSphere helped my business quickly recover from a ransomware attack which would have crippled us for weeks if we were not virtualized. I think the ROI on something like that is immeasurable.
  • vSphere has allowed my company to purchase bigger server hardware to host 3 or 4 virtual servers, which was at a cost much lower than buying 3 or 4 server hardware boxes, saving us thousands each time we need to upgrade hardware.
Read full review
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