Hands down the most elegant hypervisor & storage solution on the market.
Updated May 20, 2016
Hands down the most elegant hypervisor & storage solution on the market.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Nutanix
We use Nutanix for the hosting side of our business. As a marketing company, we also build websites for our clients and decided the best course of action would to be to host them in house. We are also slowly migrating away from VMWare and plan to utilize our Nutanix as a datastore once NFS is fully supported which is on the roadmap and will be available in the next couple of months (currently the date is 5/20/2016 of this writing).
- Nutanix is absolutely fantastic for those who wish to avoid costly proprietary storage appliances as Acropolis and the rest of the software run directly on what is effectively commodity enterprise hardware. That makes upgrading memory and disk space affordable.
- Nutanix has absolutely no latency between VM and storage pools as the entire storage pool is directly on each machine in what effectively results in a localhost situation at the hypervisor level. No traversing then network like other competing storage solutions.
- The Nutanix hypervisor, Acropolis is absolutely free and built on the rock solid stable KVM base while adding in its own features. This makes the yearly cost of ownership far less expensive than other competing visualization solutions.
- Nutanix is highly resilient for enterprise, in that additional hyper-converged nodes can replicate data between each other. In our case we have 3 nodes and if one machine fails, one of the others take over.
- The first feature that the Nutanix Acropolis is missing that we ran in to was the inability to set manual MAC addresses, which we would prefer for our custom DHCP server software. Its not a deal breaker, but we are coming from VMWare where this is desired for our workflow.
- Nutanix Acropolis took a few minutes to really work out how to provision a machine. Its font to do things like turn on a virtual machine happened to be a light grey on a white background. We spoke to them to have that stand out more, it wasn't a deal breaker once we figured it out.
- I found that loading ISOs was needlessly difficult. VMWare has a folder popup to search for ISOs to mount while Nutanix required typing in the path. This could be easily fixed in future releases, and likely will with the maturity of Acropolis.
- The cost of ownership is far less than purchasing a separate storage appliance from a competing vendor. One of the reasons why Nutanix was attractive to us is that we plan to phase out our Netapp in the next year.
- Since the server hardware is not proprietary, we are able to do upgrades ourselves using standard ECC memory and off the shelf enterprise SSD drives. This makes service costs near negligible for our operations.
- Our current hyper-visor solution through VMWare charges by the core while Acropolis which again is built on a rock solid KVM foundation is free from Nutanix. The per year software savings is tremendous.
- VMWare, Netapp and Red Hat Ceph Storage
We have used, and still currently use VMWare for our hyper-visor in many respects, it is what was used entirely. While Nutanix's Acropolis is missing a few features because of it being a newer hyper-visor, none of them are deal breakers and the cost savings is absolutely phenomenal as it is provided for free.
As Nutanix is a hyper-converged system, we are also able to phase out proprietary systems such as Netapp and we could avoid considering Tegile since it allows us to do hardware upgrades ourselves. We had looked in to Ceph as an alternative before deciding on Nutanix however Calamari, the web interface, is a couple of years out from being a true management interface that we require and Ceph has issues with multi client MDS degradation where the MDS server will freeze when there are too many clients accessing it. Nutanix is also by far the most performant system we have utilized so far as disk reads/writes do not have to traverse the network like it does with competing solutions.
As Nutanix is a hyper-converged system, we are also able to phase out proprietary systems such as Netapp and we could avoid considering Tegile since it allows us to do hardware upgrades ourselves. We had looked in to Ceph as an alternative before deciding on Nutanix however Calamari, the web interface, is a couple of years out from being a true management interface that we require and Ceph has issues with multi client MDS degradation where the MDS server will freeze when there are too many clients accessing it. Nutanix is also by far the most performant system we have utilized so far as disk reads/writes do not have to traverse the network like it does with competing solutions.