Why settle for hyperconverged when you can buy a private cloud in a box?
December 07, 2016
Why settle for hyperconverged when you can buy a private cloud in a box?
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Nutanix AOS
Nutanix is being used by the library at the University of Waterloo. We have two clusters of four nodes each; one for our Virtual Server Infrastructure and one for our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Both clusters run an ESXi/vSphere environment. The simplicity of Nutanix's web-scale technology was the greatest draw. We no longer have to manage separate server, fabric and storage silos. Instead, everything is managed from one interface that is built on simplicity.
- 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!
- LDAP integration is less refined. It works perfectly but when adding users and groups one has to know the exact, case sensitive, name of the user or group in question. There is no LDAP search function.
- HTTP proxy has a few bugs. If you are using a private address space for your CVM's, and you want to add the cluster to a Prism Central instance, then you'll need to remove your proxy settings, add it to the Prism Central instance, then re-add your proxy settings.
- The login only works using the UPN format. Down-level logon name format is not accepted.
- Found an immediate reclamation of time. SAN's are a pain to manage and update - Nutanix made turned a couple hours of work into one click.
- They are a software company. Every Time they come out with an update I find my performance improving, or a new feature added. Soon I'll be able to give my developers controlled self-service capabilities. I originally bought hardware and it's evolving on me into a private cloud in a box.
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 technology, VSAN will force you to purchase double the disk space to account for its use of RAID. Nutanix supports multiple hypervisors (ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM and their own Acropolis Hypervisor) AND allow you to convert between hypervisors with a single click, VSAN supports ESXi only.