Nutanix delivers as advertised

We purchased our first Nutanix cluster three years ago. It was a hybrid cluster and we used it for our primary vSphere cluster at our corporate data center, which multiple locations around the world access for various applications, including Exchange and ERP interfaces. We were able to replace two EMC SANs and an aging IBM blade center that made up our previous vSphere cluster. Migration to and management of the solution was a breeze. Since we were running vSphere on the Nutanix cluster we were able to use the regular vMotion capabilities to migrate all our VMs from the old cluster to the Nutanix cluster. All the one click upgrade features that Nutanix advertised worked as advertised as well. It pretty much did what they said it would do.

I will say, however, that once we migrated some of the heavy workloads to it we did see noticeable performance degradation, mainly once we moved our Exchange environment to it. We also saw our backup times extend extensively. The primary reason was because of disk latency. When we purchased this cluster it was an unplanned an unbudgeted project, so we had to make it fit into the budget so we had to size around a small budget. In hindsight we should have waited the following year to budget properly for it so we could have done an all-flash system. Last year we did by an all-flash Nutanix cluster to replace this hybrid Nutanix cluster and performance has been nothing short of exceptional now. We did move the hybrid cluster to our DR site so we still are getting purposeful use out of it. So my biggest learning experience is to take the time to size properly. If you have any type of high database workload, such as Exchange, SQL, etc. I would highly recommend an all-flash system. You won't regret it.

I would also like to mention that Nutanix technical support is the best I've ever seen of any company. When you call them you get an experienced tech who knows what they are talking about right away without having to get bounced around and they take the time to work through any issues you are having.