We performed a comparison between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Nutanix Acropolis is the clear winner in this comparison. In addition to being a powerful and reliable product, it is easy to deploy, has excellent customer support and a significant ROI.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability."
"There are a lot of features in Nutanix that are different from other hyper-converged solutions, such as site-to-site replication. VM-based site-to-site replication is bundled with the software licensing. For the DR, it has the availability groups, which is one of the key features that Nutanix provides."
"The features that I have found most valuable include its HA facility, viability, robustness, flexibility, it's time to go live is very short, and it has a friendly user interface."
"We have had good feedback from our customers about this solution."
"The solution offers impressive performance."
"This is a complete, very user-friendly product."
"The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV."
"We are suggesting Nutanix to the management because of scalability and time efficiency."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"The valuable features are its scalability and the standardization - one size fits all. It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage."
"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."
"The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"As Nutanix Acropolis AOS is on the expensive side, one of its areas for improvement is the price. It would also be better if it can be integrated with other cloud providers, because currently, it's only for private cloud deployment."
"The name of the solutions offered by Nutanix does not indicate what the tool does."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is new technology in a competitive market. Pricing is too high for a new product and requires better discounts to be able to compete with IBM, Dell EMC, and HP."
"Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high."
"The pricing model for software and hardware subscription renewals can be improved."
"One thing I've noticed is that, when you do a shift from VMware to Nutanix, it opens the setup of the VM that's currently running. If people from another site double click on it, it opens the VM instead of the setup of the unit. So I would suggest that this could perhaps be switched. That is so far the only change I would like. I would like it if they could fix the instance where you double click on a VM and it opens the VM instead of the setup. That's the only thing that's a major bother to me."
"Storage utilization and optimization should be better."
"The look and feel of the web GUI of this system needs improvement, when compared to other systems. Its hardware integration also needs improvement."
"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."
"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
"I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."
"I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere, Dell PowerFlex and Hyper-V, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware vSAN report.
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Hello Edwin, I am posting this answer on behalf of Daniel Wetter, one of PeerSpot's community members: "Hello, Edwin, first, it would be good to receive more information about your needs and concerns. Would you like to use existing local storage equipped with your Hypervisor servers, it seems you maybe already running on ESXi? Do you already earn fibre channel switches? How fast is your current network? Would you like to easily expand your storage environment? How fast should your storage perform, GB/s , IO/s , average response time / ms (ns)? .. and so on…. Maybe also other HCI Storage vendors like DataCore could gain additional efforts. What is your environment like? Do you need a kind of block storage or maybe you already got S3 aware/ready applications like SAP, document management systems, structured unstructured file services, big data files, databases…. All these topics and a lot more … were needed to give you a good for your special needs a related answer. With such a globalized question, you will earn/receive suggestions and opinions, but not an answer which fits your needs. Maybe my above little questionnaire will help you a little bit. Best regards Daniel"
Both can get you the performance you might want, however, you should also consider what else you get with the solution. For Nutanix, you're stuck on Acropolis if you start with that. It would be best to run either VMware or Hyper-V on top of that so migration isn't a gym show, plus the renewal cost will be very high.
vSAN is a fine option, just ensure it is designed well with enough nodes to tolerate any amount of disk failure.
Both options have their unique value but the most important thing is the data. You'll need data protection solutions like Veeam, Nakivo, or Zerto.
For an all-in-one high-performance solution with built-in data protection consider HPE SimpliVity with VMware. You'll also likely buy fewer nodes than the others with SimpliVity.
In the early days, Nutanix had the better solution, by now especially when you use a vSphere hypervisor I would go with vSAN for better integration and with ReadyNodes no complex config anymore. Also, I had several customers who complained that Nutanix got very expensive on the first renewal vs. massive initial discounts, however, I can't judge if that is true.