We performed a comparison between Nutanix Acropolis AOS series and VxRail based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the solution our users prefer when looking for an HCI solution. It is user-friendly and offers simple operating system features, easy installation, and excellent centralized administration. VxRail users are happier with that solution’s pricing, however.
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are ease of management, hyper-convergence platform, and it has robust operations."
"It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us."
"Everything is core centralized on the UI."
"The interface is very good. Before we used this solution, we had separate storage and switches, but with the hyper convert, it's all in one."
"There are a lot of things I really like. Perhaps the best part is taking a snapshot of a virtual machine. It's very quick. Another useful part is replication and creating a protection domain: using the protection feature to replicate a machine to a remote site for DR purposes."
"It has solid performance and provides data locality."
"What's best about Nutanix Acropolis AOS is its simplicity. It's simple to install and simple to understand. The technical support and support portal for this product are both very good and very helpful."
"Cost-effective and easy to install."
"What I like the most in terms of features is the fact that the VxRail update can be done in one week. It takes much less time to do a whole server upgrade and an infrastructure update as well."
"We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"The most valuable feature in the VxRail solution is the software that binds the management portal and its ease of use of managing the environment. The guys don't have to worry about getting multiple solutions specialist. You can have one person looking at and managing the whole environment."
"We like the design and that it meets data storage needs."
"It has a valuable deduplication feature."
"You don't need to think about compatibility of components."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"One point for improvement is to increase the performance capabilities of the Windows-based executable as compared to its Linux Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) equivalent."
"The self-service side of the product needs to be improved. We should be able to add two-factor authentication and more security layers to it."
"Regarding third-party backup solutions, the only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex, and requires intensive vendor training."
"It does not have good backup feature tools, like having templates or being able to back up every two or three days."
"It's lacking in some features but overcompensating in others."
"Storage utilization and optimization should be better."
"We ran into an issue as a managed service provider because Acropolis isn't designed to be used the way we are running it. For example, if we want to deploy a Kubernetes service, the customer networks need to reach our protected cluster network. We have isolated our customers in separate VLANs. However, our customers' networks must access our cluster network to get features like iSCSI or Kubernetes to run. It's challenging."
"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."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure lacks compatibility with certain older processors."
"The way that the VxRail is licensed could be improved."
"The solution should facilitate the separate expansion of computing and storage."
"The upgrade packages require a lot of bandwidth. This could be reduced for an improved experience."
"My customers want more storage for university databases."
"If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature."
"The initial setup was not that easy, it was a medium difficulty level."
"This solution needs to have the capability where even older versions of hardware can be seamlessly utilized and additional expansion becomes so much easier."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VMware vSphere, Dell PowerFlex, Hyper-V and HPE SimpliVity, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Hyper Converged and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VxRail report.
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"Nutanix node you will be running vSphere on top on the underlining Nutanix software" This description is incorrect.
There is no "layer" between the hardware and the OS which is ESXI hypervisor on both cases.
While both systems do a very good job within the nodal limits for scaling a compute environment - it is the networking layer that has the most impact on GPU sharing across a cluster. From a practical perspective, VxRail nodes will typically offer a discount over native Nutanix nodes. With Nutanix you also need servers, disk, networking and GPU's. VxRail will be more integrated with sized nodes, Dell, Cisco or other networking and often the VSphere 7 licenses can be integrated - achieving a lower net cost.
Testing for optimizations on either VSAN or Nutanix to see which favors a vGPU system would be something I would like to see quantified. My guess is they are network constrained and differences between VxRail and a build your own Nutanix environment will be negligible for the same network. Would be good to confirm if there is an optimal point - say 40Gbps vs 10Gbps or 100Gbps for the inter-GPU message passing.
Best option for vSphere 7 is the VxRail as it designed on VMware technology and built in integrates with vSphere, on a Nutanix node you will be running vSphere on top on the underlining Nutanix software.
Ok, I have no hands-on with vxRail.
But we have vGPU running on Nutanix with ESXi (vsphere). I am not aware of something like vGPU sharing across nodes/hosts. You did not mention which solution you have in mind as you would be about to choose in the process.
We have Citrix XenDesktop running. It works really smoothly most of the time. We only encountered a lagging problem once every few weeks which we are yet to solve. Perhaps something running in the back of our net.
With Nutanix you would have a solid base to work with.
You did not mention what automation is to be used. You could use something like Nutanix Calm as an automation solution.
further reading: Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop on Nutanix
Dev-Test: Cloud Development Environment & Testing Solutions | Nutanix
Let me know which platform you have in mind to narrow down suggestions.