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.
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"Acropolis has a great interface and lots of management features packaged with it at an affordable price."
"The technology of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the most valuable feature. You don't need multiple screens to manage."
"One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect."
"The simplicity when it comes to building your own automation has been excellent."
"The fact that there is only one interface to deploy a complete solution for maximum storage is fantastic."
"Management is simple"
"Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure."
"The configuration is easy, and it's flexible."
"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"The pricing model for software and hardware subscription renewals can be improved."
"There is a lot of functionality in Prism Central, but sometimes you want to see those features in Prism Element."
"It's lacking in some features but overcompensating in others."
"The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates."
"As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface which can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as a parallel execution. What happens then is that I have to work in two different environments within my data center. Practically, they are two different data centers but physically and logically, they are one. If they cannot talk to each other that creates a lot of issues. That is something which Nutanix has to develop because for Nutanix it is very simple. For example, Oracle is using a function called GoldenGate. They have a feature called GoldenGate which allows them to talk to various different environments which must really help."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure lacks compatibility with certain older processors."
"Nutanix could streamline Acropolis' advanced management to keep pace with its competitors. For example, in VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor, you can directly put a host into maintenance mode via the GUI. However, it takes several steps to do this with Nutanix Acropolis, and you need to use the command-line interface for most of the steps."
"I would enjoy an advanced mode where experienced users can leverage their knowledge to do advanced things currently only allowed using the command line tools on the CVM."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
"The vSan product uses a software system called Vsphere to monitor the system. It is sometimes difficult to manage the PCs within the systems."
"I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"It could be cheaper."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten."
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.