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.
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"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.""
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"Hyper-convergence is the most valuable feature for me as it allows me to scale the hardware according to project requirements."
"The scalability is great."
"Simplified management: It provides us more time to work on other tasks."
"One-click setup is a valuable feature because it allows us to set up a server automatically with a single click."
"A great feature involves real-time hardware changes."
"The ease of deployment is very good."
"It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is its low cost, guaranteed to failover and failback with only a few clicks."
"Valuable features for us are the VDI, UCC, and HCI."
"The updating of the features was one aspect of the solution that made us decide to use it."
"It helps our servers and it is very efficient."
"VxRail has improved out organization because we are trying to be a little more proactive and elastic. We are trying to change our conventional approach to development."
"Enterprise is a complete solution that includes performance, backups and disaster recovery."
"The assurance that my systems would not suffer a performance drop no matter where they are is valuable. I do not need any extra hardware."
"Its ease of administration is extremely valuable. It allows me to make better use of my time for other tasks instead of maintaining systems through multiple administration consoles."
"A valuable feature of the solution is that it allows everything to be integrated into a single model, comprised of hardware and software."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"The solution doesn't support older systems, which can be a problem for some organizations who wish to implement it. It became a problem for us due to the fact that some of our systems are older."
"The product requires a lot of resources."
"Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high."
"The reporting section of the dashboard could be improved to include more detailed reporting about the servers."
"Make it easier to manage."
"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."
"We have a team that does the implementation of the solution for our customers, it is better to have professionals handle the process."
"It would be great if they could improve the GUI features."
"The support protocols have changed after Broadcom acquired VMware."
"We used an integrator team for the implementation of the solution. The one person who takes care of the maintenance of VxRail, such as upgrading the software. The upgrading takes too long. We have many nodes which takes a long time, they need to improve the speed of the upgrades"
"The way that the VxRail is licensed could be improved."
"Pricing could be improved."
"The agility of the support team to provide you with better solutions should be improved. VxRail also has to be improved in terms of simplicity. Adding a simple node seemed like quite a project."
"I would like to see integration with vCenter if possible."
"It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM."
"Lifecycle management (LCM) should be enhanced"
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.