Nutanix

and
VMware vSAN
Buyer's Guide and Reviews
September 2019
Nutanix and VMware vSAN

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Nutanix and VMware vSAN

Contents

Overview 4

Top Review by Topic of Nutanix and VMware vSAN 5-7

Answers From the Community 8

Vendor Directory 9

Top Hyper-Converged (HCI) Vendors, Weighted 10-11

Top 5 Solutions by Ranking Factor 12

About This Report and IT Central Station 13

© 2019 IT Central Station

To read more reviews please visit https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/nutanix_vs_vmware-vsan?tid=pdf_comp_29088-29355

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Nutanix and VMware vSAN

Overview
SOLUTION Nutanix VMware vSAN

OVERVIEW Nutanix delivers invisible infrastructure for next-
generation enterprise computing, elevating IT to
focus on the applications and services that power
their business. Nutanix’s software-driven Xtreme
Computing Platform natively converges compute,
virtualization and storage into a single solution to
drive simplicity in the datacenter. Using Nutanix,
customers benefit from predictable performance,
linear scalability and cloud-like infrastructure
consumption.
For more information...
VMware vSAN is the industry-leading software
powering Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
solutions.
What vSAN Does
Enables you to evolve without risk. Seamlessly
extend virtualization to storage with an integrated
hyper-converged solution that simply works with
your overall VMware environment and reduces
the risk in digital transformation by using existing
tools, skillsets and solutions.

Lowers total cost of ownership by 50% or more

with capital and operational savings. Reduce
storage...

SAMPLE St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Read Some Case Studies
CUSTOMERS
Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai
AUS, and many others. At Home

Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the

Rest of our Customer Stories Here

TOP VMware vSAN vs. Nutanix Nutanix vs. VMware vSAN

COMPARISONS Compared 26% of the time Compared 37% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs. Nutanix HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN

Compared 20% of the time Compared 11% of the time

VxRail vs. Nutanix VxRail vs. VMware vSAN

Compared 16% of the time Compared 11% of the time

TOP INDUSTRIES, Manufacturing Company ... 8% Manufacturing Company ... 8%

BASED ON Healthcare Company ... 12% University ... 9%
REVIEWERS*
Financial Services Firm ... 12% Retailer ... 14%
Energy/Utilities Company ... 15% Healthcare Company ... 17%
TOP INDUSTRIES, Comms Service Provider ... 11% Comms Service Provider ... 12%
BASED ON Software R&D Company ... 11% Manufacturing Company ... 13%
COMPANIES
READING REVIEWS* Manufacturing Company ... 12% Financial Services Firm ... 13%
Financial Services Firm ... 14% Software R&D Company ... 15%
COMPANY SIZE, 1001+ Employees ... 29% 201-1000 Employees ... 19%
BASED ON 201-1000 Employees ... 34% 1-200 Employees ... 28%
REVIEWERS*
1-200 Employees ... 37% 1001+ Employees ... 53%
COMPANY SIZE, 1-200 Employees ... 16% 1-200 Employees ... 15%
BASED ON 201-1000 Employees ... 31% 201-1000 Employees ... 28%
COMPANIES
READING REVIEWS* 1001+ Employees ... 53% 1001+ Employees ... 57%

* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.
© 2019 IT Central Station
To read more reviews please visit https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/nutanix_vs_vmware-vsan?tid=pdf_comp_29088-29355

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Nutanix and VMware vSAN
Top Reviews by Topic
SOLUTION Nutanix
VALUABLE
FEATURES Samuel Rothenbühler
Some years ago when we started working with
Nutanix the solution was essentially a stable, user
friendly hyper converged solution offering a less
future rich version of what is now called the
distributed storage fabric. This is what competing
solutions typically offer today and for many
customers it isn't easy to understand the added
value (I would argue they should in fact be a
requirement) Nutanix offers today in comparison
to other approaches. Over the years Nutanix has
added lots of enterpri... [Full Review]
William Beckett
* One-Click upgrades * Software defined storage *
The capacity savings One click upgrades are an
absolute godsend. Being able to upgrade our
entire cluster with the click of a button during
business hours with zero downtime has made
managing our infrastructure so easy. Previously,
we had to schedule downtime to perform
upgrades on our infrastructure and that quickly
becomes painful and time consuming. Because
the entire Nutanix system is contained in a VM, we
don't have to reboot physical hosts ... [Full Review]
Emmanuel Onen
The most valuable feature would be the ease of
deployment. That is the most significant feature
for me because I've worked with multiple vendors
and it's always been very complicated to install the
software and get everything running. It has better
software to get everything up and running. It has a
simple interface. [Full Review]
© 2019 IT Central Station
To read more reviews please visit https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/nutanix_vs_vmware-vsan?tid=pdf_comp_29088-29355
VMware vSAN
Yves Sandfort
vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need
to expand resources. We have an overall larger
host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific
customer test and use cases. In that specific
scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce
the number of hosts in the environment. This is an
advantage when we use vSAN. We have pretty
constant performance results, which is sometimes,
on a normal three-tier storage architecture, harder
for us to achieve because the customer doesn't
want us to ve... [Full Review]
Paul Letta
We like that it is a hyperconverged solution.
Everything is in a box. You got the compute,
memory, and storage. So, we can scale out by
adding nodes as we go and eliminate the back-
end storage, whether that's a NAS or iSCSI device.
You get the benefit of local storage, but you have
the protection of shared storage. [Full Review]
ManagerT5097
The most valuable feature for us, long-term, is the
integration with VMware that we're going to be
using. We're currently using AirWatch, we're
working in Workspace ONE. We want to make
sure that our VDIs, with the integration of the
Windows 10 solution - as well as any-device,
anywhere, anytime mobility - work, yet still offer
them the ability to gain access to that VDI. That is
huge for us. [Full Review]
5
Nutanix and VMware vSAN
Top Reviews by Topic
SOLUTION Nutanix
IMPROVEMENTS
TO MY Samuel Rothenbühler
ORGANIZATION
As a system integrator, Nutanix offers a highly
standardized solution which can be deployed in
timely fashion compared to legacy three-tier,
generation one converged, and most competing
hyper-converged solutions. This allows us to move
quickly with a small team or architects, and
implementation specialists for large projects. [Full
Review]
William Beckett
Processes that used to take hours to complete
have been drastically improved due to the nature
of Nutanix. Data locality means things complete
faster and our users now have more time to
complete their work rather than having to wait for
a certain job to finish before they can continue on.
[Full Review]
Steffen Hornung
Any task with our servers which is painless
because the system runs really fast. Our users are
glad to be migrated to Citrix, although giving up
the local admin rights there (yes, there are some
local admin users still in place), because it
performs so well. [Full Review]
© 2019 IT Central Station
To read more reviews please visit https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/nutanix_vs_vmware-vsan?tid=pdf_comp_29088-29355
VMware vSAN
Yves Sandfort
The way vSAN improved our organization was we
could deploy scenarios or workloads more easily
because, from a vSAN perspective, we don't need
to reconfigure underlying storage or anything else.
We can actually adjust for each individual
machines and individual workload characteristics.
We don't have to deal with different type of disk
shelves, rate groups, etc. We can directly take that
off. [Full Review]
Paul Letta
It's improved the organization overall primarily
because the storage is local on the boxes. Before
we were with vSAN, we were with another iSCSI
product which was a clustered product that went
across the network. We had multiple instances
where we would have either a network hiccup
(caused by us) or a network hiccup (caused by the
device). This took a whole bunch of VMs down
with a lot of repercussions. It took a long time to
recover. By eliminating dependency on that back-
end storage, we now de... [Full Review]
ManagerT5097
The opportunity gained with the relationship we
have now is limitless, as new features and
products roll out, especially with today's
announcements: the news about
microsegmentation, the RDS in the cloud with
AWS, as well as some security features. It's a
constant evolution for us. That's really why we're
with vSAN. [Full Review]
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Nutanix and VMware vSAN
Top Reviews by Topic
SOLUTION Nutanix
ROOM FOR
IMPROVEMENT Samuel Rothenbühler
Nutanix has the potential to replace most of
today's traditional storage solutions. These are
classic hybrid SAN arrays (dual and multi
controller), NAS Filers, newer All-Flash Arrays as
well as any object, big data etc. use cases. For
capacity it usually comes down to the price for
large amounts of data where Nutanix may offer
higher than needed storage performance at a
price point which isn't very attractive. This has
been address in a first step using storage only
nodes which are essentially ... [Full Review]
Mohammed Alakhouch
I think that there are several areas that they can
improve slightly, including the mail servers, the
application servers, and perhaps even the
database servers. If we can have certified
compatibility with other companies, such as
Oracle, then it would let us know that they
function correctly together. [Full Review]
William Beckett
Given all the amazing features, there is room for
improvement around the support ability of
different hypervisors. Sure, Nutanix now supports
four hypervisors but they are not all at feature
parity. If you want all the benefits of Nutanix, you
need to be on AHV. For some businesses, that's
just not an option. I find we miss out on some of
the great features due to being on ESX. [Full
Review]
© 2019 IT Central Station
To read more reviews please visit https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/nutanix_vs_vmware-vsan?tid=pdf_comp_29088-29355
VMware vSAN
Yves Sandfort
Stability can be improved. Adding all these new
features is nice, but we are now at the level that
most of the features you need in production are
there. The stability, not from a day-to-day
operations' perspective, but more from a
supportability perspective, because currently
some of the support scenarios require you to
completely evacuate hosts or the complete
cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This
would clearly be an improvement if the support
teams were given additional tools to make... [Full
Review]
Paul Letta
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. The
vSAN licensing is no... [Full Review]
ManagerT5097
If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of
room for improvement, we would really like them
to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two
operations deployment: Bringing in the
equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup,
and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-
node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each
one individually and set it up. [Full Review]
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 Nutanix and VMware vSAN

Answers from the Community

What Is The Biggest Difference Between Nutanix And VMware vSAN?

One of the most popular comparisons on IT Central Station is Nutanix vs VMware vSAN.
People like you are trying to decide which one is best for their company. Can you help them out?
What is the biggest difference between Nutanix and VMware vSAN? Which of these two solutions would you
recommend to a colleague evaluating hyper-converged solutions and why?Thanks for helping your peers make
the best decision!

I have written about this comparison before – the difference between Nutanix and VMware VSAN is like a Stanich Garage Grinder
(Rated best burger in the US) vs getting a slab of Romaine Lettuce from California. Nutanix is a full meal deal – Vmware VSAN is a
single ingredient in a complex stew including VSphere, VCloud Director, vRealize Automation, vRealize Ops, NSX, Log Insight,
Bob Network Insight, CodeStream, Orchestrator and don’t forget – AirWatch. If you already have the meat and buns (VSphere, VCloud) and
Whitcombe
some vRealize condiments – you can add VSAN and make a decent burger. But it takes a lot of work, you have to juggle a lot of
ingredients and each time you build a new cluster – it looks different. Or, I can order Nutanix, place it on a recommended HCI
architecture from Dell, HPE or Cisco – and get a single pane of glass to...

When we were looking at replacing our server infrastructure of 10 physical boxes and 5 VMs, I was thinking of going the traditional
route of 2 large servers, a SAN and use VMware to run the servers. Then I decided to look at hyperconverged solutions. Looking at
what was on the market we settled on a single Nutanix block with 3 nodes for the following reasons: 1. License cost of Nutanix’s AHV
Pat versus VMWare 2. Online training to support the hyperconverged environment, mostly free 3. Nutanix ‘FILES’ SAN/NAS solution saved
LaPointe
me license cost 4. Single glass for managing both hardware and VM’s 5. Reduction in System Administrator workload 6. Seamless
software upgrades (we were able to do them over lunch with no downtime) 7. Nutanix device takes up only 2u of rack space

The BIGGEST difference is that vSAN only runs on the ESX Hypervisor. Whereas Nutanix runs on multiple Hypervisors including ESX,
Hyper-V and their own Acropolis Hyper Visor (AHV). The second main difference is the cost, as the Nutanix software boasts a much
larger range of features included in the toolsuit. Where as with vSAN, a lot of the extraneous functionality can be taken up by other
Shu vmWare apps (vSphere, vCenter, etc...) Finally, vSAN requires a minimum of two (2) nodes whereas Nutanix needs three (3).
Mookerjee

See all 12 answers >>

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Nutanix and VMware vSAN

Vendor Directory
Acronis Acronis Cyber Infrastructure Nutanix Nutanix Acropolis

Atlantis Computing Atlantis Hyperscale Pivot3 Pivot3

Cisco Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series Promise Technology Promise VSkyCube [EOL]

CTERA CTERA Edge X Series QCT QCT

DataCore DataCore SANsymphony SDS Red Hat Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

DataCore DataCore Virtual SAN Sangfor Sangfor HCI

Datrium Datrium DVX Scale Computing Scale Computing HC3

Dell EMC Dell XC Appliance Cisco Springpath [EOL]

Ericsson Ericsson Hyperscale Datacenter System StarWind StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

[EOL]
StarWind StarWind Virtual SAN
Fujitsu Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX
StarWind StarWind Virtual Tape Library
Hitachi Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC
Series Riverbed SteelFusion
Hewlett Packard HPE Hyper Converged StorMagic StorMagic
Enterprise
Stratoscale Stratoscale
Hewlett Packard HPE SimpliVity
Enterprise
VMware VMware EVO:RAIL [EOL]
HTBASE HTBASE
VMware VMware vSAN
Huawei Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged
Infrastructure Dell EMC VSPEX BLUE [EOL]

Maxta Maxta Dell EMC VxFlex (VxRack FLEX)

NetApp NetApp HCI Dell EMC VxRail

NIMBOXX NIMBOXX [EOL]

Nutanix Nutanix

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Nutanix and VMware vSAN

Top Hyper-Converged (HCI) Vendors, Weighted

Over professionals have used IT Central Station research. Here are the top vendors based on product reviews, ratings, and comparisons.
All reviews and ratings are from real users, validated by our triple authentication process.

Chart Key

Views Comparisons Reviews Words/Review Average Rating

Number of views Number of times compared Total number of reviews on Average words per review Average rating based on
to another product IT Central Station on IT Central Station reviews

Bar length
The total ranking of a product (i.e. bar length) is based on a weighted aggregate ranking of that product's Views (weighting factor = 17.5%),
Comparisons (17.5%), Reviews (17.5%), Followers (17.5%), and Average Rating (30%). Reviews and ratings by resellers are excluded from the
rankings. For each ranking factor, the score (i.e. bar segment length) is calculated as a product of the weighting factor and its position for that
ranking factor. For example, if a product has 80% of the number of reviews compared to the product with the most reviews in its category, then
the product's bar length for reviews would be 17.5% (weighting factor) * 80%.

1 Nutanix

123,658 views 89,771 comparisons 24 reviews 450 words/review 8.9 average rating

2 VMware vSAN

89,009 views 72,552 comparisons 54 reviews 433 words/review 8.5 average rating

3 HPE SimpliVity

56,597 views 37,621 comparisons 42 reviews 377 words/review 8.8 average rating

4 VxRail

62,896 views 51,337 comparisons 13 reviews 507 words/review 8.8 average rating

5 StarWind Virtual SAN

9,406 views 4,260 comparisons 39 reviews 549 words/review 9.7 average rating

© 2019 IT Central Station

To read more reviews please visit https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/nutanix_vs_vmware-vsan?tid=pdf_comp_29088-29355

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Nutanix and VMware vSAN

6 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series

26,452 views 20,484 comparisons 52 reviews 440 words/review 8.2 average rating

7 Nutanix Acropolis

10,738 views 9,094 comparisons 10 reviews 625 words/review 8.8 average rating

8 DataCore SANsymphony SDS

3,703 views 1,593 comparisons 22 reviews 328 words/review 9.2 average rating

9 NetApp HCI

8,931 views 6,723 comparisons 6 reviews 672 words/review 8.7 average rating

10 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

1,510 views 638 comparisons 8 reviews 367 words/review 9.8 average rating

© 2019 IT Central Station

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Nutanix and VMware vSAN

Top 5 Solutions by Ranking Factor

Views

SOLUTION VIEWS

1 Nutanix 123,658

2 VMware vSAN 89,009

3 VxRail 62,896

4 HPE SimpliVity 56,597

5 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series 26,452

Reviews

SOLUTION REVIEWS

1 VMware vSAN 54

2 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series 52

3 HPE SimpliVity 42

4 StarWind Virtual SAN 39

5 Nutanix 24

Words/Review

SOLUTION WORDS/REV
IEW

1 VxFlex (VxRack FLEX) 872

2 NetApp HCI 672

3 SteelFusion 653

4 Nutanix Acropolis 625

5 StarWind Virtual SAN 549

© 2019 IT Central Station

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Nutanix and VMware vSAN

About this report

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The reviewers of these products have been validated as real users based on their LinkedIn profiles to ensure that they provide reliable opinions
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