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Exploring Nutanix from a VMware User’s Perspective
Exploring Nutanix from a VMware User’s Perspective
#Exploring #Nutanix #VMware #Users #Perspective
“2GuysTek”
Welcome to our fourth and likely final video in our series on diving deep into #VMware alternatives for your #homelab and your business. In this video, I tread into the realm of #Nutanix AOS/AHV to uncover how it compares to VMware ESXi and vCenter and evaluate it as a replacement from a VMware…
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There's been a lot of talk already about the actual cost of Nutanix, and I'm hoping that more viewers will share their Nutanix costs in the comments so we can kind of crowdsource some qualitative numbers as this video ages. For those of you wondering, Nutanix does not publish retail licensing costs anywhere that I could find in my research, so I'm hoping anyone who's purchased into Nutanix's tech is willing to share! Thanks all! -R
Isn't Nutanix just the hardware configuration? It's still running VMware…
I would love to see a comparison of Scale Computing’s HCI solution. SC doesn’t currently offer a community edition (free as in beer) so home lab enthusiasts are likely not gonna be interested but for business use I think they are a solution worth considering as a replacement ESXi & vCenter. Like Nutanix, Scale Computing is HCI only but very efficient code and ease of use are the major attractions to Scale Computing.
I've used VMware, Nutanix, Hyper-V, Proxmox, XCP-NG, and Scale Computing over the last 20 years (rated by experience with each). I've had a VMUG subscription for access to VMware historically but after the Broadcom acquisition, I prefer Promox in my home lab, Hyper-V for small business (cost savings can't be beat as much as I wish they could), and Scale Computing for SMB environments.
AFAIK, the company has been on the edge of bankruptcy more than once in the past years. If I interpret figures correctly, in fact last year was the first year they had a positive corporate result since their start. Every competitor they had was taken over by one of the large tech companies. One could wonder why they never were.
IMHO Nutanix is terrible value for money when XCP-NG & Proxmox exist.
I am testing NutanixCE at the moment. Regarding the CVM I am not sure what you are referring where you say it requires all this work to get the CVM to come up. It just comes up with everything done by itself and nothing left to do, When the host is up it can take a while for it to come up. On first install it seems to take a while after the host starts but I never timed it as I have better things to do. it also doesn't always seem to redirect to the :9440 port after first install but again this could be that its just still loading things. I am using a Dell Tower server at my desk with 18 cores, 128gb RAM and 2x2TB NVME and a handful of SSD's. I think it might be building out the Raid on first run but I am guessing here. I am currently working on Disk expansions as it seems to be clunky. Also After the Host comes up the first time it seems to restart by it self after about 10 minutes with no warning so it must be still figuring things out but after that you are generally good to go. In My case it seems to take me around 30min for the whole process each time I break the system to get it back to the start. You will want to restart the system 1 more time before you do updates and best after each type of update else there seems to be weird errors with it failing to update. Their Error reasons are a giant rabithole but its the same with most solutions.
they provide a vm for foundation, or you can install the foundation tool on what every OS, the process is not that bad
we bought 250k worth of HW, getting the Nutanix licensing costs us 1.1million for AOS 🙁 so not cheap
Please DEEP DIVE into Nutanix CE latest using 4x Intel NUC (that way it would be easy to understand).
– install with 3 node first, then add the last one.
– show how to update/upgrade the cluster, software & hardware
This was the one video I wanted to see. Thank you for putting it together. I am about to replace my ESXI host with Nutanix due to my job looking to migrate.
Not a word on the fact that many (most?) Nutanix shops are actually running vSphere with the Nutanix CVM and Prism add-ons for HCI rather than Acropolis (AHV). This increases the cost of a deployment tremendously, but is necessary for those companies that need a vSphere back-end for apps, services, etc.
It also adds to the complexity of the deployment, with Prism being used in addition to vCenter Server. Deploy Nutanix on third-party hardware, such as Dell, and you add complexity to support, having to open cases and troubleshoot with Dell until they exhaust their options, where then they bring Nutanix in on the case.
We had a few Nutanix clusters, and when support ran out, they were shipped off to Dell for some small credit amount and replaced with stock Dell machines of the latest generation.
My biggest grief regarding Nutanix is the fact it's HCI only.
For most of my customers, this approach just doesn't make sense! A good old 3-tier model is still the best approach for the vast majority of my customers, instantly ruling out Nutanix for them.
You didn’t even cover the license cost for business.. terrible video
Nutanix GUI very bad … 😔
Please – cut the crap – you don't need "deep linux knowledge" to find the IP or reboot the machine 😉
I think I watched all videos about VMWare alternatives. I think a sumary video with a recomendation for each type of workloads and/or scenarios would be interesting.
is the controller-vm supposed to have 20GB RAM or were you just funny?
seems pretty good. but to be honest I also noticed much wasted space in vmware. I really dont like the mini-table-lists in esxi – there is also so much space left free on the monitor. sometimes you even have to resize the table manually! by the way, is there a dark mode in prism?
Re: consoles. you can log into the Nutanix AHV consoles and do everything you can do in the web GUI, via the CLI. You will be looking up every command and reading documentation, but you can do everything from the CLI if needed. There is no menu, but "acli" is there and will let you blow your foot off if you want to (or fix things, too)
I just pulled the trigger for a new HCI homelabcluster.
I will check out nutanix, but will ultimatly stay on proxmox. Although i will test Linstor on proxmox. Both linstor and nutanix use drbd under the hood for their clustering/distributed storage. Its not as heavy or complex as ceph but you need to set it up yourself.
We were (several years ago) Nutanix over VMWare on Dell. In order to save some money, we moved to "pure" Nutanix over AHV on Dell. All of that saving was then eaten up having to buy the AHV plugin for our backup solution. We're not doing anything crazy with it, it's just a HCI cluster running our business.
One thing I absolutely love about Nutanix: how hard it is to accidentally break.
I do cluster updates during the day while the whole business is running, and nobody even notices, it just migrates VMs around, does Nutanix and firmware updates, and moves on to the next node, rinse and repeat. But it's not cheap. Around 50% of our server purchase cost was Nutanix licensing last refresh, and pre-refresh this time we're looking at other options, but Nutanix very much has the incumbent advantage and aside from price, we're very happy with it.
Thank you.
Tech refresh for my companies VMware cluster is coming up. Looking at VMware and other options. Was told Dell is still offering perpetual (no subscription) vSphere, vSAN and VCF licensing on their VxRail HCI platform. Anyone had a look into this?
We were a VMware shop and we are leaning toward Azure Stack HCI. It is a pain to learn and deploy, but it is great to have both cloud and on-prem managed from a single portal. I really like Nutanix also.
Something that I don't like about Nutanix CE it's that they ask you for a corporate email account which makes no sense it's a community release.
Please do a deep dive on Nutanix and for fun build a three node cluster.
Great video and them not offering SAN is going to be a deal breaker for a lot of companies. Also, if you look yup "Nutanix looking to sale" you will find several financial articles about the company as their are lots of rumors about them getting bought.
Hey, Kurt from Nutanix here. Great Video!
We are working on a number of items in our Community Edition to reduce some barriers and make installation significantly smoother. The CE install process is lightyears different than the Foundation deployment process we use for the commercial product due to having to support such a wider range of hardware platforms (many of which don't have IPMI for example).
Two small corrections, your CE nodes do not have to match, in fact one of my clusters that I use for testing CE is made up of a 7th Gen NUC, a HP Z620 Workstation, and a Dell Precision 7820. As long as they're "close" from a total capacity perspective, you'll be fine. You will have to go through the CLI process for actually creating the cluster as you noted. Second, we support passthrough of enterprise GPUs, so you won't be passing through a RTX2080, but an Nvidia T40 for example is fully supported for GPU passthru. I have a M10 installed in that Precision 7280 and usually have it passed through to either a Kubernetes worker or a Plex server as I move workloads around.
Happy to help folks getting CE up and running or answer questions. You can find me on the Nutanix .Next forums in the Community Edition section.
No passthru? Deal breaker for many home labs.
My issue with VMware licensing is that I can't control what is going to happen to the host shipped and installed in the control network (i.e. no Internet connectivity or remote access) somewhere in Africa. I can't afford losing production servers once the subscription expires and colleague in a different country had forgotten to notify the end-user to update the licenses.
Nutanix AHV look cool at the first glance, but NOBODY (except Nutanix sales) can give a rough estimate of the hypervisor cost for single server or explain how their subscription works. People say that Nutanix has great tech support, they seem to have good documentation, but that atmosphere of secrecy around pricing is surprising.
MNutanix (just like all Linux kernel based hypervisors) has no tight integration with major BU solutions from Veeam and Acronis, which also a big deal…
Great Video series bro!
After me extensive research… It's Proxmox because of it's roadmap.
The feature for multi-cluster data centers is on it's way… Connecting with people in the forums and Reddit, admins have got 700+ node clusters across data centers 8 Data centers with modifications to the cluster tool, corosync, that they will be published to the community as well as their own modifications of the UI for multiple cluster management.
You also made a great suggestion about a VMWARE like console interface when you log into PROXMOX, kind of like what XCP-NG did… I'm going to get my team to develop a near clone copy of the ESXI version… I think that would be a great little console too project.
The fact that it's based off of CentOS7 is concerning. It is going full end of life in June 2024 and there is not simple drop in replacement available as CentOS has moved onto a rolling release model which is not ideal for production. A quick google search of Nutanix doesn't seem to really address this concern either.
Without clear guidance on that Nutanix should be a non-starter for most businesses.
Nutanix is what VMware will become. It is good but be aware. Whatever you do without support means cluster down. No documentantion no solutions for kb only " contact nutaniz support". It fails at any serious updates. It might be a little cheaper than eaxi but depends on reseller and where you are. Also nutanix is something open source rebranded
re 20:20 – LCM does firmware + bios updates for DELL and other major brands as well, if you get a supported server (like an XC series)
Is Nutanix really cheaper for business use?
You mention the cost of a new vmware license, but it's unclear how that compares to Nutanix.
I've heard that Nutanix is not cheap for business use. And for homelab, Nutanix is not an option at all.
Nutanix has also increased their prices substantially to the point where moving to AHV is not worth the cost of transitioning our infrastructure staff to learn it over the years of experience with vsphere. They don't let you lower or raise license editions without re-purchasing, and the rates/multi-year savings are bad. Everyone is terrible now.
Recent Nutanix Customer from VMware here. It has been a great transition and all of our users find it way more user friendly! Can't wait to see what they do for homelab users!
Excellent videos. Thanks! Maybe one last summary video recapping the whole series? So many good points from each video. Also, after using all the different options .. do you have a favourite? 😃
Nutanix is great I use it in production every day for multiple different Heathcare facilities.
vLan 666 m/