Exploring Nutanix from a VMware User's Perspective

[@2GuysTek]

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

[@Jippett0]

We’ve just had our Hardware refresh pricing as our current cluster is nearing 5 yrs old. Hardware isn’t too bad. 6 nodes at approx 20k each. (120k). Support is where they sting you. Support for these nodes, over 5 years works out at over 300k. And this is with “preferred” pricing! Oh and I should add. If you decide to not use AHV and want to use another Hypervisor with Nutanix you need to add those costs as well.

[@jeffyaptengco8532]

Dell XC, HPe DX, Lenovo HX, Cisco Hyperconverged, Fujitsu XF, & Inspur inMerge all have Nutanix Solutions as well. They may include some additional costs.

[@carlosnachos]

We are replacing our near-end-of-life Nutanix Cluster right now. We have an aging 2017, 8 nodes Lenovo HCX series. The total cost per-year for service contract with Nutanix is around 39K$CAD/year. In 2017 we paid the whole setup around 400K$CAD. We decided to go with Dell VxRails for the next one due to an argument with the directing board and Nutanix regarding a 100% cluster failure with 5 complete days of downtime on Dec 31 2023. The cost for an all-included install with 89vm swap from Nutanix to VMware, 5 years support contract with hardware included, running VMware Vcenter PERPETUAL, 2022 Server Datacenter licence is 640K$CAD. Keep in mind that HYPERCONVERGED IS NOT CHEAP and require support contract up-to-date to be able to sleep tight at night when used in 24-7-365 production intensive environment!

[@sommerers2]

Another thing to think about is Disaster recovery if you are a business. The licensing for a disaster recovery site with Nutanix is way cheaper than VMware.

[@ZachFromIT]

My company just shelled out ~75k-USD for a 3 node cluster with install (I believe we are a hyperconverged cluster). I believe we are paying per VM but Per core was also available. I would guess that 75k included 3 years of licensing (as we usually do 3yr blocks). We're moving from VMware in time for our support contract to expire but I've been told our actual VMware server has a type of perpetual license.

[@sadfghjkllkjhgfdsfg]

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.

[@vitorgoncalves7527]

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.

[@GeekzHardware]

Agreed

[@0views0]

I have to comment about setting up a cluster (23:44). Assuming you have a jump box, If you download Nutanix Foundation, you can launch the wizard and you have the option to build a new cluster. It'll deploy the OS on the host, deploy the CVM, and create the cluster. It's very easy!

[@markx6288]

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? 😃

[@2GuysTek]

You might have just convinced me to make ONE MORE video for the series! Thanks for the suggestion!

[@adambeal1037]

Yes please 🙏

[@michaelamireh2800]

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!

[@Vmwaremine]

@@michaelamireh2800 homeland users stay tuned, a lot of good stuff I happening at Nutanix to make sure community edition is up to par.

[@jeffnew1213]

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.

[@jeffyaptengco8532]

See also Nutanix In-place conversion and Nutanix Move are tools available for those using VMWare vSphere on Nutanix hardware.

[@gabeoravitz]

70% of Nutanix customers are running AHV, just FYI

[@edwardvanhazendonk]

Nutanix does support cli configuration via acli and ncli commands wich are feature rich! So you can tinker a lot more parameters then with ESXi.

[@Nehemoth_G]

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.

[@antonioriggio1906]

Yea I agree and it has to be corporate I tried with a personal one and it didnt work. Weird too it has to connect back to .Next too.

[@ninjmnky]

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)

[@TVJAY]

Please do a deep dive on Nutanix and for fun build a three node cluster.

[@seanwoods1526]

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.

[@fbifido2]

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

[@GeekzHardware]

☝️

[@phillippeerman2296]

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.

[@TheTychus]

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...

[@2GuysTek]

The pricing situation was also concerning to me. It's suspicious that Nutanix doesn't provide 'retail' numbers or a general breakdown of how you license hardware/software. It's one thing to give a general retail pricing number on your site and then negotiate your actual cost with your VAR or rep, but hiding any public pricing information isn't a good look.

[@Username00011000]

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.

[@2GuysTek]

One of the hardest things I came against while working on this video was trying to find actual numbers for how much Nutanix costs. It’s disappointing to hear this, and I think you’re right, everyone is terrible now. Which is why open source virtualization might be the only saving grace.

[@Username00011000]

@@2GuysTek As much as I hawk open source at work, I don't think it's very likely even at cost savings. Admins are too used to clean user interfaces and at a glance criticals/errors/warnings etc. My organizations next move might very well be on-prem Hyper-V which I'd never have imagined.

[@lordkappa]

@@2GuysTekThey are very resistant to any discussion of pricing until after you have had a formal pitch meeting with their reps. We just went through an evaluation, and standard pro-level license (just licensing, no hardware) was quoted roughly $8000 USD per node (each having 20-cores). They wouldn't break down exactly how the price was determined, but they did imply that it is partly scaled based on core-count.

[@2GuysTek]

@@Username00011000 Oof...While I'm (clearly) not a fan of Hyper-V, I will admit that in certain circumstances, it makes sense for some businesses. In the end, the best hypervisor is the one that best suits the business's needs.

[@2GuysTek]

@@lordkappa I have heard that the sales portion of Nutanix can be pretty heavy-handed. I've met with some reps about it for my professional side of life, and they didn't seem pushy, but I have heard stories from others that it's not pleasant. $8k per node a year doesn't sound as bad considering what I've been seeing some VMware users are having to pay to license VVF with vSAN now. But cost is relative. Best of luck and thank you for the information!

[@trevorlockhorn]

Nutanix is great I use it in production every day for multiple different Heathcare facilities.

[@JohnSmith-yz7uh]

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.

[@Darkk6969]

Let us know how Linstor is working out for you on ProxMox. I'm thinking of the same for my homelab ProxMox which is running three nodes. CEPH is great for what it is but also resource intensive. Linstor sounds lightweight in use.

[@datacntrdude]

The coolest thing Nutanix could do would be to introduce external storage support (i.e. NFS/iSCSI/FC/NVMoTCP) for datastores and direct-to-VM mounting. This is the one thing I run into most often. The era of static HCI has come and gone and it would be a big growth step in the right direction, for multiple reasons.

[@bits2646]

LOVE those in depth reviews with very valid personal opinion on top ...

[@groMMit1981]

Looks really good. Hope nutanix or one of the others is busy working on bare metal hypervisor with nice basic console management, then expand that out to web management and clustering etc.

[@jannikmeissner]

Would be cool to also see one video on Suse/Rancher Harvester. It keeps getting better and better with each update.

[@fieldsfury]

Please do one on OpenShift Virt.

[@PeterStuartJr]

+1, or OpenStack

[@coreyman00]

they provide a vm for foundation, or you can install the foundation tool on what every OS, the process is not that bad

[@coreyman00]

we bought 250k worth of HW, getting the Nutanix licensing costs us 1.1million for AOS :( so not cheap

[@Paraclete.Kinyanjui]

Thank you once again! i had no clue what Nutanix.. more grace for more!!

[@omarhmaidan2371]

Thank you so much for this invaluable information, keep it up

[@TheNetpctech]

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.

[@BasicITStuff]

any other alternatives worth mentioning?

[@ayyaswamythangavel1550]

Excellent videos comparing the various Hypervisors! Thank you

[@lukeleung2012]

Very good video!!! Want to know more about Nutanix and how it compare to VMware in more!!!

[@magnificoas388]

I am using Incus/LXC simple, pure FOSS, light, powerfull (all what you want: clusters,etc.) and a little bit cli oriented. It is a fork from LXD. And you know Ubuntu invested a lot in LXD (about 10 years x 10 people).... My containers are NixOS so the servers :) So configurations are in 1 file only, easy.

[@crazychatting]

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?

[@Toffel14]

Are you going to do a comparison to XenServer as well?

[@drstefankrank]

No classic SAN support means we can't transition to AVH without replacing all SAN Storage with new servers that have enough storage.

[@ThePistophchristoph]

You'd probably have to stand up new H/W anyway though to transition to anything other than what you have unless you have that much excess hardware though, I would argue.

[@zhiyuanlee123]

will you do another comparison on openstack vs esx or hyperV? it would be interesting to know too...

[@2GuysTek]

There is a video on Hyper-V vs ESXi already up on the channel, it was part of the same 'Life after VMware' series. In terms of Openstack, probably not at this point as I consider this particular series to be complete. That being said, we will be making other virtualization videos in the future and Openstack is on our list!

[@Techtips200]

Thanks for covering Nutanix...much awaited...

[@2GuysTek]

Hope you enjoyed it!

[@dominicpowers5938]

What about open shift?

[@hlabznsei]

open shift is not a virtualization platform... it's an app containerization platform

[@karanpadghane1205]

What about Huawei DCS (Fusion Compute)

[@RonnieRedd]

Personally I am very interested xcp-ng vs proxmox vs pure Linux KVM on Debian. Would never choose proprietary after leaving vmware a long time ago

[@stocky9803]

The issue ive had with nutanix is 1. Testing the OS itself in a virtualized environment and 2. successfully getting it running on bare metal in the cloud Those are 2 pretty big issues that XCPNG, Proxmox and VMware dont have Otherwise it looks really promising

[@druxpack8531]

after watching this series (thank you!) i've come to a decision: ride out the rest of the 3 year term we have with vmware, and then move on to a non-infrastructure role within IT. These choices are complete trash compared to vmware. completely terrible.

[@Tirubix]

Question, is there a way to move your VM's from a ESXi OS to Nutanix if you change the OS on the server?

[@sadfghjkllkjhgfdsfg]

Nutanix provide a migration tool, we used it, it worked.

[@Tirubix]

@@sadfghjkllkjhgfdsfg oh thanks, wil look into it

[@CloudMining-w1n]

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?

[@2GuysTek]

Call your Dell rep. Broadcom put the squeeze on this even more and it sounds like, from what I’ve heard, this ‘deal’ is only good till the end of this month. Before this news, the word was you could get the legacy licensing deal up until August.

[@jamieterrell75]

Was a pretty fair comparison but I think with your limited setup you don't get to see the full benefits. LCM with one click updates, all the self-healing Nutanix does and the absolutely biggest point I have not seen anyone really make in comparison videos is vendor support especially in an enterprise setup. I know this is mainly for home labs but just wanted to point that out.

[@syafiq3543]

san storage not support but we still can use it right? just no nutanix support right?

[@2GuysTek]

There's no reason you can't mount iSCSI, FC, or NFS storage within a VM.

[@napalmsteak]

Unraid next please!

[@SeanWoods-u9p]

Small update with the latest updates the OS has migrated to Rocky Linux.

[@Jippett0]

No passthru? Deal breaker for many home labs.

[@2GuysTek]

100% agree. There are two big deal breakers for some homelabbers with Nutanix - passthrough and the inability to mount external storage via NFS or iSCSI.

[@blindsay]

@@2GuysTek Maybe I am missing something here but I was able to passthrough an entire gpu to a VM (I am using a gpu on their official supported list though). It was vgpu that i havent been able to get working ironically enough. I plan to use it for Plex. Not being able to pass usb devices though is definitely a pain

[@AnirbanRoyP]

Nutanix supports GPU pass through for several years now

[@khoapham1821]

Great video. Thank you

[@Mustafa-vz4uo]

Any one know how to downloaded the community version there website doesn’t accept regular email domain to register

[@2GuysTek]

Short answer is to use a ‘business’ email address. I’ve told people at Nutanix directly that their blocking of Google and Hotmail/Outlook mail accounts is not cool and is hurting their community edition. The reality is that currently Nutanix treats the community edition as an on-ramp to their sales funnel and that’s the opposite of community.

[@chancebingen6760]

Great overview.

[@kyrresletsje3048]

You displayed price for vmware, but not for nutanix

[@2GuysTek]

Because there are no advertised costs for Nutanix, hence the pinned comment on this video.

[@kyrresletsje3048]

@@2GuysTek If nutanix has a completely non-transparent cost structure, they are hardly worth consideration in the post-vmware lineup.

[@connormoulton1424]

Comparing ESXi GUI instead of a vCenter is disingenuous because the vCenter login is completely different. Comparing a single host vs a cluster of Nutanix is not the same

[@user-kn8wi2xt6f]

Thank you.

[@JagHiroshi]

What you describe for setup is only true for the community edition. RL deployments use different tools and have none of those complexity.

[@2GuysTek]

You are correct.

[@fikri2822]

if only Nutanix follow the installation method of VMware.

[@acconboy]

Now do Scale Computing

[@BeeGoodRealty]

The support service on VMWare was never great but now it is useless. The only saving grace is others sharing their experiences.

[@e621_]

anyone else put elmers glue on public toilet seats to make it look like someone went number 3 on them? lmao

[@noidnobb]

Nutanix GUI very bad ... 😔

[@hlabznsei]

I'm not sure Nutanix is a good fit for a #homelab given they won't even allow to download the software without a company email address.

[@vortical911]

you can buy a cheap domain including mail for super cheap and then boom you have a company email address.

[@td241]

You’re talking SO FAST you’re swallowing your own words! Relaxxxxx!

[@NTVN-Alex]

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.

[@Vmwaremine]

🤦🤦🤦

[@ciobyl]

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

[@Vmwaremine]

the biggest stack of lies I have seen for a very long time about Nutanix

[@ciobyl]

@@Vmwaremine i have worked with nutanix for the last 4 years and this is my experience. Maybe you can explain the points where I am wrong.

[@ThePistophchristoph]

@@ciobyl no you're not wrong, there are 'hidden' KBs where only Paid Support has the answers to, but I'd honestly expect that from any company at this point. They want to encourage/force support contracts.

[@JasonsLabVideos]

ME FIRST !

[@2GuysTek]

As is tradition!

[@bryanbaldwin151]

Lee Matthew Taylor Mark Thomas Jose

[@VanAntony-l3k]

Miller Larry Thomas Sharon Johnson Jessica

[@GuntherKen-j8x]

Clark Maria White Patricia Jones Kenneth

[@NeedhamViolet-w7z]

Wilson Anna Martinez Deborah Miller Charles

[@crazychatting]

is the controller-vm supposed to have 20GB RAM or were you just funny?

[@sadfghjkllkjhgfdsfg]

It's a requirement. My cluster lets me choose 40, 48 or 64Gb of RAM, it can't be less than it wants. Plus, You get one controller on every node, so you end up giving up a fair amount of RAM to just nutanix. That VM looks after storage on the node, as well as everything else, so kinda like ZFS, it wants RAM, and so you have to feed it RAM. It's really, really not aimed at the homelab.

[@alQamar79]

This and GPU passthrough is odd. Windows Admin Center is one VM, satisfied with 4-16 GB for a several clusters or even no VM running from Azure Portal.

[@MacGyver0]

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.

[@TheTychus]

Other than RAM requirements, AHV CE shall be fine for home lab use.

[@2GuysTek]

I understand where you're coming from. My intention here is to not make a financial comparison between VVF or VCF and Nutanix, because I couldn't - Nutanix doesn't publish retail prices for licensing. That is mentioned in the video. I also think that the inherent nature of Nutanix's HCI approach only really competes with VMware for users who've already adopted HCI via vSAN, etc. And, based on that comparison, especially with the new Broadcom numbers, makes Nutanix more than competitive. I'm hoping that we see more viewers share their Nutanix costs in the comments so we can kinda crowdsource some qualitative numbers as this video ages. Thanks for the comment!

[@ThePistophchristoph]

​@@2GuysTek​ Well when you hear about Vmware's prices going up multiple factors, I think that'd be a more fair comparison, rather than 'list' pricing anyway. I would not be shocked to see Nutanix FAR cheaper alternative at near parity for most users.

[@roysigurdkarlsbakk3842]

Please - cut the crap - you don't need "deep linux knowledge" to find the IP or reboot the machine ;)

[@nardelis9797]

Legal software that collects personal and probably confidential data works like a virus. Be careful with passwords and important documents. Outgoing TCP ports 80 or 8443 opened through your firewall. That's why it's free

[@locusm]

IMHO Nutanix is terrible value for money when XCP-NG & Proxmox exist.

[@dariusz2k]

Isn't Nutanix just the hardware configuration? It's still running VMware...

[@Vmwaremine]

you can run VMware ESXi with Nutanix AOS or Nutanix AOS with AHV (the Nutanix hypervisor)

[@1986xaker]

I think nutanix lose to Vmware

[@ThePistophchristoph]

Sure it does, but at what cost / price point, that'd be the main point to consider here. Let's just say hypothetically Nutanix can do 90% of the operations that VMware does, at let's just say maybe 1/3 the cost, it'd probably be worth it, no?

[@1986xaker]

@@ThePistophchristoph maybe,😉

[@ihyln1]

You didn’t even cover the license cost for business.. terrible video

[@InterFelix]

That's because Nutanix doesn't have public pricing information - there's not even list prices available to me as a partner. The only way to get prices is by getting an actual quote for an actual customer. We don't sell a lot of Nutanix, so my experience is limited, but in the past, their prices were always higher than VMware. I'm not sure about the current situation though, the last sale I have the numbers for was a while ago.

[@ihyln1]

@@InterFelix then maybe mention it in the video? the little bit of googling I did after the video proved that nutanix is indeed more expensive than vmware.