Azure Virtual Machines vs. Nutanix AHV

It's well suited to delivering information about our sports events as during the events a lot of processing power is needed and instantly becomes available by scaling out when the event is over the service can be scaled right back making massive savings. We use it for football, horse racing, Olympics games etc, it is also used when things happen in the world like right now there is a lot of concern over the Russia and Ukraine conflict, since the demand for this information is high we instantly scale to meet the demand of our news feed services. I believe up to 90% of the UK's News, sports and media information actually passes through our computer systems, we are a market leading news and information service and Azure Virtual Machines provide us with the reliability that we need so that we can provide a rock solid reliable news and information service to the world.

Incentivized

[Nutanix AOS] is good when you need easy scaling and high reliability. The good architecture of the solution allows to solve the tasks set for the platform. This solution allows to reduce the number of personnel serving the infrastructure due to the ease of management and a good knowledge base. As a disadvantage, I would attribute the complexity of customizing some types of loads to optimal work on DFS, for example, high-load databases.

Incentivized

• You can login to Azure VMs using SSO with your Azure Ad account
• Azure VMs are securely accessible from anywhere in the world, with Azure Bastion
• You can execute scripts on the VM from the Azure portal without logging in to it

Incentivized

• One component to support both compute and storage needs for virtualization.
• Easy expandable as business needs arise both at the node level and larger with blocks.
• Well outlined interface with good historical data.
• API tools are available to obtain logging information from Nutanix that can be used with other monitoring tools such as Splunk.

Incentivized

• Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
• The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
• As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.

Incentivized

• Management of VMs on AHV take some getting used to. It's just a list of VMs that are displayed, and you search through it. Not the normal folder structure that I'm used to in VMware.
• Also can't disable a NIC card in a VM in AHV. Very handy feature present in VMware.
• Larger workloads may have to be tweaked to get the performance you need/want.

Incentivized

We made a huge financial investment with this platform (four clusters, all-flash storage array), so we're in it for the long haul. Luckily it's a beast. I've had to use support more than any other platform I've administered, but the help has been very good. Nutanix continues to add features and innovations which increase the ROI

Incentivized

They are very easy and intuitive, very easy to deploy

Incentivized

Nutanix Prism Element and Prism Central are easy-to-use HTML5-based web consoles. The layout makes sense; you're only a few clicks away from getting to where you need to be. The AHV hypervisor is integrated into the platform for a fast and seamless experience. Rich data on VM metrics is also available.

Incentivized

The performance is very impressive. I am used to VMware and the snapshots were taking 10 minutes. The first time I had to restore from a snapshot on Nutanix it took 5 seconds and I couldn't believe it. Everything done on the server is fast. Powering on VM is done in seconds compared.to what we were using before.

Incentivized

I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

Incentivized

Our first support ticket to Nutanix was responded to within 10 minutes of submission. That was kind of impressive. They have worldwide support so that when a support request is created, support is acknowledged in a relative short amount of time.

Incentivized

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Compute supports Windows, but is really geared towards Linux. You can install Windows on some Linode servers, but again, Linode is geared towards Linux. AWS does everything but is complex and can have high costs. If you want to host Windows servers in the cloud, nothing beats Azure. From licensing to management, Microsoft Azure provides the easiest way to deploy and manage Windows Servers in the cloud, especially if you utilize other Microsoft services like Microsoft 365 an Visual Studio subscriptions.

Incentivized

By far, in my opinion, Nutanix AOS is heads above VMware. From the creation of a VM to updating the nodes themselves, Nutanix AOS is so much easier, faster, and just an overall better product. I would choose Nutanix AOS over VMware any day.

• It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
• Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
• The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs

Incentivized

• It is a highly redundant solution
• Nutanix [AOS] provides a simple easy to manage HCI platform with a reduced TCO and an increased ROI
• Centralized management solution of consolidated sever and storage solution in a virtualized environment which minimizes wastage of valuable resourses
• Offers businesses the agility and flexibility to run other virtualized platforms on the Nutanix environment

Incentivized