Firecracker vs. Nutanix AHV

While deploying workloads in lightweight microVMs presents a couple of perks, Firecracker may not be the best software to handle this. Startup times are slow and scalability is quite limited because of the jailer and virtualization barriers. We have had security breaches on isolated EC2 instances while using Firecracker. It however has a silver lining by improving how serverless functions in container ecosystems are run with their VMMs.

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

• It makes it easy to secure virtual machines as they are segmented into microvms with a minimal attack surface area

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

• Excludes devices unnecessarily
• Has a slow startup time the basis being to improve security which is quite irrelevant.
• It has limited functionalities on monitoring VMs despite being an open source.

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

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

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

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.

• Low memory overhead on each microVM
• We can run workloads from different customers on the same machine.

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