Nutanix AHV is presented as a modern and secure virtualization platform that powers VMs and containers for applications and cloud-native workloads on-premises and in public clouds. Its tools and automated workflows simplify the day-to-day administration of VMs and containers.
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VMware ESXi
Score 7.8 out of 10
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A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.
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Pricing
Nutanix AHV
VMware ESXi
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Nutanix AHV
VMware ESXi
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Nutanix AHV
VMware ESXi
TrustRadius Insights
Nutanix AHV
VMware ESXi
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
Nutanix AOS and VMware ESXi are both products for IT virtualization, but they differ substantially. VMware ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor intended as the foundation of a virtualized server system. By contrast, Nutanix AOS is a comprehensive hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution that combines a hypervisor with software-defined storage and networking. Mid-size and enterprise-level organizations make up the bulk of customers for both products, probably because smaller businesses are less likely to need or have the budget for IT virtualization products.
Features
Although both VMware ESXi and Nutanix AOS provide virtualized hardware benefits such as minimal physical footprints and reliable server uptime, they differ heavily in their scope and feature set.
Most customers find VMware ESXi to be a rock-solid hypervisor. Users report that it’s reliable and stable, with some users enjoying years of consistent server uptime in spite of hardware failures. It’s also efficient in its use of hardware resources, taking up a very small footprint on its host machine. VMware ESXi makes it fast and easy to deploy new servers, whether you use an existing configuration file or configure the server from scratch. VMware also provides detailed hardware compatibility guidelines to help choose the right hardware when it’s time to upgrade.
Nutanix AOS, on the other hand, is a complete HCI solution with software-defined storage, compute, and networking functionality. Nutanix provides a one-click upgrade system for their platform, making upgrades a painless experience for most users. Its single-pane-of-glass management interface is useful for IT administrators, and customers report solid server uptimes, a high degree of hardware fault tolerance, and reliable disaster recovery options. When customers do encounter problems, they generally report fast, useful assistance from Nutanix’s support team.
Limitations
Both Nutanix AOS and VMware ESXi are strong in their own categories, but they’re not free from problems. It’s important to consider their drawbacks before implementing one or the other.
Nutanix AOS can suffer from a rocky setup experience. Users migrating from existing HCI systems report an especially rough start, even with support from Nutanix. Although many users appreciate the one-click upgrade system, it’s not perfect, and can encounter unexpected failures with certain drivers and hardware. Additionally, the GUI and command-line interface aren’t at full parity, forcing users to switch between interfaces for specific functionality.
VMware ESXi, of course, isn’t a complete solution on its own. It’s most effective as part of a larger virtualization ecosystem, and that costs money. Licensing VMwareESXi can get expensive fast, especially when you need higher subscription tiers or additional VMware products to get the features you want. Users also commonly have issues with its web-based management client, which may not work properly on all browsers. And while VMware’s hardware compatibility guidelines may be comprehensive, they’re detailed for good reason: VMware ESXi can be very picky about the hardware it can run on, which could bump up the price of implementation if existing hardware doesn’t fit the bill.
Pricing
Nutanix AOS offers a free Community Edition with limited functionality intended for internal and non-production usage only. Pricing for Nutanix AOS is available via a quote from the vendor.
VMware ESXi is available as part of VMware’s vSphere product, which has a free vSphere Hypervisor edition limited to a single physical server. vSphere has multiple packages, tiers, and subscription levels with differing capabilities, ranging from $510 to over $20,000. For full pricing information, refer to the vSphere pricing page.
Features
Nutanix AHV
VMware ESXi
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
[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.
If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
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.
There are some odd issues with VMware's virtualized network drive (VMXNET3). On occasion, after a reboot of a Windows-based VM the NIC will fail to bind properly and network access is unavailable until an admin intervenes by disabling/re-enabling the adapter. While it's possible that our environment is a contributing factor, this never happens on VMs using Intel E1000 emulation, only the paravirtual NICs.
Logging is extensive but difficult to work with. VMware's solution is a product called Log Insight, which comes at additional cost. Fortunately this is somewhat mitigated by the extensive support documentation and robust user community, but in the heat of the moment obtaining the required detail can be a trying experience.
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
It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
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.
The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
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.
We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
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.
I rarely ever need support for anything VMWare makes, but when I do, the documentation available just in the free community is generally enough. It's extensive and the community is truly robust and active. And if you have a myvmware account, you can get support for your owned products from VMWare support by the conventional case/ticket method
Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
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.
While Hyper-V also can work very well and can have licensing benefits, it does rely on Windows in order to run. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can add another layer of potential failure and might not be running on as low of a level as ESXi does. The footprint for Hyper-V can be smaller if the Desktop Experience isn't used for the hosts, but this is the default fashion that ESXi has been running for many years. VMware's support has always been stellar, and its documentation is phenomenal. Hyper-V can work as a virtual environment option, but ESXi has never let me down in any environment I have managed. I will continue standing by this product and prefer it over other options. It has proven itself time and time again over time as the defacto virtual environment hosting platform.
We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
Positively, it has saved us time in spinning up new servers for the different departments in our company. It is easy for us to spin up virtual machines with VMware ESXi and deploy applications at the drop of a hat.
Positively we are able to save space in our data closets as we no longer need to keep room for physical servers and workstations, allowing us to expand in other areas like networking equipment and physical backup solutions.
It has moved our business forward as we are able to migrate old servers and static workstations in the virtual environment allowing us to easily keep an eye on older applications and update/backup easily through VMware ESXi management console.
